SANTA FE’S FAVORITE 50-foot marionette, Zozobra, is gussying up to attend a special 100th celebration in his honor this month. How little he’s learned after all these years! In the time-honored tradition created in 1924 by Will Shuster and his fellow artists, the painstakingly crafted puppet is stuffed with the city’s flammable glooms, worries, and anxieties. “Burn him!” more than 60,000 spectators will chant on the night of August 30, as he moans, groans, and wags his finger, wondering where he went wrong. Then, at the crescendo of his first century, Zozobra will go up in smoke for another year. Event committee chair Ray Sandoval, who was a kid when he began helping the Kiwanis Club build the ill-fated Z-man, gave us the lowdown on Zozobra’s centennial style.
HAIR
Old Man Gloom’s hair color is “our one little secret every year,” Sandoval says. However, “people can probably guess what the color will be because of the anniversary.”
EYES
The puppet’s scary peepers are made of pizza pans. LED lights illuminate his digitally printed pupils. While ropes were historically used to move the eyes, drone pilots now use radio-control technology to signal his distress.
NOSE
Sculpted from chicken wire, paper, and cloth, Zozobra’s schnoz has legendary proportions. Harold Gans, who took over building Zozobra’s face from Shuster, always told Sandoval to make the nose bigger. “You’ve got to see it from the field,” he’d say.
MOUTH
“We’ve decided to go back to what Shuster did in the late 1950s,” Sandoval says. “You get just a hint of an upper lip. And you know, as we age, our lips get smaller.”
HANDS
With the help of a Los Alamos National Lab robotics engineer, the marionette will be able to move all four fingers for the very first time—a giant leap from his traditional pointing and thumbs-up stance.
GLOOMIES
Local kids, ages 11 to 15, will once again perform as Zozobra’s beloved Gloomies: the dancing Santa Fe schoolchildren who are temporarily converted into Old Man Gloom’s minions before torchbearers arrive to save the city.
BUTTONS
The vest’s 3D-printed buttons will depict “something very significant to both the tradition and our city,” Sandoval says mysteriously.
CUFF LINKS
Since Zozobra will be dressed to the nines, “he’ll have real cuff links this year,”Sandoval says. “There will be a different image on them from the buttons.”
GHOST TAIL
Early versions of the puppet had legs. A mishap in the early 1930s involving a lot of wind and too much imbibing of Shuster’s homemade absinthe led to the legs coming undone to form what builders now call the “ghost tail.” “The fire caught the bottom and created a glow inside of it,” Sandoval says. “Everyone said to Shuster, ‘You’re a genius!’ and Zozobra never had legs again.”
TIE
“He definitely knows how to dress,” Sandoval says. “Formal attire is in the cards for him. He’s been invited to this party as the guest of honor.”
FIREWORKS
Shuster wrote about his vision for a postburn display in 1929. “He’s talking about the black sky of the canvas and how he’s painting on that canvas with fireworks,” Sandoval says. Drone fireworks will “paint” Shuster’s signature toward the end of the 2024 show, “as if he’s signing the sky.”
EARS
“We call them kite-shaped ears,” Sandoval says. “He had very, very large ears from the very beginning.”
Gates open at 4 p.m., August 30; Fort Marcy Park, Santa Fe