Marta Chico Martín. November 11, 2000 10:12pm

It's about 2:30am on Thursday as I type these words. This time I thought I dig into the photo archives going as far back as 8 years ago. I was thinking to myself that there have been lots of restaurant gigs that have come and gone more than I keep track of and let's face it, I've been playing flamenco in the DC area for 17 years! However, for me, one tablao that stands out is Catalan West--which was reopened as an Italian restaurant currently called Finemundo. Besides being a beautiful venue with pretty decent food, Catalan West was the only gig (as long as I've been playing in DC) that featured four dancers. That's right. I said four dancers! The guitarist was my friend and colleague Torcuato Zamora--and I did have the pleasure of subbing for him at Catalan a few times.

I did publish these photos previously. But this time around they're in a larger format and using a more current version of Photoshop, I've cropped and optimized the original file images to better present these very lovely and talented dancers. You might find it interesting to note that since these pics were taken way back in 2000 (the stone ages by technology standards), I was using a digital camera with a resolution of 2.3 megapixels. Don't laugh. Yeah, I know that these days there are camera phones with higher resolutions. But on my artist income at the time, $500 (the price of my camera at that time) was a lot of money and 2.3 was a respectable resolution way back then. Cool thing was that my friend and fellow guitarrista Ramin Rad raised the funds to pay for that camera by collecting donations from members of the DC flamenco community so it was practically free! Well not really free. In a way, I did earn it for all the years that I persistently promoted the DC flamenco scene. My deepest gratitude to Ramin for coming up with the idea and making it a reality!

Anywayz, enough talk. Enjoy the pics!