Life in full color

oh, i can't believe it.... this is so eerie... I am back in the United States.

Usual chaotic airport confusion getting out of Brazil - a 2.5hr, half-mile-long line at the American Airlines ticket counter because they'd had a plane turn back with wing trouble (!) the night before, so they had 350 extra people waiting to get on the 3 planes out of Rio that night. I got there 2.5hrs ahead of time and watched the clock slowly tick, tick, tick, standing in the stock-still, half-mile line, till the time for my flight had come and gone. But everyone around me was on the same flight, so at least we'd all missed it together.

Ran into one of my fellow Banga players at the airport! He recognized me as I was standing in line, and came right over - "Oi! Tudo bom???" He asked, "Are you leaving? Are you leaving Brazil? But you played with us last year too, right? Have you been here the whole time? Will you be back? Where are you going?" - Suddenly he wanted to know everything. It was fun to finally get a chance to talk with him, instead of the usual waving hi across the noisy rehearsal room - and really sweet to discover that someone had remembered me from last year and wanted to know if I'd be back. The same way I felt when I saw Rio Maracatu last week and they said "Where have you been? Are you coming back?" My Rio families.

Each time, with some pain, I answer "Vou voltar o ano que vem." I'll come back next year.

He turned out to be on his way to Australia to film a surf documentary! Banga and Monobloco are full of people like that: pro musicians, artists, film-makers - the arty bohemian side of Rio's white middle class. Maybe it's not the favela thing exactly, but it's definitely very cool in its own way. They are good people.

We wished each other well - he asked if anyone in Banga had my contact info, and I told him Olivia did. A hug goodbye, the Brazilian double kiss, off he went, that was my last little contact with my Rio music life.

Finally on the plane..... arrived a long time later in Manhattan and got on a subway car where nobody was wearing any colors at all! The entire subway car was dressed in black and grey! Once I would have thought this looked cool - black, yeah! - I've been through that black-clothes thing. But after six months of Brazil, with the laughing guys in colorful board shorts, and bright-eyed brunettes in sparkly, colorful haltertops and bright little skirts - and everything the girls wear always spiced up in that Brazilian way with an extra row of sequins, an extra little flower in the hair, always some colorful extra splash.... well, the Manhattan black style just looked old and creaky and dull. Everybody in that subway car looked tired, sad, still, dead. No color at all. All black and grey, everywhere I looked. Like people were afraid of standing out, afraid of color.

My friend Aileen, once she had lived in Brazil for a while, could not live without color any more. She painted all her rooms bright colors and almost always wears orange or pink.

There is an equivalent in the vivid, colorful way that Brazilians come across in their personalities - in the way they sing and dance. They just leap up and start dancing. Never that oh-I'm-so-cool thing of standing back with arms crossed, at the back of the room watching the band. In Brazil that is NOT cool.

It's like... they WANT to be center stage, want to be colorful in all possible ways, want to have a life bursting with color and sun and music and song, in all ways.

It changes your eyes after a while. It changes the way you dance and sing, and the way you live your life. After a while in Brazil, you think: enough of the cool life, enough of the shades and black leather jackets, being too cool to smile, too cool to talk to people. Being cool is not as important as being happy. Time for a life in full color.