For the last 10 years, performances by the Zoppé Family Circus have been a much-loved and much-anticipated treat. Playing to packed houses and wowing kids and adults alike, the artists of Zoppé work with traditions that date back to the Circus’s founding in Italy in 1842.
This year’s run, however, reflects the new and current reality of 2020/21, and so the extravaganza has been reborn at the Zoppé Family Circus Drive-In. Instead of sitting under the big-top tent, the 2021 circus will allow audiences to enjoy the circus from the safety of their own vehicles, while the performers can be seen on an elevated stage and circus ring, as well as displayed live on large LED screens. Sound will be broadcast through car stereos, just like a traditional drive-in movie theater on FM radio, with minimal sound coming from the stage. The circus family will be welcoming cars for half an hour before each show, including an old-fashioned circus parade through the cars. Performers and acts for this year’s Circus include high-flying gymnastics, acrobatics, and feats of strength, all under the watchful eye of ringmaster Mace Perlman. Shows will run between January 15 and January 31. For tickets and showtimes, please visit the Mercado’s website.
This December all live theater and dance events are canceled in Tucson, but you can still take in the Nutcracker at El Toro Flicks drive-in theater (198 S. Granada Ave., 520 449 4468).
On December 21, Danswest Dance Company presents a new, original staging of the classic ballet. Written and directed by Danswest owner and professional tap dancer Megan Maltos, Not Your Ordinary Nut features dancers aged 7–18, plus a few courageous dance dads. NYON is entirely choreographed by Tucson artists, three of whom grew up dancing at Danswest.
The show incorporates elements of all of Danswest’s styles—ballet, yes, but also acrobatics, tap dancing, jazz, even hip hop, and plenty of heart. The dancers had six weeks to learn the choreography before it was filmed in October. Danswest will offer two screenings at 6:00 pm and 9:30 pm. Tickets are $40 a carload. For more information, contact Megan.maltos@gmail.com, (520) 240–2476.
The local-food movement is built on flavor, nutrition, and freshness. But it is also built on story and a sense of place. The word “heritage” feeds our longing for a feeling of rootedness. White Sonoran wheat has a great story, and that has led to its charisma. Throughout the country, though, grains have been slower to join the lineup of reintroduced foods than other heritage seeds because unlike a vegetable like a squash, which can be picked and eaten quickly, wheat involves additional processing to become food.
The introduction of spring wheat (also called winter wheat) by the Spanish missionaries in the 1690s was a most welcome addition to the food cycle of local native people. We can assume that the Spanish brought several kinds of wheat seeds, but it was the spring wheat that adapted to local conditions best and made the most impact. By March, the Tohono O’odham granaries of stored foods, such as mesquite, were empty, and the early populations were getting hungry, awaiting the plants that would be available later in the spring. But the various varieties of wheat we now call White Sonora and Pima Club could be planted in the fall or winter in our mild climate and take advantage of the winter rains. Some of the crop was harvested green in the spring, just when the people needed food the most. They prepared the grain by roasting it over coals. The rest was ripe by May, having by then turned into golden fields.
At first the wheat crop didn’t produce as well as the native corn, but over the next hundred years the farmers learned how to grow it more successfully, and the White Sonora and Pima Club wheat yielded twice as much food as did the fields planted with corn.
The easy and quick adoption of spring wheat can be attributed to the fact that it filled an important niche in the food cycle. And, as a new crop, it came without cultural baggage. Corn was traditionally planted and curated through its lifecycle with ceremony and song; wheat, on the other hand, with no such requirements, was easier to grow. We must not overlook the fact, though, that in some mission communities, the local people had no choice but were forced to grow wheat for the padres’ sacramental wafers.
By the mid-eighteenth century, spring wheat had become the major staple crop of the Tucson basin and far beyond. Although it does better with irrigation, in a normal, non-drought year, it could also produce an excellent crop in marginal soils of low fertility and with no water other than winter rainfall. With the abundance of wheat, women began making tortillas from flour instead of corn.
The 1920s and 1930s were the beginning of the Green Revolution, which advocated increasing grain yields through the application of copious amounts of water and high nitrogen fertilizer. White Sonora wheat did not thrive under those conditions. Mill technology also changed, making it more difficult to grind the soft, powdery wheat berries, which tended to absorb water.
The market also changed. Soft wheat varieties like White Sonora are used for crackers, cookies, biscuits, and pie crusts. Bakeries were producing more bread, and what they wanted was the hard-red wheat. As a result, the soft heritage wheats fell out of favor. Then came the closing of many flour mills in Sonora due to a multitude of economic factors. It was a downward spiral, because without a means to get their grain ground, more farmers quit growing it.
In 2012, Native Seeds/SEARCH, a Tucson nonprofit seed bank specializing in arid-land heritage seeds, was awarded a two-year grant from the USDA’s Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program to reintroduce into sustained production two heritage grains with historical presence and good potential for adaptation in the arid Southwest: White Sonora wheat and Chapalote flint corn.
Today the heritage wheats, both White Sonoran and Pima Club, are making a strong comeback due to their sweet flavor, disease resistance, and drought tolerance. Their low gluten content makes them a good choice for people with gluten sensitivity. Specialty bakers advertise breads made with local heritage wheats, and local brewers use them as an ingredient in beer. It’s a welcome rediscovery of a food with a complex and once almost forgotten history.
Carolyn Niethammer’s A Desert Feast (University of Arizona Press, 2020) is available online and at local booksellers.
Fall is when our movie watching fancy turns to the scary and unsettling. Shadows grow long in the late afternoon, and the extended nights summon us to explore the dark side of our imaginations. The chills are extra-special when the action takes place close to home.
In Blood Widow, filmed in and around Tucson, young women are disappearing. Detectives Valentine and Stokes suspect a serial killer and soon pick up a trail from terrifying events across the city. Unbeknownst to the detectives, the last survivor of a mysterious clan is feverishly searching for the same person, with dark plans of her own. Should she reach the killer first, the detectives will be dealing with an evil unlike any they have experienced.
Blood Widow was directed by Brendan Guy Murphy, who co-wrote the script with Dominic Ross. This is the third film for production company MurphySpeaking Films, founded by Brendan in 2007, the same year his first film, Limbo, was released. Story Time Fables came out in 2010 and was featured in the Arizona International Film Festival and the Stepping Stone Film Festival in India, and it was a semifinalist in the Oaxaca Film Festival in Mexico.
Recipient of the 2008 Buffalo Exchange Arts Award, Brendan says he was inspired to make Blood Widowwhen he began to wonder what would happen if a malevolent supernatural evil encountered a morally evil madman. “The idea turned into a treatment, the treatment became a script, and as the right cast of characters came off the pages, it was time to make the film,” says Murphy.
Shot on location in Southern Arizona, Blood Widow taps into some of the psychic power embodied in Hotel Congress, El Rancho Diablo, and the Slaughterhouse—all of which have infamous stories in their histories, from gangster hideouts to murder. The three are also long rumored to be haunted. Danny’s Baboquivari Lounge, Petroglyphs, and Gentle Ben’s Brewing Company generously agreed to allow their businesses to be used by the filmmakers as well.
“Tucson and its surrounding areas are filled with wonderful filming locations,” says Murphy. “We were fortunate to have been granted access to numerous settings that created the unique texture and sense of place that anchors the film.”
As an actor, Murphy has been featured in many films, commercials, and music videos, including Lucky U Ranch, Wastelander, and the Alex Italics award-winning short film Sheltered Love. In Blood Widow, he surrounds himself with a diverse cast of players, primarily from Tucson, who bring an authentic Southwest feel to the movie. Melissa Alejandra, born in Sonora, Mexico, and raised in Tucson, is a dancer/singer/choreographer who has performed nationally and internationally. Dallas Thomas has acted in film, web series, commercials, and onstage, including multiple appearances with the stellar Rogue Theatre Company. Hector Ayala, a native Tucsonan, has appeared in several films and made numerous appearances with Borderlands Theatre.
Veteran actor James Craven, whose resume includes a long list of television and movie credits, has appeared on Broadway and in the European tour of Gospel at Colonus with Morgan Freeman. The Minneapolis-based actor is a long-time member of the Penumbra Theater Company there, where he has appeared in more than 35 shows.
There is a wealth of local talent behind the camera, too. Art director Cori DiSimone and makeup artist Sonia Campbell work their dark arts to magically eerie effect. Director of photography Antonio Villagomez and sound mixer and editor James Wan came to Arizona from Ecuador and Hong Kong respectively. They combine to create a thrillingly atmospheric cinematic chiller. Dan Singleton composed the film score.
Blood Widow was produced by Brendan Guy Murphy, Sergio Kardenas, Antonio Villagomez, and Scott Hellon and is distributed by Indican Pictures through Lionsgate Studios. It is available for streaming on Amazon Prime and for rent and purchase on Amazon Prime, Google Play, YouTube, Apple TV, Fandango Now, Vudu, and Microsoft.
This year, make BloodWidow your Halloween date for a good, frightening time in Tucson. Death will never be the same.
Lydia Millet has lived in Tucson since 1999, a year before her second novel, George Bush, Dark Prince of Love, appeared. In the years since, while working as a writer and editor for the Center for Biological Diversity, she has published 16 more books of fiction for young and adult readers. Of her latest, A Children’s Bible (Norton, $25.95), Washington Post books editor Ron Charles writes, “I swear on a stack of copies that it’s a blistering little classic: ‘Lord of the Flies’ for a generation of young people left to fend for themselves on their parents’ rapidly warming planet.” Alternately dark and comic, it’s told from the point of view of a young woman who grows to maturity in a time that, like our own, is full of threats and terrors—but also great beauty. Copies of the book are available at Antigone Books (411 N. Fourth Ave.); call 792-3715 to reserve your copy for curbside pickup. Evoking a world of missing things that is all too recognizable, here’s a glimpse inside the covers. —Editor
By late winter all the vegetables we ate were coming from the hydroponic nursery and the indoor garden in the basement (what used to be the squash court). Fresh produce could no longer be ordered online—no refrigerated trucks were running, at least not for the average rich person in our neck of the woods—so we had to eat what we grew.
We didn’t have fruit, of course. We’d planted apple trees, but it’d be years before they were fruit-bearing: that planting was a Hail Mary. No citrus at all, and we missed our orange juice and lemonade. The parents missed their slices of lime.
And we had dry and canned goods, a trove far more extensive than the one in the silo. We had made sure of that.
When the day’s work was done we got into the habit of preparing dinner for everyone, with the help of some mothers whose highest-rated skills were cooking. We’d all sit around in the vast sunken living room of fake Italy, with its wall of glass that opened onto the patio and the pool. We held our plates on our laps, eating and talking about the things we missed. The peasant mother was allowed to recite a blessing. Nondenominational.
She’d turned out to be no one’s mother at all. All she had was the cat. But I still thought of her as the peasant one.
Then we’d go through our missings. That was what my little brother called them. We figured it was healthy, for the parents especially, not to try to deny the fact of what had been lost but to acknowledge it.
Someone would mention a colleague or an ex, a grandparent or a bicycle or a neighborhood or a store. A beach or a town or a movie. Someone would say “ice cream” and someone else would say “ice-cream sandwiches, Neapolitan,” and we’d riff on it, go down a list of favorite ice-cream novelties that couldn’t be had anymore for love or money.
Zócalo Magazine is currently on hiatus. We will be back in print when more of our marvelous advertisers and distribution outlets are unshut and experiencing more traffic. If you subscribe to the print magazine, your subscription will be extended. In the meantime, we’ll be working on some digital assignments which we hope to bring you in the coming weeks. Stay safe, Tucson. We love you. Stayed tuned.
We are terribly saddened to learn of the death of our friend Lisa Kanouse Art, a tremendously talented artist whose work appeared on the covers of Zócalo. Lisa was a thrill to work with and we were truly inspired by her enthusiastic embrace of Tucson’s culture, history, architecture and natural surroundings. RIP, Lisa.
The health crises is forcing many small Tucson businesses to think outside the box. Once such business, Why I Love Where I Live, was unable to launch their new physical store as planned, so they’ve decided to do it virtually instead! With the help of Zocalo Magazine’s publisher, they’ve created an innovative and interactive virtual shopping experience where you can “walk” through the new store and explore their products online. Check it out below!
The print edition of Zócalo Magazine has momentarily paused, but we’ll be back when more of our marvelous advertisers and distribution outlets are fully serving the community. In the meantime, please continue to support your local Tucson businesses!
TUCSON ARTS AND CULTURE – Zocalo is a hyper-local monthly magazine reflecting the heart and soul of Tucson through its arts, culture, entertainment, food, and events. Look for us at over 350 locations city-wide, read our digital magazine, or have Zocalo delivered to your home or office.
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