California Llorada

'California llorada!!!!!!'
'Callete guay!'
--smack!

I'm wearing my favorite faded black t-shirt, the one that I've loved since I first found it shopping in a second hand store with my mother in Grapevine Texas almost five years ago. The font is distinctively 80's and the white letters spell out C-A-L-I-F-O-R-N-I-A with a big palm tree at the end. Some of the boys back home in Dallas once said they would tell the seasons by this t-shirt...when they would see this shirt they would say it was 'California' weather again.
But I am at Llano park on Avenida Juarez today for a festival that celebrates a prep school here in Oaxaca. The sun is making the birds and kids go nuts, and the next performance of ten or twelve guitar boys are restless along the back side of the white tents. Four or five charge suddenly away from the group and across the gardens with intent. They swerve to avoid a troop of preteen girls in long navy polyester jumpers and cool white blouses, one of which is carrying a goldfish in a plastic bag.
But the musicians push through to a teenage couple on the sidewalk, and her hair is red and her hands are filled up with flowers...and he...he doesn't even look up at the 5 guitarists and the romantic crowd including me who has surrounded them. He just stares at her. She doesn't sweat at serenades; like a star.

Then I start crying.
I start crying and the teenage boys around me start heckling me and screaming into the park that 'California is crying'. I am laughing too with them.

And the music stops.

And we all just stare for a long time at the couple, not knowing what to say, until someone starts shouting Be-so! Be-so! and we all start shouting Be-so! BE-SO! BE-SO! Because we here in Mexico we love to incite a good public make-out session...but no such luck. A kiss on the cheek, and suddenly they part ways. The boy goes back to his friends talking soccer, the girl back to her father's house for lunch, and the musicians to the stage beyond the bleached canvas where they proceed to play 'Llarona'.

Before, the buxom woman even belts out the first word of this song, the crowd is applauding on their feet.
And everyone here is thinking about how they miss Peter Stevens.
Including me.