When you find yourself living in a Mexican village in the middle of nowhere with no electricity and it’s the 80ies, whoever has a good ghetto-blaster is your God. Therefor, Lang and Nancy were God.

On a clear night, you could hear Lang and Nancy’s stereo all the way across the river and down the mountain to our palapa behind Carmen and Magdaleno’s house. Mom, Ron and I would sit at our fiber-glass dinning room table in silence trying to see if we could identify the song they were playing a few miles away. ”It’s Coltrane,” Ron would say. ”Thriller!” I would sometimes shout in ecstasy. ”Ahhh, Andreas Vollenweider, ” my mom would exhale in bliss…

Lang and Nancy also had a solar-panel-but-more-often-generator-powered television with the most incredible attachment in the whole entire world for a 10 year old in 1981: a VCR. And to make it a total ecstatic dream for a child living in the mexican jungle, Lang and Nancy also had a fabled leather-couch that was brought to Yelapa on an over-sized panga (boat) so that they could watch their TV and VCR in utter comfort inside of their hut.

I was a delirious bundle of 10 year-old joy when my family of 3 and our dog Beso received a movie-watching invitation on a stuffy and humid spring night from Lang and Nancy.

I put on my cleanest dress with the least mold on the hems and attached my most colorful scrunchy into my blond hair. I helped my mother finish the batch of her famous chocolate-chip cookies for the outing. I could barely contain my utter drunken-bliss as we crossed the river bare-footed, put on our shoes on the muddy bank on the other side of the river, headed up the dusty trail and climbed the 97 stone steps up the mountain to the Mansion-Couch-And-VCR-Harboring palapa (thatched roof) hut of Lang and Nancy.

The cookies were an instant hit with the stoned gringos and Lang and Nancy complimented my lace dress. They invited me to sit on their leather couch (after my mother lifted all of the pillows checking for hiding scorpions) and to sit back and relax for the show. A Handfull of ex-patriot gringos were hanging around the Mansion-Hut and were as eager as I to see the feature presentation.

It was Pink Floyd’s ”The Wall”. I was mesmerized. Speechless. Scared. Fascinated. Semi-distracted and considerably irritated with the green and red long-legged tree frog that climbed the television screen and distorted my perfect view of the film. The smell of the leather couch under my small body, the film, the view of the stars from Lang and Nancy’s side of the mountain… What could be a better definition of heaven?

When we left Lang and Nancy’s home that evening, I bounced down the 97 stone steps with my flash light illuminating with it’s weak beam the snaking trail. I took off my shoes to cross the river, brushed my teeth under the stars and then climbed up into my loft, inside my hanging and mosquito-net protected bed, and dreamed of leather sofa’s, Pink Floyd and VCRs. What a perfect world it was…

And what a perfect world it still is. Even with all the fucked up shit that is happening, I still believe in Magic and in Love. I still believe in Pink Floyd playing from VCRs with Tree frogs distracting your view and I am here to walk My Talk and Infect Love. Here is some self portraits and some of my photography with a little child-like fantasy super-imposed on the image I originally took. Take a look, believe in magic, infect love into this world. It may feel like we cannot change the world, but that is a lie. We can. We are.