Peruvian Graduation Ceremonies can only be described as a combination of a Quiensienera (Mexican rite of passage for women on their 15th birthday) and the prom from Hades. All the girls were dressed in matching Barbie doll dresses (just wait for the photo) with their hair done by a Dolly Parton-inspired hairdresser who lives in my town. The boys were all dressed like boys should be dressed for a graduation, black pants, dress shirt and tie. Simple. Go figure that they’d make the girls look like bad Barbie dolls and the boys get to retain some sense of self respect. Then again, my point of view could be skewed by the fact that I hate anything pink and frilly. Some of the girls actually seemed to have liked the dress they were wearing.
All of the girls except Jenny that is(Second girl from the left). If you read the earlier blog then this should not be a surprise, but just in case I’ll fill ya’ll in: Jenny is a now graduate from the 6th grade who is basically the Peruvian version of me, a tomboy at its finest, anything but girly, and extremely awkward in a pair of heels. She is a girl after my own heart. So as you can imagine, she was less than happy to be the in the new “my sized Barbie” dress. She takes the credit for the quote of the night: “Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, one of the plagues shows up.”
So what had happened was, about 30 minutes into the ceremony, right when we’re getting into the full swing of things, the crickets show up. Apparently every 4 rainy seasons or so we have a slight problem with our chirping friends, they appear in such amounts as to confuse them with rain. It started out as slightly bothersome. A cricket would land on a girl’s foot, she’d squeal and then it’d move on the bother the next guest until someone finally caught it and slammed it into the ground (the preferred Peruvian method for killing a cricket). But soon it because evident that there were far too many crickets to smash. I, as the resident photographer, had at least 5 climbing down my shirt while I was trying to take pictures of the poor girls in Barbie dresses posing with their families attempting to smile while screaming on the inside because there were 5 crickets crawling down their dresses. Next thing you know our little chirping friends are crawling in and around the snack food, the cakes, and getting trapped in the Pepsi bottles of the little ones causing both a ticked off 6 year old and an even more so ticked cricket. For those of you are thinking well “this sounds like when the party died down and everyone went home”…you’d be mistaken.
I was just waiting for when the guests would get tired of fighting the crickets. We fought the crickets through the ceremony. We fought the crickets through the picture taking. We fought the crickets through the required dancing (photographer not included in the dancing). We fought the crickets through the eating. And then this here gringa-photographer decided that she’d fought the crickets long enough and headed home to the safety of her room (cricket-less as of this moment…knock on wood). I figured everyone else would soon follow suit. You know how it goes, no one likes to be the first one to leave a party, but I figured maybe I’d have started a trend of surrendering to the cricket army and calling it a night. Well 2 hours after my departure they’re still blaring cumbia music, probably slamming crickets into the pavement with the beat in an exaggerated dance move. I may have been the only one who surrendered to the little chirping ones…but at least I still have my pride. I wasn’t in a pink frilly Barbie dress.
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