The reason I am doing this

jeez, I've had no time for blog entries recently... sorry everybody! Seems like every day and night has been so full. I haven't gotten to bed before 2am in god knows how long, and 6am is common.

This week has been FULL. Too full... I'm exhausted... I'm starting to fry out! I think next week will be surf camp time.

Anyway, this week was Monobloco, Bangalafumenga, Sao Clemente, Mocidade and Grande Rio. For today's entry, Monobloco:

Monobloco is finishing up their "school year" this week. Monday they had the last rehearsal before the student show on Wednesday. A huge amount of people turned up - people I've never seen before - the stage was so packed that they realized they were going to have to split the advanced class into 2 sections, have 1 section play part of the show, 1 section play another part.

Partway through the class, Fred (caixa leader) and Junior (tamborim leader) both came zipping over time me asking "Do you know who that guy is? Is he a friend of yours?" - turns out there was another foreigner who had turned up, a guy they'd never seen before, who had jumped in on caixa in the beginner class without realizing that this was a formal class, not an open rehearsal. And not just any rehearsal, but the final rehearsal for the year-end student show. Fred and Junior, working on the theory that "All gringo sambistas know each other" (which is not too far off!) thought I might know who he was. I didn't then, but I think I do now - another foreign caixa player who's just moved to Rio, and who contacted me later. They wouldn't let him play....oh well... they wouldn't let me play last year either, when I showed up in December. Turns out, Monobloco gets swamped all the time with visiting foreigners who want to play but who don't know the repertoire. But, as I now understand from first-hand experience, their repertoire is just too complicated for a drop-in player to pick up on the fly. I thought I would have the repertoire nailed in a couple weeks, but, as I discovered two days later, I'm still shaky on it after a month! It's not that the patterns are all that hard, it's just that there's a lot of them, and...hoo... a whole lotta of hand signs.

Anyway - Wednesday night arrived, the night of the show. Freddy, the caixa leader, once again impressed me with his attention to detail as a caixa leader. He combed the packed lobby to pick out all the caixa players individually, and took us up to a quiet nook of the balcony, where he gave us a rapid-fire reminder of the ENTIRE Monobloco caixa repertoire: he went down the set list and chanted out every single caixa pattern, every break and convencao, every start and every end, reviewed every single hand sign, quizzed us on everything, and even stopped every now and then to check in with me to make sure I was following his Portuguese (he'd say to me in English "Are you understanding? Is everything clear?") Yup, yup, I said, everything's clear! The show started, we all went to watch the adorable kid's group ("Minibloco"), then I played tamborim in the beginner class, then it was time for the advanced class. I grabbed a caixa and immediately realized that I'd forgotten EVERYTHING Freddy had reviewed half an hour earlier. EVERYTHING. It was just all blown clear out of my head by the tamborim stuff I'd just been playing. Not helped by some mental conflicts from identical hand signs that cue different things in Bangalafumenga, VamoLa, and the Lions. Yikes!

Luckily, as we got into the songs it all started to come back to me. And Monobloco encourages a culture of "please DO look at your neighbor if you've forgotten a pattern, rather than guessing. Rule #1: Don't guess!!" So I felt ok about mooching off of other people - sneaking looks at other caixa players to be sure I was on the right pattern.

But, I need to put in some serious time on this before January! I don't like being the kind of player who only half-remembers what's coming up and has to look at her neighbors to be sure. I like to be the kind who's completely solid on her own. I like being the one who is always sure. Never dependent. Come January, you better believe it, I'll be there.

Halfway through the show, one of the singers started goofing around, putting in extra repeats of the refrains that kept taking everybody by surprise, but he was so funny about it, and the leaders started giving him such shit about it, and he kept doing it anyway, and they started giving him more shit about it, and everybody just started to loosen up and laugh. The show came alive. It stopped being a slightly-tense Student Recital and started being Music. And they were playing all my favorite songs... all the Monobloco classics. Everybody started jumping and dancing. The lights were shining in our eyes. I saw the crowd starting to dance in the aisles, I saw Junior and Freddy and Celso and all the others jumping around singing along with the lead singers, not worrying about us any more, just having fun. I looked down the line of surdos and caixas next to me and saw that everyone was dancing. I suddenly realized "I'm here in Rio playing with Monobloco!"

I've been having moments recently of worrying about next year, what I will do for a job, how I will get any money. Long confused worries of wondering, why I am putting in so much time and effort on studying music? When it is clear that it can never be a career for me. (I started too late. And, like there is a market for third-surdo and pandeiro players anyway!) I wonder, often, why am doing this? Toward what end? What can possibly come out of it?

But there I was on stage with everybody jumping around in the lights, playing my favorite songs, with this mob of a hundred people all leaping around exhilarated, everybody yelling "Rio Mara-vil-ha!" along with the singer, the surdo players pounding away, the caixas rocketing along, everybody jumping. Not a pro show, not for money, not for fame. Just a student show, with all their friends and family dancing in the hall. It was perfect. I thought, the reason I'm doing this is not toward any end; it's not for anything in the future. It's for right now, this moment right now.