ALBUQUERQUE — Green hair and sunken eye sockets, black and turquoise fingernails, shockingly pink lips. That classic bow tie, perennially wagging pointer finger and a sleek, flared-skirt silhouette. The New Mexico skies will be 720 pounds gloomier when the new Zozobra hot air balloon makes its debut later this year.
The Old Man Gloom balloon will first be inflated Aug. 30 during the 100th anniversary of the first burning of Will Shuster's Zozobra at Fort Marcy Park. It will then take its first full flight in October at the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, said Ray Sandoval, the Zozobra event chair for the Kiwanis Club of Santa Fe.
"The fact that we can bring our two cities even closer in two traditions that mean so much to us and means the world to me," Sandoval said Monday at the Anderson Abruzzo Albuquerque International Balloon Museum, where the mayors of the two cities and the Kiwanis Club unveiled the new balloon's design. The 135-foot special shape balloon is a $300,000 purchase by the city of Santa Fe, the city of Albuquerque and the Kiwanis Club of Santa Fe, the official Zozobra organizer. It is meant to link New Mexico's two most iconic annual traditions: Santa Fe's burning of the giant marionette and Albuquerque's annual fall balloon festival.
Photographer and Kiwanis Club volunteer Bryce Risley, who is serving as the hot air balloon chair, said it took considerable consideration to figure out what the balloon should look like. "There's 100 years of Zozob.
