Grupo Especial parade update: Viradouro

Next up for Sunday night: Viradouro. Poor Viradouro. The rumors I heard about Viradouro being broke must have been true, because their floats and costumes showed severe budget limitations. It's the kind of thing that makes you sorry for the designers - you could tell they were doing the best they could with no resources. The floats actually had very lovely statues and good ideas, but were almost completely lacking in any kind of detail or decoration. Some of them literally had just a sheet of fabric stretched over the sides, and here and there you could see that someone had thought "we HAVE to put some decoration on this" and had pasted on, say, a little drapery of fabric and pinned a flower to it. The kind of thing you do when you're a broke college student trying to brighten up a bleak dorm room.


See what I mean? It's not that it's ugly... it's just that swathing something in gold fabric is not going to keep you in Grupo Especial.


The newspaper today said it is the worst parade Viradouro has done in 20 years. It made me really feel sorry for them.

As for Viradouro's 7-year-old queen of the bateria, Julia Lira, she did a great job but I felt sorry for her. She was crying just before the parade started, frightened by the paparazzi swarming around her. She gathered her nerve together somehow, though, and managed to to do the parade, assisted ably by the bateria mestre's 9-year-old son, who danced by her side the whole way (what a sweetie). The two of them were quite adorable together, but the 7-year-old looked a bit nervous - though to be fair we were in Setor 3, right at the beginning when she probably was most nervous, and maybe she settled down later. Anyway, I was left feeling disturbed that this little 7-year-old had been forced to do something overwhelming that quite scared her. I'd heard originally that she'd "wanted" to do it, but I've since heard that she only "agreed" to do it when her parents asked her to, which is quite a different thing.