"White Guys Doing Jazzercize "
Since I began embarking on my annual international adventures a few years ago, two patterns have emerged. One, my holidays tend to be on the impulsive side. An opportunity presents itself – a blind date for Kilimanjaro, Gary’s need for a climbing partner in Canada, an invitation to hike Machu Picchu, etc., and suddenly I find myself overseas on some trailhead wondering how in the hell I got there. Secondly, I always go to DO something. Summit a mountain. Hike a trail. Climb some rocks. I don’t believe in the sit-on-your-ass vacation. I can sit on my ass anywhere. I expect that my ass will always work. The rest of my parts may not. I’m gonna use them as much as I can before the only part I have left is my ass. My recent trip to Rio followed the same patterns.
As you know, this year, Todd and I went to Rio. But not just for the drinking and carousing and girls and lounging in the sand Rio. Not just the parties and hang-gliding and surfing and costume balls and did I mention girls of Rio. We went for Carnival. We went for the Sambodromo parades.
During Carnival Rio holds a huge, nationally televised parade. This parade lasts four nights and passes through Rio’s Sambodromo, a road about half a kilometer (think 500 yards for the Metric challenged) lined with multi-tier grandstands, all filled with screaming, singing Cariocas. But on the last two nights, Sunday and Monday, it gets real big. Participants in this parade are all part of Brazil’s fourteen top samba schools. The Grupo Especial. These schools pull all the details together, design and produce the floats, the costumes, the songs, and invite all the people. This is a big deal. Think of an erotic, Brazilian Tournament of Roses without the big game. Only louder. More colorful. With girls in thongs. Each school parades down the Sambodromo to the cheers of the crowd and the evaluation of the judges. After each school completes its pass, a group of dancing, broom wielding custodians dances down the road cleaning up the litter and glitter and amputated parts of costumes that inevitably clutter the route.
Each school consists of hundreds of different revelers, all in costume, in different groups called wings, each wing usually with a different theme. There are dozens of complex and ornate floats, complete with beautiful models, amazing costumes, and pyrotechnics. And don’t forget the band. The band has a hundred musicians and creates the hypnotic samba beat keeps this complex living organism of glitter and foil, foam and feathers, all sweating and swaying in unison. The schools plan all year for these nights. It is a serious competition and everyone in Rio knows the names of the schools, has their favorite, and knows who is likely to win. The winner is announced on national television and becomes the samba champion of all of Brazil.
I still have no idea where the funding for any of this comes from, but who cares. It’s a big party, a huge event, and guess what? We were there. And I don’t mean that we were cheering in the grandstands. Todd and I were IN the parade. We were in costume. In a Samba School. On the floor of the Sambodromo. Dancing in the parade.
As I mentioned before, each of the fourteen schools has different wings, all with different themes. The wings are filled with costumed dancers all followed by the wing’s unique float (also with it’s own set of costumed dancers). There might be fifty, maybe even a hundred people in each wing, and maybe a dozen wings in each school. And anybody, including American anybodies like me and Todd, can purchase a costume and their spot in the parade for roughly $200 bucks.
When Rose and I started talking about getting together for Carnival, she mentioned that she had never been to Rio for Carnival and asked me if I wanted to join the parade.
Do I want to join the parade? Like she had to ask.
She agreed to take care of all the details. It’s a good thing too considering how well I can communicate in Portuguese. Rose hooked us up with Caprichosos de Pilares. That school had chosen a theme that celebrated her city of Porto Alegre. Our wing specifically celebrated the western sunsets of gaucho country.
Our costumes consisted of yellow and gold miniskirts, orange Speedo style undies underneath, ornate zip-up knee boots and wrist gauntlets, and a huge yellow top that looked like the shoulder pads an offensive lineman might use if South Beach had an all-gay professional football team, the Miami Meat. Of course, I can’t forget the three-foot sun shaped arc of feathers on my back and the two-foot feathered headdress worn around my shaved and sunburned noggin.
The night of the parade was typically hot and humid. It rained periodically with the same, soft, drizzling rain common in Southern California. We left for the Sambodromo late (everyone and everything is running perennially late in Rio) and our cabbie weaved through the wet and crowded streets to get us as close as possible to our samba school. Rose and I took a separate cab from Erika and Todd. It was the only way to get there considering the size of our costumes. Two of us barely fit in the back of this Toyota. The streets were teeming with people in various states of costumed dress (or undress). Feathers and glitter, skirts and hats, tights and boots. It was noisy. Everyone was trying to get into position, trying to find their school trying to find their wing, trying to keep their feathers dry.
Rose and got out of the cab after the roads to the Sabodromo were choked vehicles and pedestrians and subsequently stopped our cab cold. We grabbed the unwieldy parts of our costumes and weaved our way amongst the other revelers in waiting, looking first for our samba school, and second for Erika and Todd. After about fifteen minutes of winding our way through a sea of color and costumes, we found a large group of similarly clad people. It reminded me of that old Blind Mellon music video, where the chubby little girl in the yellow bee costume finally finds her place in the world with a group of other fat little bees. We worked our way through the foam hands, the blue treble clefs, the red hearts, the white capes, finally to find the people of orange feathers and yellow suns. We also found Todd and Erika.
We still had quite some time before our parade was about to begin, so we stashed the caps and feathers and wandered around the parade route, wandering among hundreds of revelers in a chaotic collection of colors and glitter and foam. As we approached the end of our Samba School, we were stopped by some parade police (they were not dressed in feathers and foam rubber), and sent back to our spot. Right at this time, some unseen man with the personality of a motivational speaker began shouting to the crowd through the amps. I of course possess no fluency in Portuguese, so all I heard was “blah blah Caprichosos, blah blah blib!” At this point everyone would scream.
“WOOOOO!!”
Seemed simple enough. I figure it was the Brazilian equivalent of “Caprichosos, I can’t heeeeear you?” So every time I heard “blah blah Caprichosos, blah blah blib!” I’d just shout “WOOOOO!!”
Come to think of it, anytime anybody said anything to me in Portuegese that evening, I figured the safe answer was “Wooooo!!” It seemed to work. All else fails, just act really excited. Of course, it’s true that I have no idea what anyone was actually saying to me. Is this your first time in the parade? “Woooo!” Where are you from buddy? “Woooo!!” You look hot in that miniskirt. What are you doing later big boy? “Woooo!!” Hey, you’re doing the samba wrong asshole! “Woooo!”
It’s actually an interesting moment in my life. I’m standing in the rain in South America. I’m wearing a miniskirt, yellow boots, a headdress and feathers, surrounded by a hundred people dressed the same way, all surrounded by a thousand people dressed perhaps even more flamboyantly, and shouting “Wooooo!” like a drunk college kid at some unknown, unseen man yelling to us over a loud speaker.
Then the music started. First the drums, then the strings, then the guy singing (again, I have no idea what he was singing about), then the fireworks, and our parade with one last WOOOO!! began moving down the route to the Sambodromo. Everyone was singing the Caprichosos theme song and if a parade manager saw you were singing they would shout at you in Portuguese. Remember, these things are being judged so they want everyone to be tight and excited! So Todd and I just smiled big and mumbled our “blah blah blahs” in time to the music and did our best to keep up with the rest of the our fellow sambaing Caprichosos.
This of course brings us to another problem. I have no idea how to do the samba. The samba beat is very, very fast, and the steps are subsequently very, very fast. And like most latin dances, it all comes from the hips. To me, the samba looks like a shuffle, a wiggle and a turn all to be performed like you were Charo on speed. So that’s what I did. For an hour. In feathers. In the rain.
Shuffle, wiggle, turn. “Mumble mumble, blah blah, WOOO!!!”
As our wing came around the corner I got my first glimpse of the Sambodromo and just what I had gotten my self into. The Sambodromo is more than five football fields, all lined with grandstands filled with crazed Cariocas. I’m guessing conservatively 50,000 people. Maybe more. So here we are, Todd and Jimbo flanked by Rose and Erika, dead center of a samba parade in front of thousands and thousands of screaming, cheering, singing fans. Two white guys in miniskirts doing jazzercize while the rest of the parade is successfully executing the proper combination of shuffle, wiggle and turn.
What a rush.
Remember, this parade is broadcast live to all of Brazil. Subsequently, the stands are also filled with camera crews. The occasional camera man would even run down the parade route and shove a lens in your face, and ask you something in Portuguese.
The correct answer: “Wooooo!!”
For all I know we were live on national Brazilian television. I can imagine the color commentary. Getting mocked by a Brazilian version of Pat Summeral and John Madden. Actually it’s a parade, so it’s probably more like the Brazilian version of Kathy lee Gifford and John Tesh.
“Hey Luiz, check out the two white guys doing jazzercize!”
The parade took about an hour. As we approached the end of the route we passed the band. The sound was incredible. I made an mpeg of the event, but forgot to turn on the microphone. I suck, I know, but by this time I was exhausted. My feet were blistered after an hour of shuffle, wiggle, turn in the rain while wearing those crappy superhero boots, my shoulders were raw from the weight of the costume, and my headdress was falling apart. I had this errant strand of beads hanging in front of my eyes and bouncing off my sizeable schnoz during most of the parade.
I spent most of the time trying to keep track of Erika or Rose. The last thing I wanted to do was lose my interpreters and get stuck in downtown Rio wearing nothing but a miniskirt. This is harder than it sounds considering I am surrounded by a hundred or so people dressed in the same orange and yellow feathers. As it turned out, I did lose Todd and Erika, but Rose and I managed to find each other in the fray. After watching the rest of our school’s wings dance in behind us, we found a cab and headed back to Copa to a waiting bottle of soon to be stolen champagne and to collapse into bed.
Several days later the results of the competition were broadcast. Caprichoses came in 12th – out of 14. I hope it didn’t have anything to do with the two white guys doing jazzercize. I’m just glad we weren’t dead last. But I’m working on my samba skills. Next year, I’ll shuffle, wiggle and turn with the best of them.
