Wally Gordon

This is the second and final column about a Yucatán journey. Read Part 1 here.

We traveled around Yucatán exclusively by public bus, which does have the advantage of giving you lots of idle time to study the people and countryside. Everybody has their own opinions on when and where the buses run, so you have to be resigned to long waits and occasional dead ends. Even though the distances in Yucatán are modest by U.S. standards, it takes a day or two to get just about anywhere by bus…

On a warm, bright morning, with high white clouds scudding over the dense tropical forest, four Frenchmen, four Germans, a Dutch couple, an American couple and three Mayas, jabbering in half a dozen languages, including Spanish and Yucatec, puttered slowly down a canal dug 1,500 years ago by residents of the Mayan city of Muyil.

For centuries their descendants stubbornly fought off the Spanish and Mexican governments with the result that the canal is still there and so are the Maya, as well as the magnificent ruins of their old city. Soaring above the jungle panoply, it is a victory over time and endless tribulations…

On Saturday night, I sat in an Albuquerque theater as actors discussed the hospital in which I was born, the street on which I lived, the store that my father managed—and it was all transpiring in my native city within eight months of my birth. As assimilated, non-practicing, non-believing Jews living in a city notorious for earlier incidents of antisemitism, my family could have been the subject of this play—except for the fact that unlike the play’s characters, my family never discussed Judaism. For two hours, the parallel tracks of fiction and life did indeed seem to meet, even if in the far distance.

Such was the moving but rather unnerving experience I had watching Last Night of Ballyhoo, an effective and affecting comedy being staged by Mother Road at the Tricklock Performance Laboratory…