Panama's Pomp 'n Circumstance
(costaricapages.com) Recently in Panama, a man was killed, his body taken to the Amador Causeway, and disposed of Soprano’s style…well, kind of. Instead of cement blocks to weight the body down, an old rucksack was used, filled with spare car parts, which eventually filled with water and floated with the corpse to the surface where the bobbing keychain was discovered by some very surprised tourists. It was a scene symbolic of Panama’s emerging identity as a whole, one of glamorous and imitated plotlines then the somewhat inept will to follow through.
The pseudo-swank bars and clubs that line the streets of Panama’s top nightlife district, Calle Uruguay, are the quintessence of wannabe chic. Tacky advertisements displaying bottles of Bacardi line the windows, lines of ghetto-fabulous teenagers wrap around block corners, and cover charges, a fad sometime in nineties, hover between $5 and $20 for entrance alone. The intangible which sums it all up is the look on everyone’s face, from bartender to man who watches your car: it says, you’ve arrived on the big stage now chief, do NOT embarrass yourself.
The buildings that have come to symbolize Panama’s growth over the past few years, its capital city’s luxury residential towers, bleed a desperately futuristic look of sharp angles and glass-enclosed lofts, the kind of thing you may have seen in an architectural digest magazine from the Reagan years. The kind of thing whose creators drive M3 beamers paying a little extra to have the prestigious M5 logo installed.
Malls are crowded, but not stores like Mont Blanc or Louis Vuiton. Rather it’s the department stores that are packed, filled with fashions known best to MC Hammer and New Kids on the Block, which then make regular appearances regular in Panama’s top social scenes. The short-lived t-shirts with sayings displayed across the front are top sellers: just recently, a young boy in my neighborhood walked by with one that read “I love my boyfriend.” It’s as if Bloomingdales put all their rejected pieces into a big container and sent it to Panama: took something like twenty five years to arrive.
Gossip magazines flank every supermarket checkout aisle, filled to the brim with photos of sweet sixteen parties and wedding soirées of Panama’s rich and famous: the participants posing as if about to collect that long-awaited Oscar. Appearing in one of these magazines says you’ve really made it onto the social scene here, though visitors from New York often gawk as to just how exactly that constitutes as cool? Panama’s elite find themselves humbly out of place when visiting trend circles up north, but use their time at home to impress minions with what swarms they know about pomp and circumstance.
Where Panama got all its attitude is hard to say. There’s always, since the occupation of the US, been some infatuation with the United States, with nearly everyone having a relative or acquaintance living big time up north. But what everyone fails to recognize is that bad imitation is out, boutique appeal is in. A poor mans Miami attracts just that, poor men. Panama needs to lose the fake designer shades and come up with a model of its own before the world’s most stately of affairs are re-enacted, on a budget of course.
