For Sunday, May 11, 2008 Drummer Column, Gibbs, 826 words



Mi patio es su patio


Our fourth annual Cinco de Mayo Mexican Luau Celebration began promptly at 2ish to 5ish Saturday, May 3, in my backyard.

No disrespect meant with the multi-cultural addition of the Hawaiian themes to the revered Cinco de Mayo Holiday, a celebration of Hispanic and Latino heritage, not to be confused with Mexico’s Independence Day, which is September 16.

On Tres de Mayo friends gather together in my backyard to celebrate mid-spring in all four cardinal directions. We celebrate ourselves, our beloved brethren in Mexico, from Mexico, and all things south and north of the border.

The western luau theme came from shopping at Party America in Vallejo four years ago. They didn’t have enough Mexican decorations, so we turned right, down the Hawaiian Luau aisle, and finished stocking our cart with grass skirts and leis. Gino and I are from the east.

We bought all of our fish and vegetables at Seafood City in Vallejo, an enormous, bustling Filipino-owned extravaganza mega grocery store of whole and filleted water-borne food sources and exotic fruits and vegetables. Gino cooked it all Italian style on a 4x6-foot marble tabletop sitting on two saw horses in the back lawn.

I made my usual experimental chili from a new unwritten recipe each year, and my standard experimental barbecued chicken for the first time.

We had two chimeneas stoked with eucalyptus wood, a tent, a keg, rope lights, outdoor speakers creating alpha waves with the Gypsy Kings, and eleventeen chairs strewn about my three-level redwood orange deck.

“Steve, it’s not that orange,” said most of my guests.

“Ah, but you didn’t see it before,” I tried to explain. “In comparison, it is.”

We had about 50 guests. People arrived between 2 and 5 p.m. and stayed from 6 to midnight. People brought their best dishes and spread them out. We ate and ate and ate and milled and swilled and talked. I manned the barbecue on level three. Gino and Debra hosted their seafood kitchen on level one. Our shifts included several frequent intermissions. I wore a funny straw hat.

The lovely Rosemary Pinkstaff, mother of Roger, a veteran high school backpacker from the Golden 1990s, who was also in attendance with his wife and two children, Mae and Hunter, stitched me an apron that reads Mexican Luau BBQ. I wore that, too.

The party ended with five guys sitting around the campfire in the dark talking about politics and the price of corn.

Corn, by the way. Where is the darn corn? We had a shopper’s panic. It was like trying to buy the most popular toy on Christmas Eve. It was like trying to buy 26 pounds of rice.
Corn news grows worse

Every year for three years I’ve bought a couple dozen ears of sweet corn and steamed them. They were our after-dinner treats. This year corn was 69- and 79-cents an ear. What’s with that? Ethanol to blame? Not an ear was to be had at the Farmer’s Market. We opted for four boxes of mango popsicles.

Who gets invited to this party? Hm. Everyone I meet. Actually, it helps if I have your email. The invitation is a homemade multimedia Internet thing, which has an origin of its own that is tied to the root boot of this event.

Back in year one, two needs and a yearning converged to create our first Mexican Luau. I needed to learn Adobe Flash, a program for making website animations, and Gino, new to California, needed work. He’d just remodeled our bathroom and patio stair, so we decided to throw a party showcasing his talents to friends; I created the Flash invitation with zany pictures and whacky sound effects. We both had a yearning to party.

It came to pass.

Each year since then Gino has fixed something new at my house, and of course he cooks like Emeril. Each year I’ve created a new Flash animation, always trying to top the previous one and apply new features. Each year we’ve returned to Party America for more decorations.

I began my fascination with rope lights, stringing them along my fences and deck contours. The strands have grown considerably since then. I made a personal pact. Every time I visit Home Depot for anything, I buy one new strand of colored rope lights. On my back fence currently is a glowing outline of the Sierra mountain range with Highway 49 crosscutting the foothills. I’m about to buy a dedicated solar panel.

For Gino and me this year’s party lasted three days. We built a practice fire Friday night and sat out on the patio until 1 a.m. deep-frying chicken in the propane cooker and eating every fourth piece. On Sunday after the clean up, we sat in the sun. In that context, the word sat was not a verb. It was not something that happened quickly and ended, as in “Edward sat in the catapult.” It was a constant state of being, an abstract noun.