LISA MCINTIRE
Merchandising Buckstopper

Lisa McIntire became our Merchandising Buckstopper in the late spring of 2007. This is no small thing, because like it or not, without funding, All Souls and other MMOS productions can’t and will not exist. Merchandising provides a relatively small but increasingly significant revenue stream to help keep All Soul’s chugging along into the future, and under Lisa’s direction, last year’s merch sales totaled more than the previous four years combined! Personnel is another inestimable resource we need to keep it all going, and as the buckstopper for merch, Lisa’s taken the delegation of this indispensable and demanding job off the hands of boardmembers whose plates are plenty full as it is.

“We were praying for someone like Lisa to come along and take on merchandise,” says Daniel Meyers, All Souls weekend event director and MMOS board-chair. “She jumped in with both feet and built it up like it never has been before.”

A native Southern Californian in Tucson since 1996, Lisa McIntire first arrived in the Old Pueblo from Los Angeles on vacation twenty years ago.

“I was enormously curious about the Sonoran desert, as I cultivated cactus as a hobby and loved creating southwest interior plant design,” she says. “When I first set eyes on the Santa Catalinas with their noble saguaros standing like so many sentinels, I thought I was in my spiritual homeland.” From that moment on, she embarked on a path of Southwest discovery.

The journey to Lisa’s involvement with All Souls Procession, however, really begins even further back. “In 1984 I spent a few days in Santa Fe visiting the wife of a friend. We went to the International Folk Art Museum where for the first time I saw the ‘happy skeleton’ imagery of El Dia de los Muertos. I was instantly captivated,” says Lisa. “I had no idea what I was looking at, but I wanted it in my life somehow. To this day, I can’t entirely explain the spell it cast upon me, but from that point on, I set about collecting artistic expressions of its themes.”

Lisa’s careers as a technical writer in the record industry and later a paralegal sustained her materially through the eighties and into the nineties, but over the course of that time, she found herself pondering the quality of her life in L.A.

“Whatever I was able to create in my home space through my various artistic pursuits sustained me to a certain degree,” she says. “I create jewelry from vividly colored glass beads and enjoy doing graphic design. But all the while a sense of emptiness was gnawing away at me. I couldn’t find what I needed for my soul in the sprawling, impersonal metropolis that is L.A.” And so it was at that juncture that Lisa decided to leave everything and everyone she knew for a giant question mark in the Old Pueblo. “I arrived on Election Day, 1996 to a brand new apartment in the foothills, full of hope for my new life in the Southwest.”

The new life turned out to be something she hadn’t reckoned on. The setting was perfect, but Lisa hadn’t counted on the difficulty in finding meaningful employment in her adopted city. Tapping into investments she had made a few years earlier and picking up part-time work through the few personal contacts she had made did little for a feeling of contentment in Tucson. “I found that I was in the exact inverse of the L.A. equation; I had everything I wanted in my setting and surroundings, but no sense of well being through financial security.”

Four years into the move, Lisa met the man who would become her husband on a flight returning from the Christmas holidays in L.A. “Brett appreciated all the things I was good at that I hadn’t had any success translating into a living, and that helped immensely. But I was still frustrated by my lack of ability to find the right situation where my experience and creative abilities could make a significant contribution to something.”

That all changed when by happenstance, Lisa found herself at the All Souls Procession in 2004. “It’s a rare occurrence for something to meet my expectations, let alone exceed them,” she says, “but as I stood on 4th Avenue watching the multi-sensory experience unfold with many of the Day of the Dead elements, I immediately wanted to connect with it. At last I felt there was a place I might fit in Tucson. I’d been standing on the outside for so long and then suddenly, I saw a world where I already spoke some of the language.”

What Lisa didn’t realize was just how acutely personal her first interaction with the All Souls Procession experience would prove to be. “In the late summer and fall of 2006, I was struggling to save my cat Silver, now 14 years old and in the throes of a medical crisis that caused him to stop eating. For about six weeks, we thought we might be able to save Silver, plying him with seafood and shellfish. In the end, we were unable to get his weight back up in order to treat the primary medical condition, and I had to face that horrendous decision in which one life is extinguished and a small death occurs in the other.”

“Simultaneously, I had dragged myself to a couple of the All Souls Procession volunteer meetings, mostly as a means to combat the depression I was going through day in and day out in the home setting. By chance, someone within the organization needed assistance in writing a description of the memorial card workshops to be conducted for the community. Ironically, in providing this small service, I ended up reaping so much more than I gave. Had I not been able to make a tribute of my own for Silver that I framed and took with me to the Procession, I think I would have buckled under the weight of my grief. I knew then that I wanted to make a much more significant contribution to the organization.”

Happily for Lisa, her proposal to become one of the All Souls Procession buckstoppers in 2007 was accepted by the board of Many Mouths One Stomach. “Having volunteered for a shift at the merchandise table at the ASP Weekend’s 2006 Dance of the Dead, I thought perhaps I could assist MMOS in generating greater revenues towards the goal of becoming a self-funded venture,” she says.

“We are fortunate to have artists whose compelling images for our posters and T-shirts strike a chord with the community and bring the public out in droves each year. Due to everything that goes into producing the All Souls Procession Weekend events, sales of merchandise have been limited primarily to these two items at various events. In 2008, our 19th Procession year, we will offer All Souls merchandise through an online store that will be up and running in the near future.”

Adds Lisa, “This is one of the most photographed Tucson community events, and we have so many great images in the photo archives. I’m hoping to bring out an All Souls Procession 20th Anniversary commemorative calendar for 2009. What’s been most gratifying is that we continue to be included as a presence at so many other community events over the calendar year via our merchandise booth. This helps both to fill our coffers and raise awareness for Many Mouths One Stomach as a collective of other diverse groups and individuals that reclaim public space for the arts in Tucson.”

When I first approached Lisa about having her in this issue’s Buckstopper Spotlight, she expressed doubt that there was anything remarkable about herself or her life-story that would make for a good subject. I disagree. Lisa possesses an uncommon willingness to not only give of herself, but to give the very best, without ordinary recompense. She does so not merely for personal satisfaction, but to offer her gifts as one among many toward the achievement of something great that holds enduring and universal value. That, I find, is quite remarkable -precious, even- and we will all do very well with more people like her doing their work in the world-at-large. As Daniel Meyers says, “We are so grateful that Lisa wanted to join our MMOS family”.