Word: home
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Everyday, at 2 p.m., the entire city essentially shuts down. People walk home from work to eat the comida (lunch) and take a siesta. Although they return to work at "4 o'clock," this is Mexican time--so you must add at least 30 minutes...
There are ways, however, in which Comitan is like life back home. I exercise daily at a gym; I eat Quaker Instant Oatmeal; I can have my photos developed in an hour; I can check my e-mail daily. American marketing is everywhere. Coca-Cola (a.k.a. "Coca") and Pepsi have made inroads to even the most remote towns--towns which still do not have running water. (I even visited a Mayan village where the bubbly has been incorporated into a sacred healing ceremony.) If you walk through Comitan in the late afternoon, you can hear the loud cheers...
What has hit home the most for me was befriending Chelie, a 15-year-old girl who lives in my boarding house. She left school a few years ago to earn money for her family and is up at dawn each day doing domestic chores until late in the evening. As a Harvard student, I complain about excessive homework, the lack of social life at school and what was served in the dining hall for dinner. The disparity between livelihoods is just so unbelievably vast. Who's the adult here? And this week, with this pained awareness of the grave...
Lona Williams' script has more lutefisk and Lutheran gags than a year of A Prairie Home Companion. Williams and director Michael Patrick Jann are as eager to deride Middle America, with its oppressively cheerful whiteness, as they were to exploit the area's hospitality; the film was shot in half a dozen Minnesota towns. As Amber says, "The whole thing's kinda sad and lame at the same time...
Sydney Maleia Lawford 1956-present Worked as a model, now home raising four children...