The Ink Zone
July,
2000
Number 94
Carnival
This year, while not a total vacation, Sally and I accepted the invitation of our friends living in Rio de Janeiro, to attend carnival. Without question, the best experience, party, celebration, splendor ever. For a week people set aside their baggage to open their creative treasures to anyone willing to see and listen. This year, the 500th year since the Portuguese found Brazil, the annual celebration themed the discovery and history since.
We had preconceived notions of the event; photographs, TV coverage of past
events, and the vivid personal descriptions from friends who not only attended,
but danced. None of this prepared us for what we saw, felt, and now remember.
After flying all day and night, we arrived to find a Taxi waiting to take us to
our friends apartment. A shower later we are walking on the beach catching up
with the local news and family events. It is the end of summer, a wet one this
year, hopefully with the threat of rain now past. Not that a little rain would
stop the four nights of Samba, it just might make for a soggy evening for the
60,000 folks in the Sambadrome. Yup an official stadium build along a Rio street
to host the competing schools as they vi for the honors while celebrating the
last days prior to lent.
We paid about $ 75 dollars each for seat in the next to the lowest cost section, not the cheep seats, but close enough. A plastic credit card is the ticket, eaten by a machine that opens the gates and keeps count at the same time. After a metro ride competing for space with costumed people carrying all sorts of feathers, masks, and garb, we found our selves walking along the staging area in search of our section, not reserved seats, on the upper cement grand stands-our home until dawn. Worried at first that this might be a bit uncomfortable, we soon learned that there will be little chance to sit; this is a participatory splendor sport where everyone sings and dances whether they know the words or steps or not.
After passing the gate, we are handed books, maps, literature, condoms, just about every thing anyone might need for a party in Rio. Our friends chose section 3 because it is near the beginning where the band, dancers, and floats stage while waiting for their chance to dance nearly 2 kilometers in front of frenzied celebrants and judges marking the scores of each Samba school. Rules and competition for the top honor focus the event to find the best each year. In our eyes they are all good and it is the party that counts. Fourteen different categories are important including the customs for up to 5,000 people, hand pushed tall floats, the song, the dance, and getting all this precision precession completely through the route in 70 minutes. Just the start of the schools is enough to give rhythm to even an hardwood post. That place rocks, embellished by a frenzy of fireworks, drums capturing our sole, and color, more color than the rainbow. Everywhere one shares, color. From all the feathers we saw in one night, there cannot be a bird nor rainbow anywhere that does not need a coat and is reduced now to black and white.
We arrived at about 6 pm and within minutes it was four in the morning. The Goodyear blimp is the only visible symbol that this is a commercial event. The schools, many from the poorer sections of Rio, spend up to a million dollars making costumes, floats all choreographed to their interpretation of a theme. There are no hydraulic motorized gizmos, only a generator towed behind the bouncing floats, bounced by dancing power. The whole crowd joins in the song and dances in step in the stands. My video of the first several schools has more hands waving in the foreground than the precession. Somehow the zoom lens did find some of the more notable costumes, latter the subject of awe by our sons in law. The television and video accounts are no measure of the event. Sure the wonderful gowns, and sometimes lack of the same, are splendid, but without the crowd, it is just a movie. We had beer happily spilled on our feet, funny T-shirts that looked much better in the stands than at home, and snacks from people we never knew. We sang and hummed songs we still do not know the deep meaning, and we gawked all night at the creativity of expression. Color and more color until the pallet is dry.
We will go back, and perhaps even pay a bit more to dance in the procession, for
who knows by that time we will embrace the need for a night of free time without
peer-directed posturing. Brazil is a happy place where people are happy to be
who they are, not what others want them to be. You rarely hear someone
commenting on the dress of another, “she shouldn't wear that”, for folks
wear and do what is good for them, not to impress others. Yup we will be back.
By the way, we bought the video, newspaper and a book, kept the T-shirts, sang
from the song books, drank the beer and are still wondering what old folks are
supposed to do with a set of free condoms, put em on our ears to prevent hearing
AIDS?
G.E. McKelvey
GEM Press
9485 E. Conquistadores Dr.
Scottsdale, Arizona
85255-4345
gempress@qWEST.net
480 473-9320
Fax 480 473-8599