Should be in bed already. Hard to sleep. After ten years of gradually becoming a tequila lover, beginning with a single bottle of “supermarket tequila” in my Point Loma apartment, to having some 200 different ones in my home in Clairemont, including aging and blending a dozen of my own batches in 3, 8.5 and 10 liter charred white oak barrels, printing labels, and even beginning a fledging business of decorating bottles already quite resplendent on their own, I’m finally heading to the birthplace and motherland… Tequila, Mexico.

Flying from Tijuana to Guadalajara in the a.m. with Carla, Kippy, and Ken, who’s turning 50 on December 2nd and is the catalyst of this journey. From Guadalajara we’ll travel east to Tequila, then keep going to some of the most spectacular coast in the world, replete with jungle, jaguars, crocodiles, black bears, jaguarundi, armadillos, land crabs, scorpions and tons of other plant, bird and sea life. Warm, blue water and good surf too.

We’ll slowly zig zag to Puerto Vallarta, and fly back from there. Puerto Vallarta is arguably the birthplace of the commercialization or “Americalization” of tequila, thanks to the movie, Night of the Iguana, a celluloid adaption of the Tennessee Williams play.

My sister Sherry turned me on to the movie, and it’s become one of my all-time favorites. Filmed in 1964 and starring Richard Burton, Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr, it’s synopsis is “A defrocked Episcopal clergyman leads a bus load of middle-aged Baptist women on a tour of the Mexican coast and comes to terms with the failure haunting his life.”

Oh, but that blurb does the plotline, intensity and story no justice at all. The acting is superb, the set puts Puerto Vallarta on the map, and perhaps the best scene is that which brings Tennessee Williams’ remarkable craftsmanship with words and feel for the frailty of humanity to light.

Deborah Kerr plays a woman traveling with her grandfather, Nonno, who she claims is the “world’s oldest living poet.” He’s working on his last poem, and just before he nods out peacefully for good one starry night on the veranda of the hotel he and his granddaughter are staying in, he dictates his final verse to her. It’s a wonderful scene. Here is the full poem. One of my all-time favorites…

Nonno’s Last Poem

How calmly does the orange branch

Observe the sky begin to blanch

Without a cry, without a prayer,

With no betrayal of despair.

Sometimes while night obscures the tree

The zenith of its life will be

Gone past forever, and from thence

A second history will commence.

A chronicle no longer gold,

A bargaining with mist and mould,

And finally the broken stem

The plummeting to earth; and then

An intercourse not well designed

For Beings of a golden kind

Whose native green must arch above

The Earth’s obscene, corrupting love.

And still the ripe fruit and the branch

Observe the sky begin to blanch

Without a cry, without a prayer,

With no betrayal of despair.

O Courage, could you not as well

Select a second place to dwell,

No only in that golden tree

But in the frightened heart of me?