Fort Marcy Park fills with locals and visitors to watch the annual burning of Zozobra in 2011. Organizers hope they will be able to have a crowd again this year, but if not they will livestream the burning.
Record crowds have packed into Fort Marcy Ballpark downtown to watch the burning for years. Event organizer Ray Sandoval says this year’s festival will happen — in one form or another.
Event organizers would prefer a full crowd at this year’s Zozobra festival, but the organization will make accommodations for a virtual and televised burning if necessary.
If social-distancing requirements are still in place in September, event organizer Ray Sandoval said he would consider inviting only disadvantaged children or health care workers.
Fort Marcy Park fills with locals and visitors to watch the annual burning of Zozobra in 2011. Organizers hope they will be able to have a crowd again this year, but if not they will livestream the burning.
Record crowds have packed into Fort Marcy Ballpark downtown to watch the burning for years. Event organizer Ray Sandoval says this year’s festival will happen — in one form or another.
Gabriela Campos/New Mexican file photo
Event organizers would prefer a full crowd at this year’s Zozobra festival, but the organization will make accommodations for a virtual and televised burning if necessary.
Gabriela Campos/New Mexican file photo
If social-distancing requirements are still in place in September, event organizer Ray Sandoval said he would consider inviting only disadvantaged children or health care workers.
Luke E. Montavon/New Mexican file photo
A puppet of Zozobra stands out in crowd for the annual burning of Zozobra at Fort Marcy Park in 2017.
The novel coronavirus pandemic has crippled economies, paralyzed businesses, infected millions and claimed the lives of more than 170,000 people worldwide.
But the disease is no match for Santa Fe’s boogeyman.
While concerns about the spread of COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus, have forced the cancellation of three of the city’s biggest and most profitable summer events — Santa Fe Indian Market, the Traditional Spanish Market and the International Folk Art Market — Old Man Gloom won’t be backing down.
“Santa Fe is going to get a Zozobra one way or the other,” event organizer Ray Sandoval promised Tuesday.
But the nearly century-old ritual of burning Old Man Gloom, a symbolic destruction of people’s pain and despair from the previous year, may be a much, much less crowded event, depending on the state of the public health emergency in September.
A record-breaking crowd of 64,000 revelers packed into Fort Marcy Ballpark downtown to watch the burning last year, which may not be safe — or even legal — under new orders from the governor calling for social distancing and prohibiting the gathering of groups larger than five.
Still, Sandoval said, the show will go on.
“Obviously, this has been a year in which gloom has reigned paramount supreme, so Zozobra will burn,” he said.
“We’re hoping that by Sept. 4, we can have a full crowd, but obviously we’re going to monitor what our governmental and our health officials say,” Sandoval added. “My Plan B is that I will build a full-scale Zozobra and then [put on a show that] we will stream to everybody for free if I cannot have a mass gathering.”
Sandoval said Comcast upgraded the fiber optics in the park last year, which should make livestreaming the event trouble-free.
While the Kiwanis Club of Santa Fe, which puts on the annual event, would prefer to have a “full crowd” and “hopefully” celebrate the end of the pandemic as a community, Sandoval said the organization will make accommodations for a virtual and televised burning if necessary.
“We’ll ask people to gather with their families and to burn Zozobra with us” from the safety of their homes, he said. “We’ll have a way for them to send us their glooms electronically, and we will print them out and burn them.”
The Kiwanis Club collects so-called glooms, usually written on paper, that specify the worries, troubles and problems that people have encountered in the previous year and hope to forget. Then, volunteers stuff them into the 50-foot-tall marionette to set on fire and burn away.
“Especially in a year where so much gloom has happened,” Sandoval said, “we have to be able to give Santa Fesinos an opportunity to say goodbye to their gloom.”
If social-distancing requirements are still in place in September, Sandoval said he would consider inviting only disadvantaged children or doctors and other health care workers on the front lines of the pandemic to see the burning in person while remaining 6 feet apart.
“There could be a way with that much field in front of them to have a group,” he said, referring to Fort Marcy Ballpark.
“The Kiwanis Club, we’re the creative folks. We think our way out of these kinds of problems, and we will come up with a solution,” he said. “But I can guarantee your readers that Zozobra is going down.”
Sandoval said the organization has experience planning for a smaller event. Two years ago, the Kiwanis Club hosted the burning of Tío Coco — basically a Zozobra look-alike — for a highly touted meeting of the National Governors Association in Santa Fe that July.
“A lot of misgivings were that if we built it and we did this, people were going to show up” to watch the burning in person, Sandoval said. “We came up with a security plan to prevent that from happening, so we’ve had some experience on that. I think that we can do that again.”
This year’s burning was planned to pay tribute to the 1980s as part of the Kiwanis Club’s 10-year Zozobra Decades Project leading up to the event’s 100-year anniversary in 2024.
Sandoval said an interruption in the schedule would still allow the city to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Zozobra in 2024 because the 2000s would be celebrated in 2023. Under the current schedule, the 2010s is set to be celebrated in 2023.
“If we cannot burn in front of a crowd, we will make a special coronavirus-related Zozobra, so we can burn the virus, and we will save the 1980s for next year when we can all be together,” Sandoval said, adding that the 1980s was the decade he was looking forward to celebrating the most.
“If we can’t meet together, that’s enough gloom to make Zozobra very representative of this virus,” he added. “You know what I would probably do is paint his hair gray. You know those little crowns that they show of the virus? The little red triangles? I would put those in his hair, so he could represent us burning away the virus.”
