DRAMA AND DIPLOMACY

By Jenny Mcgill

If you’re an arm-chair adventurer who’s shopping for something a little different from “and then my Sherpa said this mountain was inhabited by the gods…,” or “I was shocked in the food market in Canton to see them selling puppies by the pound…,” it’s quite possible Drama and Diplomacy is for you.

Is it adventure? Yes. Is there drama? Yes, again. Diplomacy? Depends on how you look at it. While McGill remains mostly diplomatic in telling her stories, she knows how and when to wield the knife. Happily, hers is first dipped in an industrial-strength batch of humor.

If I may oversimplify, this is the story of how young Jenny McGill, all-American Airlines stew, landed in Puerto Vallarta "back when every day was party day.” Says McGill, of those times, “None of us worked, but we sure kept busy. Friends from the United States used to ask, ‘But what do you do all day in Puerto Vallarta?’ I always told them I didn’t know, but I got up in the morning with nothing to do and when I went to bed I hadn’t gotten half of it done.”

 Then she went to work as the American Consular Agent.

If this outlandish evolvement seems purely absurd on the face of it, somehow it makes sense in the context of a fishing village evolving into an international resort city partly because of a movie about an iguana. McGill is able to bring Puerto Vallarta to life, then and now, and does so by telling stories. True stories — which (if for no other reason) make the book worth your time. Fiction has to be believable. Truth is merely the truth. Take it or leave it. Or, as is often the case with McGill, laugh at it.

However, the descriptions of her (sur?)realistic job assignment ("Death, Detention, Destitution and Disappearance") while employed in a tropical paradise by the U.S. State Department, are often more than comical. Sometimes they are heartbreaking. Sometimes sweet. And sometimes bitter. Doing that job, in that place allowed McGill to become familiar (and sometimes friends) with crooks, cops, jailers, jet-setters (famous, royal and just plain rich), tourists (oh so many tourists), local citizens and ex-pats of all persuasions, of which she is one. Still. The book is a chronicle of a time, a town and a woman you just know you would like to know, in which three things come shining through: McGill's love of Mexico and Mexicans. Her love of life. And her love of telling a tale.

I leave you with one of my favorites. A shortie, but goodie: When Reagan named John Gavin U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, the Mexican government — and media — complained, saying he wasn’t a diplomat, he was an actor. According to McGill, Gavin changed their minds by insisting it wasn’t true — and what’s more, he had fifty-seven movies to prove he wasn’t an actor.

Now what other book is going to tell me that?

By Linda Ellerbee, March, 2009