Here We Go Again

Undeservingly classed as a dramma comico, this early 21st century work by Giovanni di Bologna is very rarely performed, and that is probably as it should be.  It just isn’t funny.

As in much of his quirky oeuvre, the Italian composer once again attempts to conflate disaster with mirth, and in This Poor Dog Needs a Taco he seeks meager humor in the acute misfortunes of his protagonist.

Is Bologna taking the honored genre of opera seriously?  This reviewer has doubts.  Even those with a complete indifference to the form, will quickly perceive a torrent of uncomfortable blunders and offenses.  By contrast, pro bowling on TV has never seemed so inspired.

All of Poor Dog’s troubling six acts take place in one day, as the sole character (identified as Bolillo Blanco) journeys from an unspecified “cold city” and struggles to find contentment during a well-intended vacation in Mexico City.  

But the fates are rigidly aligned against him, and the unfortunate Bolillo increasingly questions the efficacy of his life strategies, and even his mental competence.  Pleasure eludes him at every opportunity.

The libretto is based on a series of frantic texts and emails the young Bologna received in the early aughts, but musicologists have never discovered exactly who it was that travelled to Mexico.

Prologue: Let’s Buy a Ticket

With the house lights dimming, the audience is treated to two minutes of a winter weather and traffic report, reflecting a city with a frigid, stifling, possibly dangerous climate.  Bologna is off on the wrong foot.

As the curtain rises, Bolillo Blanco is in his unadorned apartment, which is represented by a lot of rough lumber.  He sits on a long plank, tapping at his computer (placed on more wood, suggesting a crude work area).  Huge projections share his screen with the audience, and we see that he has purchased a ticket online, for a show he plans to attend while on vacation in Mexico.

But the website’s bold lettering states that all he really has is a reservation, not an actual admission ticket, and this is the crisis that dominates the start of the opera.   So, this ticketing snag carries perhaps less emotional heft than Traviata or Bohème.

Blanco stands and offers a shouted, panicked aria, in which he recounts his weeklong effort to get a real ticket.  After four days of dickering with the website, he says that he became worried, and tried phoning the vendor, TicketMaster.  Yet, his story goes, the TicketMaster woman could not help him, since the performance is in Mexico City, and Blanco is not.

In a dissonant new melody, he sings (and awkwardly mimes) that he has wasted an hour driving to a TicketMaster office in his city, but the “office” turned out to be someone’s apartment, with a doorbell labeled “Tickets”.  No one answered.  He repeats that the events have been baffling, and unnecessarily time-consuming, and he has considered a vacation in St. Louis, instead.

Back at his keyboard, his “help chat” screen enters a conversational loop, then signs itself off.

The tempo slows, and Blanco muses on the possibility that e-commerce has not delivered on the hype of the 1990’s, but asserts that he is determined to plow ahead. 

After exchanging futile emails in Spanish with TicketMaster.MX, Blanco eventually imagines that he can obtain his tickets at a TicketMaster outlet in Mexico, and with absurd optimism, he prepares to fly away.

Thus, in the wacky prologue, Bologna has set up an unlikely scenario.  The action is already filled with unrelatable yet hopeless problems, demonstrating that his lead tenor’s role is one of naiveté, empty confidence, and a go-it-alone attitude that bodes ill both for the character’s vacation plans, and for the remainder of the production.  Too, this music grates upon the ear.

Act 1: Let’s Keep on Trying to Buy a Ticket

In an impressive transformation de scène, the wooden planks of the set rearrange themselves from the poorly-lit apartment to the cut-open interior of a generic Mexico City public transit vehicle at the platform.

Three municipal officials in ornate uniforms step forward with an opening trio, in which we learn a useful fact, and hear an important warning: it is truly difficult to distinguish the subways from the surface buses in this town.  The officials take turns singing next to a chalkboard, to explain why.

1. Both modalities travel on tires.

2. Both economize by hitching multiple vehicles together, run by one driver.

3. Both use dedicated transitways, off-limits to cars and motorbikes, and accessible only through the turnstiles.

In the lyrics, these officials fail to clarify whether the thing next to them is a bus or a train.

Blanco appears on the platform, destined for TicketMaster.  He needs the Red Line #1 Train to downtown, but first he needs a new kind of ticket.  Outside the waiting vehicle, he faces a ticket machine and, punching the little flag buttons, forces it to communicate in his own language.  Accordingly, it commands that he “Choose an Option”, but the only option shown is “Add Value to Card”.

Frustrated, he pushes “Back” and “Cancel” and so on, but nothing works.  A beautiful woman approaches (sung in this production’s opening night by the stunning young Valencian soprano Barriguita Colgante).  

She chides him in a mellifluous arietta, and moves him gently to another kiosk, and this one has a second option labeled “Purchase a Card”.  She points at each of the options and smiles, still singing.

The machine wants change or small bills, but all Blanco carries is two high-value 500 peso notes that he got at the airport.  Colgante, for all her charm and technical acumen, can’t solve that, so it is decided: for his short ride downtown and back, he buys transit credit sufficient for about 100 trips to the city.  The helpful woman swirls away.

Alone again, Blanco steps aboard, and the music rises.   Here, Bologna’s orchestration calls for a prominent pair of whanging harpsichords, indicating, as always, an impending crisis. 

The Red #1 Train is packed to the windowpanes with travelers, it does not have a visible route map, and there are no audible announcements.  Also, it is not a train after all.

Coincidentally, he has boarded at the only station in this gigantic metropolis where the Red #1 Train and the Red #1 Bus, following entirely different routes, both make a stop.   He’s on the bus, going somewhere else.

Discovering his latest error, and losing patience, he gets off after two stops, studies a wall map, and gets back on when the next bus arrives.  His new plan is to ride the bus to a point west of the city center, then discover how to make his way downtown. 

But he doesn’t want to spend his day studying Mexico City Transit; he just wants to collect his ticket at TicketMaster.  He had planned on an afternoon outing to the city’s famous park and historic castle, but now it seems that his main cultural takeaway will be a deep understanding of the local transit maps.

As he rides, he delivers a dreary recitative conveying consternation, that his simple task is turning into a draining ordeal.  He looks right and left, but no beautiful, helpful woman appears at his side to soothe his anger.

As expected, mid-February is warm here, but Blanco is sweating through his shirt, and so is everyone else.  He feels he is risking viral infection as he inhales the warm breath of the vehicle’s other 150 passengers, all very close-by, whom he worries are trying to grab his passport, his credit card, and his other 500 pesos.

Then, everyone on the bus sings.  Their complex chorus fills time and space, with the full range of voices raising tributes to commuting by bus or train, their devotion to the local mass transit, and the acceptance of not knowing exactly where they are, or when they will reach their destination.

The piccolos alternate with the tubas.  At this juncture, uncertainty reigns.  Far from being calmed by the now-famous “Passengers’ Chorus”, Blanco’s face registers a powerless fear.

Act 2: Maybe TV and a Beer Would be Good Enough After All

Blanco is exhausted, and as the curtain rises on Act 2, we see him emerging from the subway, an actual train on Blue Line #2, in the center of the city.  He hangs heavily on the railing as he climbs to the street.  He has been on the road for an hour, he has traveled just 2 miles, and he is weak with frustration and rising fury.

Half the stage is a long shot of Mexico’s exquisite Metropolitan Cathedral, in view across the main public square.  The cathedral alone is worth a visit to the city, but secondary to the developing plot.   From backstage, we hear the peaceful melodies of distant choir.

Bolillo Blanco glances sideways at the cathedral as he hurries by, searching for an address one block away.  This address is not one of the two recommended for ticket pickup by TicketMaster.MX, but Blanco is taking a shortcut, distrusting the website, and thinking that any TicketMaster office will do.

He is partly right.

Street urchins gather, hands outstretched for charity, and fall in behind Blanco, singing, as he covers the quarter-mile from Blue Line #2 to the ticket office.

The lovely children’s chorus explains that Bolillo Blanco was born with a congenital foot malformation, so walking is painful.  In celestial poetry, the youngsters outline how Blanco’s right talus/cuboid/navicular construct has collapsed in his youth, and now it shouts sharply at the distal tibia and fibula.  This level of pain, they intone, warrants crutches, or a walker.

He stops twice to rest, leaning on some yellow crowd-control barriers, massaging his ankle.  He rallies and moves on.

Stage right holds the familiar primitive two-by-fours, suggesting a tall but dingy edifice with street access.  Blanco checks the address on his phone and, consumed by skepticism in the extreme, he enters.

The man at the ticket office indicates that this is not TicketMaster, but some other kind of ticket place at the same address.  “Fifth floor!” he barks in burly Spanish.  (The character is skillfully portrayed by the promising Estonian bass-baritone Bo Fz.) 

“But to where?” Blanco responds, revealing limited language skills. 

The angry man points directly into a candy store, adjoining.

Fittingly, Bologna has directed here a darkening of the presented world, with a churning, confusing lightscape, reminiscent of the “trial scene” of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. 

Smoke wafts across the stage, then increases gradually through the end of the scene. spotlights cut the darkness, zag crazily, and disappear; colors transit throughout the spectrum, and the music lacks tonal consistency. 

Losing confidence, Blanco searches the candy store, and discovers an entryway to “Liverpool”, a maze-like multi-story department store, in the old style.  He begins to doubt the odd instructions.

In fact, at this point in Act 2, Blanco begins to question himself.  A self-sufficient and intrepid adventurer is one thing, he sings in broad tenor cadences, but pursuing a goose-chase day in and day out, from one country to the next, with no sign of upcoming success, falls short of the James Bond image that he savors.

A morose aria follows, highlighting only the string bass section.  Blanco is searching obediently for the way upstairs, and this music reflects his mood, as do the lyrics.  This is too many surprises; he’s not familiar with a world that works like this, and his adventuresome spirit is flagging.

The lights shudder and flash; gloom abounds; he struggles for orientation in the labyrinth of “Liverpool”.

A series of escalators carries him smoothly upward through children’s clothing, tools and hardware, kitchen appliances, and the like.  He disappears into the fly tower above the stage, and the scene goes dark.

Act 3: Hell on Earth

Lights flicker up to a deathly dim glow.  All is red and black.  The cello section provides a terrifying devil’s dance, and Blanco appears again, driving himself ahead, limping conspicuously in fits and starts through the surreal top-floor home goods section of “Liverpool”.

He’s acutely aware that tonight’s performance is now only five hours away, and his fear of failure is sharpened by an offstage mezzo, chanting in Bologna’s Italian vernacular, “You are screwed, Blanco.  You are basically screwed.  Give up now.”

He passes displays of easy chairs, sectionals, throw pillows, and modular waterproof high-friction exterior carpeting.  He enters the pet-care department.  At last, through the gloom, he spies his target. 

In the distance, yards from the escalators, and seeming light-years from conventional reality, Blanco notes a lighted sign above two desks manned by women.  TicketMaster.   The cheap blue-and-white neon glows and spits menacingly.

Blanco states, in booming modo parlato, that the incongruity of a TicketMaster office in a corner of the fifth floor of “Liverpool” defies description.

Eager for an end to this crisis, he now sits and shows his receipts and emails to the agents.  Next to him, there are fuzzy cat beds, a fun carpeted climbing tree, and stacked bags of kitty litter.

Moving in unison, the two women stand, nod at each other, then point at their computer screens.  They grin fiercely at Blanco, and in powerful stabbing high C’s, they shriek:

“Your ticket has been cancelled.”

Indeed, they assure him that “the 24-hour limit has passed”, and his ticket is no longer available. 

Blanco can hardly breathe.  He isn’t curious on the matter of what sort of 24-hour deadline has passed, but he tries to compose himself, and hobbles away, crestfallen.

Holding back tears of frustration, Blanco cycles back down the escalators.  This may not be worth the effort, he reflects, in a touching solo, which ends ambiguously on a tenuous Picardy third.  The ticket seemed so cheap two weeks ago – but what of the hours he has invested?  What of the curdling of the brain that such consistent bad luck generates in the unfortunate?  What of those costs?

Entr’Acte: A Tiny Light in a Dark World

The program notes explain that for weeks, Bolillo Blanco has lived in hatred of his city’s frightfully cold winter, his morale dwindling to new depths, with a month of dense fog stifling the city’s urban energy.  Blanco needs a vacation, and he knows it.

Mexico is giving just three performances of an opera he admires, Verdura Vieja’s 1890 work, ¿Por Qué Tantos Fracasos?, which roughly translates as “What’s with all the screwups?”. 

Here, we cannot forgive Giovanni di Bologna for inserting a reference to an opera as part of an opera; this is the highly objectionable “story within a story” ploy, in a transparent guise.  Many have written on this topic, and all agree, the concept is despicable.  For shame.

Aficionados will be aware that Fracasos is a take on the old Joan of Arc story, with a depressing twist.  As is well-known, Joan fights hard for France, and wins many battles, as well as the respect of King Charles VII.  But life is unpredictable, and in the time-honored legend, everyone eventually turns against her, in spite of her unrelenting dedication and efforts, and she is burned at the stake. 

In Fracasos, the “twist” is that she is spared, and lives to fight more battles, losing as often as not.  We understand that this goes on and on, with little gained for her effort.

As the curtain opens, Blanco, walking gingerly, approaches Mexico’s fabulous Art Nouveau-styled opera house, the renowned Palacio de Bellas Artes.  Still short on time, he staggers past the opulent white marble arches and columns, and finds the ticket office.

He explains his situation one more time, and quickly buys another ticket for ¿Por Qué Tantos Fracasos?, the exact same seat as he had before.  It costs the same as it did originally -- a bargain, in one sense.

Blanco is emboldened by this success.  We see him circulating on the stage, as he makes his way back to the hotel, participating in a few cheerful antics, offered as comic relief.  The following actions are supported by the orchestra playing an amusing gigue, with rhythms suggesting clinically-diagnosed insanity.

1. He searches for the subway, but as always, there are no signs, and he is lost again.

2. An unmarked stairway descends from the street, but it is blocked by a policeman, with no justification. 

3. Another unmarked entrance appears, blocked on three sides by more yellow pedestrian barriers.  Street vendors have spread half an acre of flowers and trinkets in the way.

4. Entering the train, he lags behind in the frenetic crowd, and is crushed at the shoulders by the closing subway doors.  Evidently not all the doors have a working safety mechanism.  He fights his way in, as the doors guillotine their way into place.

5. Minutes later, on the Red Line #2 Bus once again, a woman sharply reprimands Blanco for standing in the “sección rosa”.  Not comprehending, he shifts back among the seats, and deduces that the front half of the bus is painted pink, reserved for women, to combat onboard molestation.  He registers the pathetic isolation of an unsuccessful outcast.

Blanco adds his voice to the manic orchestra, singing blandly about the possibility of life inside a pinball machine.  He makes no attempt to reconcile or learn from this hodgepodge of trifles.  

At last, he limps dramatically from the bus stop to the hotel, wishing for the magical power to fly, or the societal freedom to crawl.  Grim reality fails to reveal any good options.

The familiar wooden boards reconfigure to represent a standard bed, sufficient but no more.  From above, multicolor flashing stage lights make the hotel room a clownish cell.  Blanco enters, clutching his priceless opera ticket, and collapses on the bed.  He’s been out nearly 2½ hours, and it has been a tough go. 

Fatigue steals away his remaining strength, and for a moment, his tortured mind again ponders the validity of his world.  Why all the screwups, indeed?  He sleeps, and the orchestra carries us off with foreboding chords. 

The day is not over.

Act 4: Showtime

The intermission after Act 3 provides the audience with an opportunity to escape the building, or at least to drink heavily at the bar and change the subject, and no judgement on that.  Three acts, plus a prologue and the pretentious entr’-acte launched at you by Giovanni di Bologna’s painful drama can be too much to bear.

The plotline, for sure, feels unrealistic and down; the music (save for the Act 3 “Boleto Quadrille”) is post-modern-Baroque in the extreme; the overused plank set feels too rustic and predictable.  When the lights go up for intermission, one could be forgiven for saying “So he finally has his damned ticket, just let the guy sleep.”

Yet for those who remain, whether out of morbid curiosity, self-flagellation, or bragging rights, the final acts deliver surprising insights into the main character’s endurance and determination.  We stride ahead to the conclusion, and the taco, of This Poor Dog.

Showered and refreshed, Blanco emerges onto the street at dusk, in a smart suit, ready for the opera.   Now the simple planks line up to become sidewalks, benches, and bus stop structures.

A fleeting video on the scrim shows Mexico’s landmark Angel of Independence, a towering column and statue trimmed with a layer of gold, which is directly outside his hotel.  The strident chords of the Mexican national anthem are heard, but Blanco disregards the spectacle, moving quickly and hoping to stay on schedule.

His plan is to ride the Orange Line #7 Bus, which picks up directly across from the hotel, and will take him to within two subway stops of the opera house. 

He’s allowed himself an hour and a quarter to make the 20-minute trip, and he has more credit on his transit card than he could use in a month.

But this doesn’t work at all, and Bologna’s conceit is the well-worn tropo animale, in this case presenting a street parade of speedy bunnies at the start, changing to energetic but slower chimps as Bolillo’s fortunes begin to fade, and eventually featuring walking reindeer, docile sheep, plodding draft animals, and two placid musk oxen as the situation worsens.  The music correlates.

By the end of the scene, Bolillo is encumbered by full-sized frozen mammoth carcasses.  As we know, after Verdi’s Aida, with its lions and whatnot, tropo animale was shunned and abandoned in the opera world.  Bologna has gained nothing for all the spectacle.

At the bus stop, a new surprise: this estación has a sign, for sure, but the sign serves no special purpose this evening, because the location is prominently marked by a queue of 50 or 60 people waiting to board.  Blanco conforms, and takes his place at the back of the line.

A completely full #7 bus stops and picks up a few passengers, and then, over capacity, it moves on.  Another bus appears immediately, with another directly behind it.  Both are crammed beyond all reason, and no one can get on.

Minutes pass.  Another bus stops, is penetrated by a handful of aggressive passengers, and then leaves.  Another overfull bus passes by, and another. 

The theme of the popular “Passengers’ Chorus” returns, now in a lugubrious minor key.  The energy is low, and the tonality is of stasis, and resignation.  The lyrics imply that the Orange #7 line calls out for subway construction, or an air route, with 747s.

Time is passing, and Blanco is wary, and nervous.  But there is no space on the Orange Line #7 Bus system this evening.  Further, the street traffic, even without the animal foolishness, is fierce at 7 PM, and who knows how long it will take the bus to get downtown?

Blanco steps back in defeat.  It is now 10 after 7, and Fracasos starts in 50 minutes, two miles away.  For the second time today, he faces the option of giving up on this venture entirely.

The music drifts slowly down, as if deflated and defeated.  Blanco turns away from the bus stand and heads for the street, his hand high, waving for a taxi.

It is now dark out, and he fails to notice that the bus stop is up on a raised concrete platform, which he now strides off of, unknowing, pitching headlong onto the brick sidewalk below.  He scrambles up, trying to look confident and capable.  There’s no suggestion that he is hurt, or that his suit has suffered any damage.  Ironically, his attitude is no worse than it was before.  Onward.

Outside a hotel, a huge man in a black suit waves him over, indicating an enormous vehicle-for-hire by the curb.  Blanco climbs up and into the behemoth.  (This is a cunning casting move: it is the mahogany-voiced Estonian once again, Bo Fz!)  It costs a small fortune to drive the 2 miles downtown.  He gets there on time.  He’s not sure he cares any more.

Act 5: Realismo Mexicano

As stated, the presentation of characters attending an opera, as part of the larger work which is itself an opera, is distasteful in the extreme, but Bologna thankfully diminishes this outrage to almost nothing.

Now that the wearying parade of wildlife has been cleared from the stage, and the expensive taxi ride is complete, projected titling announces an “intermission” and the house lights come up.  This is puzzling to at least one viewer; the actual intermission took place no more than 15 minutes earlier.

Nevertheless, with this invitation, much of the opening night audience walks out again, or stands to stretch and talk.  All of them are missing relevant action on the stage, which continues apace.

What is happening, during this interlude, is that Blanco is attending the Mexico City Opera’s production of ¿Por Qué Tantos Fracasos?.   With the stage closed off, Blanco positions himself on the very precipice above the orchestra, back to the audience.  He looks up at the curtain immediately in front of him, and watches a series of rapidly-changing projected images.

We see that he is in the century-old Mexico City Opera House, and it is a stunning beauty on the inside, as much as from the curb.   The ornate dark wood theme, and the classic Art Deco interior sculpting, are breathtaking.

But what stands for supertitle translations in Fracasos is a vast and rapidly-changing esposizione di parole, a panorama of the logograms and symbols of pre-Columbian Nahuatl script.  Blanco holds his head in frustration, throws his hands into the air, and finally stops watching altogether.  It is clear that he cannot understand any of the words or dialogue he is seeing, and he gives up the effort to fully enjoy the show for which he has paid so dearly. 

During these minutes, which represent the life of Joan of Arc, the orchestra plays a jaunty “Warrior’s Gavotte”, while Joan appears, wildly flailing her sword.  But she is vastly outnumbered by the English horde, and she is quickly captured, abused, and imprisoned.  Blanco seems to enjoy the music, at least.

Soon the house lights go down, and the curtain opens on a late-night city street, nearly dark and entirely empty of people.  We can tell that Blanco is on his way back to his hotel.

But he is in peril, as the audience learns from one of the most frightening and absurd ambienti oscuri ever attempted in Italian opera.   What now happens in the house deserves a trigger warning for the faint of heart, and for those who seek a more conventionally entertaining experience for their money.

Onstage, the familiar wooden boards form the edges of the street, aligned from front to back.  We see, on both sides, closed-up businesses, an occasional tiny all-night convenience store, and the winking lights of security systems.   All of these are in motion, progressing toward the audience and then disappearing to the sides.  They are continually replaced by additional desolate structures appearing in the distance, and moving downstage.  We, with Bolillo Blanco, are walking ahead through the uncertain night.

The orchestra sets up a creepy featureless monotone, which rises slowly in volume, only to eventually disappear, and start again.  An irregular cadence beats out the crashing pain in Blanco’s right ankle as he steps ahead.  Offstage, the chorus moans and shrieks throughout.  The effect of this kind of music is a rare sort of physical discomfort.

Blanco cannot find the right bus, though bus stops appear periodically on the street.  They are abandoned, and no vehicles at all are passing this way, let alone the outbound Orange Line #7.  We sense that he is wary, and scared.

There are no people on the stage.  But there are people in the aisles of the theater, and this is what is disturbing.  While we sit transfixed by the mournful scene on the stage, a vast team of extras, fully shrouded in black, enters from the rear to physically harass members of the audience. 

They shout nonsense in the darkness; they shove women violently from the side; they throttle unsuspecting men who react as if fighting for their lives.  The horrid music goes on, and the sinister crew marauds through the house, seemingly with license to actually harm the opera-goers.  Two rows ahead of where I sat, a teenage boy was yanked from his seat and thrust into the aisle, nearly over-run by more of these devils of the night.  In the balcony, one character apparently vomited over the edge – whether real or simulated was unclear in this performance.

The music boils along.  Onstage, our progress through the fearsome night continues, but with no indication that we will be successful at finding Blanco’s hotel.  What we do see are a number of the stupendous symbols of Mexico’s grand history and culture, but they are mostly hidden in darkness, and we move by quickly. 

We pass the soaring arch of the Monumento a la Revolución, memorializing the heroes of 1910; the commanding female figure at the Glorieta de las Mujeres Que Luchan (installed by self-organized women to honor their comrades suffering injustice); and the Palm Roundabout, where an iconic tree stood for nearly a century, now featuring a symbolic Montezuma Cypress.

But Blanco is unable to absorb this grandeur, as he limps desperately on his way, feeling vulnerable and ill at ease with the uncertainties of nighttime in this foreign city.  The larger message is one of fatigue and terror, punctuated by the inappropriate antics going on in the audience. 

(Later, it emerged that some in attendance had escaped the building and, unsurprisingly, called the police.  Future performances of this production of This Poor Dog are in doubt, pending the selection of a more benign way to convey that Blanco is afraid of the dark.)

At last, a bright light in the distance shows that he is approaching his hotel, and in serious pain, he lurches along the street and into a restaurant nearby, falling into a chair.

Bolillo Blanco reflects on his deep love for this city.  Its cultural history, its artistic prominence, and its enduring pizazz as an accessible, yet very foreign, vacation spot have always appealed.  Yet something – something ineffable – has begun to trouble Blanco with this visit. 

His final aria of Act 5 draws a possible parallel between his experiences of the day, and the endless purgatory of Joan of Arc.  Or maybe her actual burning at the stake. 

No matter; Blanco is hungry.

Act 6: Tacos

The stage set is a convincing sidewalk café, with colorful little lights trying to keep things merry.  A clutch of musicians climbs from the pit onto the stage, carrying the traditional trumpets and absurd bulbous guitars of mariachi folk music. They set up their little combo on the side, don colorful sarapes and sombreros, and begin to play.  It’s a fruitcake version of Jacques Offenbach’s La Périchole.

Blanco rocks back in his chair and spreads his arms wide, a bottle of Cuauhtemoc Lager held high.  He sings with gusto.

His feet are shot, he says, and he can no longer stand up.  Confined to his chair, he has his beer and awaits a plate of tacos.  The rollicking chorus:

“In this taco restaurant, they have tacos of every kind!  Every kind! 

On a hand-painted platter, they give you 10 types of sauce – beware!  Beware!”

Dipping into the guac, Blanco sings wistfully about spending the whole of the following day in bed, with a possible excursion to the park, to sit in the sun.  Yet he admits that the thought of gambling once again with public transport, brings a shocking rush of adrenaline.  He’ll decide tomorrow.

The mariachis change their key, and quicken their tempo.

Under the next table, a dog yaps sharply.  Blanco takes interest, pausing midway through his taco de lengua fria. 

The mariachi band picks up the narrative, possibly the only Italian-language mariachis on the planet.  It is too sad, they sing; these diners have brought their dog into the taco joint, and simply pushed it under the table, forgetting their pet while they eat and drink.  The happy group chatters away in untranslated Spanish.

The well-rehearsed stage dog strains on its short leash.  It whimpers loudly, uncomfortable and unhappy.  Things are not going well for this dog; he is trapped by forces he doesn’t understand, and his efforts to help himself are ineffectual.  This strikes a sympathetic chord with Bolillo Blanco, or so goes the story from the mariachis.

The trumpets are blaring, the huge guitars are whomping out a faster and faster rhythm.  The people at the table talk and laugh, with animation.  They work on their plates of food, and drink their bottles of beer, while the band nearby drives to a climax.  They pay no attention to the dog.

But Bolillo Blanco is paying attention.  This is one sad little animal, and Blanco has stopped eating, focused on the troubling situation at the next table.

One of the guitar players (Fz again!) steps forward, with a compelling solo.  He sings an announcement over the raucous band behind him:  The gringo from the north is going to say something to these people, something funny.  He has a little quip, to deliver to them in Spanish.

Blanco leans toward their table, smiling, and someone notices him.  The band stops short, and suddenly there is silence.

“This poor dog needs a taco!”

It gets a few grins around the table, and someone leans and pets the dog, and feeds him a tortilla.  The guitars and trumpets start up again with energy, and Blanco turns back to his plate.

He smiles to himself, satisfied with this small success: a little entertainment for the people with the dog, a little comedy.  In Spanish.   He looks out to the audience and raises his beer bottle in triumph, receiving brief spontaneous applause.

The mariachi band offers some final wry philosophy about the joys of helping one’s fellow humans, and dogs, and the timeless contrast between such pleasures and struggles with an inscrutable mass transit system, or the impenetrable TicketMaster Corporation.

Finally relaxed, Blanco calls for the check and swigs the last of his beer, and the curtain falls.