This week I lost my virginity, well, my pod cast virginity with an international travel company focusing on women traveling alone. Between the twenty years owning a company then being here writing about San Miguel I’ve done lots of print-based press but that’s relatively easy. Frequently reporters contacted me for quote to fit into an article already written. By the time I got here folks at the Atencion simply asked me to be my own interviewer with a fictional person asking questions. Suffice to say you, as the subject matter expert, have a lot of control over the final piece.
But a podcast is like radio but even harder because you can’t see who is asking you questions. On tours I’ve become quite good at reading an audience via their eyes, body language and facial expressions. To do a phone interview takes that ability off the table.
Luckily it went well except for when I told a story about San Miguel witches I normally keep to myself. I feel if anything in life you experience is rather dark, and you continuously talk about it, you’ve only succeeded in breathing life into a bad thing better left to die unmentioned. The story was about my first tour outside of San Miguel to become popular, the Witch and Cross tour, where I tell folks about the cult of the cross and witchcraft here in San Miguel. Doing the tours on Sunday mornings, I was shocked to find people performing the dark arts in broad daylight. One guy, under a bridge, was especially creepy with his conch shell music and copal incense. With bat-shit crazy eyes he told me that if I recorded him, the evil would follow me.
It was then that I looked down and realized I was standing in the middle of a pentagram made of flour. I couldn’t have jumped off pooh any faster.
Of course I had recorded him (in my pocket where he couldn’t see) as his music being so odd I wanted to study it later. Instead, though, the minute I got home I deleted his recordings, washed my clothes, took a shower (to get the heebie-jeebies off), and poured holy water around my doors and windows to keep away evil.
The only resulting oddity was that my load of laundry got mixed up with about 200 toothpicks that I had to keep pulling off my clothing. I found the toothpicks particularly odd because I don’t have toothpicks in the house since I’m an adult and use dental floss, so I don’t know how or why they came to be in my washing machine. But if that’s
the greatest evil Senor Crazy Eyes could muster up, I can deal with it. So I finish my podcast (mentally kicking myself to shut up about witches) and later learn my dishwasher had overflowed flooding the kitchen during the interview. Having lived on an island in the Atlantic Ocean while raising my children I’ve gotten good at home repair but couldn’t find the source of the blockage. The hired repair man took a few hours to come to me with the source of the blockage.
It was a toothpick!
Joseph Toone is the Historical Society’s short-story award winning author of the SMA Secrets book series. All books in the series are Amazon bestsellers in Mexican Travel and Holidays. Toone is SMA’s expert and TripAdvisor’s top ranked historical tour guide telling the stories behind what we do in today’s SMA. Visit HistoryAndCultureWalkin
