Hot stuff at the Virreyes

Burlesque has come to Mexico City. Burlesque of the postmodern, ironic, nudge-nudge variety, made popular in certain venues in New York and San Francisco.

Here was a rendition of Miss Liberty from last Saturday night’s show in the lobby of the Hotel Virreyes.

Here is what she had on under the tunic.

The number pictured above seemed clearly inspired by a Sergio Leone movie.

While this one below seemed to be a 21^st century take on the scene from Blonde Venus in which Marlene Dietrich showed up in a gorilla suit. The Teutonic star was probably turning in her grave.

The show was great fun, and the Virreyes – Mexico City’s closest cousin to the Chelsea Hotel, with 1950s furniture and would-be artists who rent rooms by the month – the perfect venue. It's in the centro histórico, on the corner of Izazaga and the Eje Central Lázaro Cárdenas. Next Saturday, the 20^th, there will be a different show. If you get there by 9 p.m., you’ll likely score the best seats in the house.

More sign language

For those who don't understand Spanish, the sign in this photo, outside a small grocery store in Coyoacán, offers kosher ice cubes for sale. This is notable for a couple of reasons. Coyoacán is a section of the city with hardly any Jewish population, so why kosher ice cubes would be a big draw is anyone's guess. Also, I was pretty sure that all drinking water is kosher, so there would be no such thing as "non-kosher" ice cubes. Just to make sure, I asked some Jewish friends who are more observant than I, and the very idea of kosher ice cubes provoked yells of laughter. Still, perhaps hedging their bets, they suggested I ask a rabbi. I didn't go that far, but I checked the web site www.askmoses.com. According to which, "Water is kosher -- as long as it's just plain pure water and hasn't been boiled in something used for cooking non-kosher foods or used for sacramental purposes in some non-Jewish rite."

Salad

Service in restaurants in Mexico City is, to say the least, idiosyncratic. The other day I went to a place called Matisse in the Colonia Condesa. There were various salads on the menu, and I asked the waiter if they were appetizers or main courses. He looked at me with an inscrutable expression for a long minute, as if trying to figure out what I had really meant by asking that question. Finally, he said, "yes."

What century is this?

This photo was taken the other day across the street from the Alameda Central.

The same, but cheaper

This disarming figure, known as Dr. Simi, periodically cavorts to cumbias played at ear-splitting volume outside of each branch of a chain of pharmacies that sells what are not precisely generics, but medicines it claims are “similar” to known prescriptions. Its slogan is “the same, but cheaper.”

The owner of the chain, Victor González Torres, is widely ridiculed in Mexico City, which sometimes puzzles me. Prescription medication is prohibitively expensive for most of the population here, and only sporadically available at clinics. So you might think that selling drugs cheaply would qualify someone as a hero. However, as a public figure, González Torres has not helped his own cause. For the longest time, he tended to appear in his own advertising billboards, alongside eye-candy “actresses” of the has-been or never-were variety, who were widely referred to as Simichicas. (The same but cheaper?)  

To make matters worse, in 2006, failing to consolidate an agreement with any political party, he ran for president as a write-in candidate. The best he could say for himself during the campaign was that he was using his own money to run, rather than public funds, to which the established parties are entitled. Thus, he was Mexico’s “cheapest” candidate. Beyond members of his own family, he didn’t garner many votes. Wags said that if he’d won, we’d have ended up with a simicountry – the same, but cheaper.