Faust's challenge and other Carnaval news

News from Brazil...

- Sao Paulo has its major parades Friday and Saturday. On Friday night, the actress Monique Alfradique successfully completed the first half of Faust's Challenge, a challenge set up by the TV network O Globo. The challenge? Parade with ALL FOURTEEN of Sao Paulo's escolas!! She did 7 last night, is sleeping and resting today and attempt the next 7 tonight. Between each escola she races to a trailer set up in a camarote (private box in a grandstand) to change her costume, and then races to the next escola, which apparently puts her in some random position in the parade - she never knows where she's going to be till she gets there.

Why did she accept this challenge? She's a carioca, and she said she wanted to show the paulistas a thing or two about the Carnaval energy of the cariocas.

- Viradouro has already re-made the Holocaust float into something that reportedly looks like a "giant cake", but nobody's sure what the finished version will look like. Attention is now turning to whether judges will ban another Viradouro float: a gigantic bed in which couples are acting out positions from the Kama Sutra. I wonder if Viradouro is starting to regret their "It's hair-raising" theme, which in retrospect seems guaranteed to result in things that they are so hair-raising that they offend people.

- Rio mayor Cesar Maia had one of his people call up Mangueira last night and ask them to make seven new costumes of royal guards (Mangueira's theme is the Royal Family's arrival to Rio). He's going to parade as a royal guard in front of the escola - with six family members and hangers-on. Oh, to have the power to just call up Mangueira and have them make you a costume...

- Portela is has tagged four of its floats with GPS transmitters, to help track their exact location and be sure they are moving along at a good clip. GPS technicians will be radio'ing parade organizers regularly with updates. Portela's had a persistent problem with their parades going too long in the last couple years; two years ago they wouldn't even let their Velha Guarda parade because the parade had gone over time. The parade organizer said he got the GPS idea after a friend's car was stolen, but was recovered because it had a GPS tag, and he thought "Why couldn't we do that with a float?"

- The kids' groups were a huge sensation in the Sambodromo last night, and the grandstands were completely packed. Portuguese has a word "emocionar" that I wish we had in English - it means to fill with emotion, to move emotionally, but I like to think of it as "to emotion". As in, in the paper today: "The standout ala of little kids with Down syndrome emotioned the entire packed grandstand."

Nine of the 18 kids' groups all had picked the theme of the Royal Family!