Friday night was the beginning of a 10 day party here in San Antonio called Fiesta, which in case y’all don’t know, means Party in Spanish. And that about sums up my bilingual abilities, although Caroline did inform me the other day that pappalotte means windmill in Spanish. She obviously hasn’t inherited my gift of forgetting everything that finds its way into my brain almost instantaneously.
I’m not sure exactly what all Fiesta celebrates, but it has something to do with Texas history and the ability to perfectly fry a corn tortilla into a crispy pile of goodness and call it a Gordita.
And the translation for gordita is little fat one, which is about as accurate a description for what a food can do to you as I’ve ever heard. Except for maybe Big Mac.
For 10 days the whole city basically becomes one big festival. Anywhere you look you can find overpriced food on a stick and overserved drunk people on a bench. There’s Oyster Bake, Taste of New Orleans, NIOSA (Night in Old San Antonio), and parades. Have mercy, there are parades.
A river parade, a Battle of Flowers parade and a Fiesta Flambeau parade. It’s a mass of people everywhere you look.
It’s a huge deal in the city and the first year I lived here and P and I were dating, he took me to alot of the different events so that I could get a real idea of what it was all about. As far as I could tell, it’s about eating too much food and sweating in huge crowds of people while getting beer spilled on you.
I’m all about eating too much, but I’m not a big fan of the large crowd. So, these days we confine our Fiesta merriment to just one little neighborhood event, which is where we were last Friday night.
Caroline had a ball because her only requirement for a good time is a bouncy castle and it did not disappoint. We paid for a few overpriced bounce sessions, barbecued shrimp on a stick, brisket tacos, and some blue hair spray paint, which some slick, high school salesman sold to Caroline while she sat in her stroller, leaving P and I to choose between watching a huge fit or letting our daughter be hosed down with blue hair paint.
The blue hair paint won, hands down. It’s the best $3.50 we spent all night.
Fiesta also includes several kings, queens, princesses and royal courts. When I was growing up in Beaumont, we had the Neches River Festival, which was really fancy. What else would you expect from a Festival honoring a muddy river running through a refinery town? I thought being a princess in the Neches River Festival was just about the biggest thing ever, but let me tell y’all, this San Antonio royalty puts the Neches River Queens to shame and not just because they have all their teeth.
First of all, you have King Antonio. I’m not sure how he is elected or what exactly he is king of, but if any of y’all were to find your way to San Antonio and ran into King Antonio making his rounds, you might not realize you’re in the presence of royalty, and instead wonder why this bus driver has so many medals on his chest.
But he is like a real king, y’all. He has a motorcade with a police escort and as far as I can tell, his chief job is to visit various elementary and preschools and hand out medals to a bunch of manic kids waving brightly colored streamers and shaking maracas. In fact, when I was looking at preschools for Caroline, some of them had brochures that looked like this:
Accredited by the Episcopal Private School Association
Full staff of experienced, Harvard educated teachers
All children fluent in 4 languages upon entering Kindergarten
Visit from King Antonio during Fiesta week
What??? A visit from King Antonio? You can’t put a price on that. How, oh how do we get into this school? How can we deny our child an opportunity to have an upclose encounter with royalty?
Oh, there are other kings floating around the city, but don’t you be fooled. There is only one King Antonio and the others are just imposters. Imposters, I tell you.
Then, there is the queen and her court. There is a huge coronation ceremony that requires these poor girls to wear dresses that are so beaded and heavy that they weigh about 150 pounds. Not only do they have to truck across the stage wearing these behemoths, they have to do a full, deep curtsy in them. One year I attended the coronation and one of those poor girls had so much momentum going as she dragged that dress across the stage, that when she made her turn part of her train went into the orchestra pit and I just knew I was about to witness the greatest moment in Coronation history as she was sucked right into the pit.
But life sometimes isn’t fair and it didn’t happen.
You’ll never convince me that these girls are chosen based not on family position and social status, but on who has the physical tenacity to haul those dresses around and delusional enough to try to bow in them.
When I moved to San Antonio almost 13 years ago, I didn’t really get all this Fiesta stuff. Not that I necessarily do now, but you got to love a city that takes eating good food and having a good time this seriously. Not to mention, it’s where I met P and the gordita.
And if I hadn’t met P, I wouldn’t have this.
Viva Fiesta.
That’s means Long Live the Party.
I’m practically fluent.