About 27 years ago, Pearl Manzanares- Carrillo took a job with the city Parks and Recreation Department working with seniors at the Quigg Newton Recreation Center. Pearl and her husband, Albert, are longtime Sunnyside residents and are well-known — he as one of the neighborhood’s unofficial mayors and she as one of its dynamos. Pearl is capable of organizing gatherings of any size, though none of them particularly small, given that she and Albert have eight children and 13 grandchildren.
Pearl is cook and seamstress and referee and hostess. She took up balloon decorating and can transform the dingiest gymnasium into a festival of balloon archways and towers.
Pearl applied these talents to her monthly luncheons for rec center seniors, and several years into the job, she decided a Mother’s Day dinner would be a nice addition. Dinner, dessert, a little entertainment. “I just thought it would give my senior ladies a chance to bring their daughters, you know, a tribute to women,” she says.
Every year, Pearl pulled the party together and, every year, the Manzanares-Carrillo children helped. Over time, the grandchildren joined in, so that they have never known a year without greeting the ladies of the Mother’s Day dinner.
When the city ran into lean times and told her it could no longer subsidize the celebration, Pearl found a way to do it without city money.
When she retired in 2009, she saw no reason to quit. She charged a little more to cover the cost. “It never comes out even, but that’s OK, I don’t care,” she says. “Sometimes, I get a few donations, but I don’t ask for them.” Last year, she bartered a hall rental for balloon decorating.
This year is the 20th annual Mother-Daughter Dinner, and I hear about it from Pearl’s aunt, Carmel Belo. What I fail to understand as Belo tells me about her niece and her celebration is how these dinners quickly became less a city function than the celebration of a large family. Pearl is expecting close to 200 mothers and daughters this year. “Every year, you’ll find someone new and every year you’ll find some who have never missed a year,” Pearl’s daughter Arleen says.
“Where’s the food coming from?” I ask Pearl.
She sounds surprised by the question. “I always cook.”
She decided to go with a lighter menu this year, “so, I’m doing a small combo: a soft taco of chicken or beef, tostada, tamale and a dessert bar. I made some cookies. They love my cookies.”
She made everything but the tamales this year. She made the door prizes and little gifts for the mothers. She made the serving aprons her granddaughter’s University of Denver Pi Lambda Chi sorority sisters wear. This year, she used white fabric of all patterns and adorned each apron with lace.
Naturally, she does the decorating. If Pearl had told me she also was going to play the guitar and sing, I wouldn’t have been surprised. But, no, she brought in a comedienne, who offered to emcee free of charge, plus a small jazz ensemble and a local band.
“Yes, I could have stopped after I retired, but I wanted to keep doing it, and I wouldn’t be able to do it without my family,” Pearl, who is 67, says. “I love seeing my friends. I love bringing families together.”
“It’s about camaraderie and love and faith,” Arleen says as we sit in the Manzanares’ kitchen where five crockpots of beans are cooking. “It’s about community and celebrating the women in our lives. . . . And for my sisters, for all of us, it’s a part of our present to our mom for Mother’s Day. It’s our way of showing the gratitude and respect and love we feel.”
Pearl’s mother-daughter dinner was held Saturday night in Globeville at the Stapleton Recreation Center, where Pearl is now teaching a ceramics class.
The family decorated the gym in black and white balloons and the jazz ensemble played Sam Cooke. And by dessert, the daughters and granddaughters were dancing among the tables, and Pearl’s auntie Carmel was doing the “Electric Slide.”
Pearl’s children were determined that she be out among the guests instead of in the kitchen.
“It’s a beautiful thing as far as seeing all those happy faces,” Pearl said before the dinner. “This year, I want to greet everyone.”
And so she did, dressed in white, clipboard in hand.
“It’s all worth it,” she said. “Every bit of it. This is their afternoon. This is their night.”
And before her kids could stop her, she slipped back into the kitchen and started frosting the cakes.
Tina Griego writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
