Firestarter

Sep. 1—Like all good villain origin stories, Zozobra started with a petty grievance.

The year is 1923. It's Christmas Eve. Will Shuster and Los Cinco Pintores have had another lean year, but they want to celebrate the sale of a recent Shuster sculpture. So they go to La Fonda, which had just recently been built.

Everyone's upset, says Ray Sandoval, the modern-day event chair for Zozobra, and Shuster isn't letting them off the hook.

FEEL THE FIRE

* Live entertainment starts at 4 p.m. on Friday, September 1, and the official ceremonies begin at 7 p.m. The burn begins shortly after sundown.

* No water or other bottled liquids are allowed (water provided on site). Organizers recommend clear plastic coolers. Bags and purses must be no larger than 4.5 inches by 6.5 inches (a locker truck provides safe storage for $10 per locker). In general admission, only cloth camping chairs are allowed (no chairs allowed in the premium viewing area).

* Tickets range from $25 to $210.

* Visit burnmygloom.com

"He takes out the sketchbook that he kept with him," says Sandoval. "He hands people pieces of paper and demands they write down what's bothering them. He puts them in the center of the table, grabs the candle, lights them on fire and declares their gloom is gone. Meanwhile, the bartender comes back and kicks them out on their ass. So now they're sitting on the Plaza, it's starting to snow, and they start laughing. Shuster started to get this idea that you really can write down what's bothering you and then symbolically burn it away."

Now, 100 years later, Shuster's bout of frustration has evolved into an enduring-if-flammable tradition. Santa Fe will celebrate the 99th burning of Zozobra, the manifestation of the community's fears and misgivings, with a ceremony that's expected to draw more than 50,000 people on Friday, September 1.

This year, the 50-foot Zozobra puppet will be dressed in a Harry Potter-style cloak and cap as a nod to the 2000s in the Zozobra Decades Project. Sandoval says the committee considered spandex and skinny jeans before ultimately going with the wizard look.

But there was less discussion about Zozobra's design in those early years, he says, and that resulted in a funny discrepancy. Shuster had gone to Mexico after Christmas 1923 and witnessed a procession where the townspeople reviled Judas for having turned Jesus into the authorities of his day. So Shuster returns, determined to take these two concepts and mash them together.

"The first Zozobra, Shuster has in his backyard in 1924. It's a six-foot little thing," says Sandoval. "They write down what's bothering them, they set it on fire, they have drinks and a barbecue. It's hilarious. And somebody says to him that he should do it again. So he's like, 'OK, if I'm going to do this again, I should do this right.' So he calls up Gustave Baumann and says, 'Can you build the head for me?' Gus says, 'Absolutely I'll do that.'

"He starts working on the head, and Shuster starts working on the body. You get to 1925, and you have a pinhead, because Gus Baumann had created this intricate head, but it was for a marionette you would use in vaudeville shows sitting on this six-foot body. They had completely miscommunicated. They had not talked to each other about what they were trying to accomplish."

In the beginning, says Sandoval, they didn't have a name they liked for Zozobra; they named him Old Man Groucher for the first few ceremonies.

Then Shuster and E. Dana Johnson, a former editor of The Santa Fe New Mexican, began leafing through a Spanish-to-English dictionary.

They looked up Grouch first, and the word didn't fit.

And then they looked up Gloom and found the word "zozobra" and the verb "zozobrar," which translates to "to create gloom." That started a wonderful partnership between Shuster and Johnson, which built Zozobra even bigger.

"The paper and Zozobra have a beautifully storied commitment to each other," Sandoval says. "The New Mexican would run stories in August about sheep being missing and sightings of this big white figure with a huge hand reaching into someone's house and stealing a pie."

It took time, though, for Santa Fe proper to warm to Zozobra.

At first, Sandoval says, Shuster wanted to marry his event with Santa Fe's Fiesta celebrations, but the council rebuffed him.

So he did what artists do: He decided to mock the very authorities who stood in his way. He created a holiday called Pasatiempo (sound familiar?), and he scheduled it for the week before Fiesta.

"You burn Zozobra," says Sandoval, "and you dressed up your animals — and these were not dogs and cats; they were sheep and cows and mules — like members of the Fiesta Council. You parade them through the Plaza to make fun of it. And then on Sunday, you had a parade, and you would make fun of the historical reenactments. So Pasatiempo grows for a few more years, and it gets more popular than Fiestas. And here's the part of the story I absolutely love. Only in Santa Fe does the Fiesta Council who's been celebrating this for 200 years come back to Shuster and say, 'OK, maybe we were a little hasty. Maybe we should marry the two events together, right?' And I think that's a beautiful story about our community."

The modern-day Zozobra celebrations require hundreds of volunteers, and Sandoval says a team of artists is involved in fashioning the giant malevolent puppet. But they're still working with the same frame Shuster invented back in 1930. Sandoval says that the team has only slightly enlarged the frame, and they've incorporated braces to make it safer.

But at the end of the day, it's still literally Shuster's invention.

"I think of myself as a pretty creative guy, and I've had to MacGyver things on Zozobra," says Sandoval. "But if someone came to me and said, 'How would you create a 3-D human head?' I don't think I would've created a center post and then put all of these interesting trapezoids at different places to create the profile. He jotted this down in just a few seconds of thinking it."

Sandoval has been involved with Zozobra since he was 6 years old (he's now 49); he says he promised Harold Gans, the longtime maker of Zozobra's face and the puppet's voice, that he would get the tradition through its 100th anniversary. Gans, in turn, had promised Shuster he would run Zozobra in perpetuity.

The tradition weathered a tragedy in the '90s, Sandoval says, and it faced another hard juncture in 2020 due to COVID. After many hard discussions, Zozobra was held in seclusion and televised on KOAT, and people were encouraged to send glooms electronically. The result, Sandoval says, was kismet: Zozobra reached an international audience for the first time.

"People from all over the world tuned in, and we started taking Glooms electronically," he says of the 2020 ceremony. "When you submit a Gloom electronically, we literally print them out, put them inside Zozobra and make sure they get burned. But being televised and on the internet during COVID was explosive for us in terms of popularity. What's interesting is now we've had people come back to us and say, 'Oh, you're the original Burning Man.'"

In the end, whether Zozobra is known internationally or not, the tradition is "very Santa Fe." Originally, Shuster's goal was to banish the gloom of his immediate social circle, and then he took on the role of eradicating the fears and anxieties of the entire community. It was all in good fun, and even today, Sandoval says, the symbolism is right on the nose.

"This monster of our own making is going to consume us," he says. "What's so beautiful about the story is just as we created Zozobra, there's another part of us as human beings. When we're selfless, when we're good to each other, when we do the right thing, when we tell the truth, that energy we put into the ecos and that creates the Fire Spirit. We now materialize this Fire Spirit and through the goodwill of the people of Santa Fe, we are able to battle and it's a David versus Goliath battle. It's good versus evil, this timeless thing, and we're able to renew our community through this ritual of fire. I think no human being around the world can refuse that when they understand what Zozobra is about."