you make a good point. It is really about making jobs for ABQ. A streetcar and events centre are nice but now's not the time. It is about finding a new way of sustaining Albuquerque in case KAFB close and Sandia close or relocate. Look toward a new means of jobs. You are thinking the smart reasonable way.

Joan: I'm pretty busy between the Friday column for the Independent and the acting and being old, so I haven't resumed the blog. But here's the Prime Time column about Cary:
I was playing a small role in ACLOA’s production of “South Pacific” years ago when a makeup artist, having learned that I’m Jewish, told me she was, too. That was Maria Apodaca, one of thirty-some Hispanic New Mexicans at the heart of Cary Herz’s “New Mexico’s Crypto-Jews”, subtitled “Image and Memory”.
Maria, who has traced her Luna, Candelaria and Duran lineage way back to 1629 Seville, has “returned” - become a religious Jew and part of the Albuquerque Jewish community. Many who discover Jewish roots remain Christian, however, like the Rev. William E. Sanchez, of St. Edwin Church in Albuquerque’s South Valley, descended from the Carvajal family, some of whose members were burned at the stake in Mexico City in 1596 by the Inquisition. DNA fingers Father Sanchez as a Cohen, descended from Moses’ brother Aaron, the priest. Sounds fitting.
I found these stories photographed and written by Albuquerque’s Herz thrilling. She also offers images of headstones in hidden Northern New Mexico graveyards adorned with both cross and Star of David, as well as Jewish ritual objects and folk art.
Probably somebody thought the volume needed academic heft, so it includes an introductory essay by Ori Z. Soltes, Georgetown University theologian, and, appended, Mona Hernandez’s history of her own Gomez Robledo family and “La Conquistadora” of Santa Fe, wherein Catholicism and Judaism interweave.
Both are useful but Herz’s words and images on hidden Jews and their descendants, as well as some introspection – she’s Jewish and descended from Holocaust survivors – are the beating heart of a volume beautifully produced by UNM Press, with printing and binding in China, of course.
Full disclosure: I have known Cary for more than 25 years and of her quest almost as long.
New Mexico’s cultural wealth is inexhaustible. Native son and folklorist Nasario Garcia offers a new volume, “Brujerias” (Stories of Witchcraft and the Supernatural in the American Southwest and Beyond), via Texas Tech University Press.
It’s oral tradition, the stories your abuelo spun when you were a niño, colorful in Spanish and English translation and, frankly, not very scary.
It’s titled “witch stories,” but we meet ghosts, sorcerers and fiery eruptions, too, as recalled by 64 southwestern narrators. They are our neighbors, mostly, but some names stand out, including Eliseo Torres, of folk medicine fame
Though he’s a scholar, Nasario Garcia hasn’t squeezed the fun out of the fiends. So please don’t give him the mal de ojo.

Alpert may be reached at aatruth@swcp.com.

Joan: Thanks for coming to the Vortex show and for the kind review. But I think there are a lot of fine actors in "Electoral Dysfunction" - the guy who played the Hollywood producer in the first play, the guy who played the Veep in "Car Alarm", the janitor in the Barack Obama piece...to mention three.
Anyway, thanks.
Arthur

Joan: Good to hear from you. My new, current email address is aatruth@swcp.com. And I will post the Prime Time article on my blo no later than tomorrow, Sunday.
As for real blogging, I am pondering...pondering...what to do. Perhaps I will write for Duke City Fix. Perhaps resume the blog - Lord knows we need more journalistic oversight with just one newspaper in town.
Thanks, in any case, for tracking me down.
Arthur