Pride in New Mexico

Jul. 19—I plan to live in Santa Fe for the rest of my life, but I have a long list of sites to see and events to attend before I can consider myself even an honorary New Mexican.

My roommate, Chris, and I visited Roswell and Carlsbad Caverns in April, and I'm pleased to report that the latter accommodated his wheelchair easily. Recently we checked out Santa Fe Pride and the Santa Fe Opera for the first time. Chris moved here in November so has a good excuse for not having seen those City Different staples. I'm embarrassed to acknowledge I didn't see either in my first two summers here.

I credit two factors for the change: I no longer live in an attic apartment with no air conditioning or insulation, resulting in tremendous improvement in my summer mental health, and I want to show Chris this place I'm so proud of.

While researching a preview story I wrote for Santa Fe Pride, I learned some surprising things about New Mexico's Pride landscape. Las Cruces, the state's second-largest city, didn't see its first Pride parade until 2023. That's the same year Clovis and Portales — the state's eighth-largest and 20th-largest cities, respectively — became the site of Pride events billed as being "for rural New Mexico."

Most Santa Feans likely haven't attended Pride festivities in either of those places, given that the events are new. So I plan to attend next year with an eye toward writing a roundup of Pride events statewide. As part of that mission, I'll head to Grant County in September for the Silver City LGBTQ Pride Festival.

Meanwhile, I'll be in Farmington next weekend for two reasons: to see the Connie Mack World Series, held partly at the city's beautiful Ricketts Park, and to take in Four Corners Musical Theatre Company's production of Damn Yankees. That company was founded in 2021, the year I moved to Santa Fe. I'll tell you all about it in an August column.

Four Corners Musical Theatre Company has piqued my interest in New Mexico's other far-flung theater troupes. Just as I was pleasantly surprised how many cities here are the site of Pride events, I was pleased at the number of production companies around the state. CenterStage Clovis Community Theatre is staging Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in October. Roswell Community Little Theatre will perform Murderous Night at the Museum in August, while the Way Way Off-Broadway Theatre Company, also in Roswell, will present Into the Woods in November. Children's Music Theater of Alamogordo plans a production of Seussical in October.

I aim to see — and tell you about — as many theater companies as possible. My next step in that mission is convincing my boss that our company should pay for a hotel stay for me in Clovis. I'll keep you posted on how that goes.

Given how theater-focused this column turned out, I'll close with an anecdote from New Mexico Actors Lab's recent production of Oleanna, which starred Geoffrey Pomeroy and Emily Rankin as unlikable characters in an escalating dispute. About 40 minutes into the play, Pomeroy realized someone in the audience whom he knew was having a health issue and calmly announced, "We're going to pause and make sure he's OK."

The man ended up being fine. I suspect I'm not the only audience member impressed with Pomeroy's shift from self-absorbed college professor to concerned friend. One of the messages of Oleanna is, "People can be very bad to one another." Pomeroy's actions provided an unexpected counter message: "But they also can be very good."