Flowers, gumdrops, and kisses

Three images of the past week:

New Year's Eve, Copacabana, midnight. Raining, a steady drizzle. Cool. Buying a huge bunch of flowers and candy for Yemanja (the ocean goddess) from a street vendors just before midnight - flowers on sale now, just 50 centavos. Pushing through the intensely thick crush from Ipanema to the Copacabana beach. A girl by my side spotting my flowers and asking happily "Da uma flor! Da uma flor, por favor!" - give me a flower! I gave uma branca, a white one. Struggled to the beach through the other 1.5 million people, in the rain, and then suddenly popped out of the crowd to find a magically calm zone in the surf. Thousands of people behind me, happy, peaceful, chattering; hundreds of them wading out in the surf with flowers - then suddenly - the fireworks starting overhead, and there I was in the surf tossing my flowers to Yemanja, kissing each flower with a wish, and throwing it in; and then the candy - chocolates, gumdrops; and I just started running through the surf, running all the way along Copacabana beach, tossing fistfuls of gumdrops in the ocean, hearing the whole huge crowd roaring behind me, the immense fireworks going off overhead. Seemed like I could see for miles, the vast stage of the world out in front, all the immense cruise ships, the six fireworks barges, the enormous three-mile-long curve of the beach, the endless arc of it in front of me, and all the million and a half happy people. I ran up to a clump of random guys who were leaping around the surf yelling, grabbed one at random and gave him a huge New Year's kiss - which he returned in a huge way, Brazilians being as they are. Random kisses from strangers are just part of the game here. (Maybe I am adjusting a little better to the Brazilian culture this time around!) I left him behind, kept running, didn't notice that my pants were getting soaked, forgot that I was freezing, didn't notice how badly I was bruising my toes from tripping over all the champagne bottles. I threw all the gumdrops and flowers in the ocean, and just asked Yemanja to take care of me.

I am a scientist to the core and don't really believe in any of that fluffy stuff; but I like the poetry and the ritual of it, and I like the sense of humility. And if there is anything that can give me a little luck, or even just a little hope, the next time I am stuck in a break zone, I'll take it!

As I said in a blog comment recently, if Seattle had had the attacks that Rio had last week, Seattle would have cancelled every New Year's celebration and gone into military curfew for a month. Instead, Rio just went ahead with their giant beach party, in the rain. And a million and a half people came. And nowhere else in the world would a crowd of a million and a half have been so peaceful! I didn't see one fight. Not even when 500,000 people had to walk down the same tiny little street to Ipanema right afterwards, and not even when all 500,000 tried to take the same bus back to Zona Norte. I walked an entire mile the wrong way, away from home, just to catch a bus BEFORE it met that huge crowd so I could actually get a seat. (Then I sat for two and a half hours, while the bus crawled four whole miles, through the Traffic Jam of the Gods. But I had a SEAT! I felt so brilliant for having gotten a seat! I would have walked all the way home, except that I'd cut up my feet with some nasty blisters. But no harm done, I sterilized the cuts by pouring beer all over them.)

Two days later I woke up out of the eeriest dream. A good dream, about leaving the past behind and having hope for the future, and with an odd clarity to it, and an odd premonition about something for the future, which I won't bother to describe here, but which I feel certain it will happen, and it lifted a burden off of me. There had been a tune in the background of my dream, a sort of a soundtrack, and I woke up humming it. It was some time before I recognized it as one of the songs of Yemanja.


Wednesday, still raining. I found out at the last second that Banga was having rehearsal. Zipped over to Botafogo and got to play terceiro again with Banga. Oh, what a pleasure.... All my old friends were there. It felt like home again. Rodrigo was back - I haven't seen him in Banga in quite a while (he's been busy recording an album and playing with another band and etc. and etc) - and Rato was back - and Dudu, Andre, Thiago, all the old crowd. They have put up some beautiful photographs of Banga's shows last year and I realized, I'm in the photos! Hey, there I am, playing third surdo! I was really here; it really happened. And here I am again, really back.
They're excited in Banga - they're just about to start their weekly shows at the Fundicao in Lapa! Last rehearsal is this Saturday. The first show is this Sunday. And they're going to bus a whole pile of us over the bridge to Niteroi to play for a weekly party that Banga's pro band has been developing there. The Friday Niteroi thing has apparently grown from an audience of 18, when they started two months ago, to 4,000 people at the last show, and now they want to bring the whole bateria over.


Thursday, still raining. Today I realize that it has been raining in Rio nonstop since the bus burnings. Freakishly cold; I even had to put on long pants! and shoes and socks! I had to find my SWEATER! It is really weird weather. It is like something is trying to calm the city down, trying to cool it down.
Tonight, Olivia called me up out of the blue to say "We're going to Imperio Serrano's technical rehearsal! Right now! Can you come? Right now?" But of course I can drop everything and change all my plans, and miss the play that I was going to see, just to go to Imperio Serrano. OF COURSE. So I went to Imperio Serrano. Of course. And watched that fabulous bateria play, the famous quad bells (I recorded all the quad bell bossas), the inventive choreographies, the great mestre Atila at work. Watched the caixa players. Ha, even in a great bateria there's always some guys who can barely play caixa at all!.... and talk about your weird techniques - there was even one guy playing with one finger hooked under a rod, and people playing all twisted and crooked and using the strangest stick holds, like clubs, like canoe paddles, like puppet strings... everything under the sun. Somehow they kept playing...
I recognized my favorite passista from last year - she's still the best dancer! And still singing her heart out. I recognized my favorite third-surdo player too - he's still the best too - and he was still laughing and joking and poking other guys in the ribs! It's really cool to see the same people there again, see their personalities as bright and vivid as ever. Somehow it makes me realize that they are really REAL. I had the same illogical sense of surprise when I realized that the third-surdo players in Grande Rio's Sambodromo rehearsal were the same four guys that I'd seen at the quadra a month earlier. They are not just characters who appeared just for my escola visit. They are people who really live there and have been there for years, and all last year, and all year since then. Tourists come and go, but Imperio just keeps playing. I went all the way back to North America last year, and went from San Francisco to New York City, and came all the way back to Rio again, last year - and meanwhile those same people have been dancing and playing at Imperio Serrano, and at Grande Rio, every week. God, I hope they always keep playing; I hope that Rio never falls apart so completely that the escolas actually have to shut down. I hope they always keep playing.


It was good this week, to look around the Copacabana beach at midnight, and the Banga rehearsal room, and the Imperio Serrano quadra, and see everybody still playing music, still dancing, still kissing random strangers. In spite of - or because of? - the violence and the uncertainty of life here. There is still that unstoppable spirit.