Twinkle Light Parade

Albuquerque officially welcomes the holiday season on Thanksgiving weekend with the Twinkle Light Parade. I've never gone before (it's so hard to go out when it's dark and cold), but I went tonight. It was *not* a good photographic venue -- it was dark and everything was moving. Not exactly tailor-made for photography.

However, it was a wonderful slice of New Mexicana. Just tremendous. It seemed that just about every school in the city had a float in the parade, and there were tons of low-riders decked out in lights. For those who don't know what a low-rider is -- well, it's a little hard to explain. It's a VERY souped-up car or truck, often an older model, with a hydraulic system that lets the chassis of the car ride very low to the ground (thus the name). But it's also a culture, particularly a Friday and Saturday night culture. And because of the hydraulics, the chassis of the car can go up and down very abruptly -- and back and forth too. One low-rider driver jacked up one side of his car and put the other side down real low -- so low that when he drove, the car threw up sparks. The crowd cheered. I know this sounds crazy but it's sooooo New Mexican, and really great.

The funniest part was this contingent of old VW buses (and an old VW bug too). They were all done up in lights -- and they were low-riders! It's a really funny mix, 'cause VW buses are sort of the hippie vehicles, the vehicles of choice for back-to-the-land types. And low-riders are the groovy young Spanish kids' cars, made for cruising city streets. So a low-rider VW bus is a major (and very funny) contradiction in terms -- sort of a cultural joke, in a way.

This one VW bus was rocking back and forth, back and forth, from side to side. I was laughing like crazy -- it was so funny. The driver -- a woman probably my age -- saw me laughing and yelled at me, "You have no idea how hard it is to do this -- when you really have to pee!" That made me laugh so hard I almost peed right then and there.:) What a great evening!