VamoLa leads the 2007 Solstice Parade

Solstice day. Alarm clock rang and I woke with horror to realize it was already time to get up. Oh noOOOOO!! It CAN'T be time to get up already! We'd only gotten to bed at 2am after that exhausting, intense Lions show, and here it is just 8:30. Up and tackle the costume.... I'm so glad I decided against body paint - there really was no time. On with my inferior back-up costume,which is just, silver lame bellbottom disco-queen stretch pants, a backless zebra-striped black-and-silver drape top, the black-feathered military headdress (now with peacock feathers on top). Sparkly blue-and-silver shoes below; blue tulle tied to the repinique. Overall effect: jagged silver and black. Best I could do for tossing a costume together at the last minute, ok? For the final touch I tape a massive white bandage to my right hand, over the huge blood blisters from the Lions gig last night. Anyway.... Collect instruments for everybody: Surdo for Jeremy, chocalho for Uma, caixa for Justin, tamborim for Garrett. Put on sunblock and blue glitter, tuck my sparkly shades into the waistband of the disco-queen pants, and I'm ready to go. Wake my houseguests. Get the earplugs. Check email for last minute crises. check phone. Take everybody to breakfast, find a parking space, walk to the parade start....

Oh, impossible, it's already 11am!!! Time to start warming up. Play my repique for a while, both to warm myself up and to call drummers to arms. People slowly assemble.... start playing... run through repertoire, all the hand signs....

you know what, it is getting progressively funner and funner to just blast into playing repinique at full volume in the middle of a crowd that wasn't expecting it!

We have a simple repertoire for this parade:
Samba with simple 8-count call
Two very simple, classic, one-measure-long, samba breaks:
8 booms
"One. And Three."
One long break that can feature different sections & that has a "VamoLa" shout.
Sectional solos (have half the band shut up to feature certain sections; then layer back in)
Funky samba, starting with cut
Funky dispersion into crowd, then reassemble
Funky 8-boom break (same break that we use in samba)
Transition straight back into samba
Tihai - can be used as an entrada or a call-out
Paradinhas:
"Three-three"
"Five-Five"
"George of the Jungle"
"Long buzz" - I totally forgot to do this one
"Three-boom"

That's it. I run through it all, except, there's no chance to warm up the Tihai because the lead tamborim player hasn't arrived yet, and I already know that the other players can't do it without him. I keep scanning around for him, itching to review Tihai and knowing it is going to need a long warm-up. He arrives very late, and finally we try Tihai once. Uh-oh. It's very rocky. It's decayed hugely since Sunday rehearsal. Now I'm not sure whether to call it in the parade at all.

All other breaks sound relatively clean. The groove sounds good. Our brand-new chocalho player, who joined the group a whole week ago, is settling in well (and has a great outfit, too!) Justin shows up and grabs the caixa I brought for him. Garrett's got a replacement tamborim for his broken one. My 3 Lions guests seem to have settled in too - I have one each on surdo, tamborim and chocalho. I check with them about whether my hand signs make sense; apparently they do.

Thank god I switched VamoLa to the 8-count call - the VamoLa players & Lions players are actually all starting together in the same spot! I think this is the first time in 10 years that Seattle and Portland players have been able to jam with each other successfully! yay for the 8-count call!

11:30. I call out the band and give them a 10-minute break. I tell them to absolutely without fail be back by 11:45, no excuses or I will kill them. While they're gone I keep worrying about the Tihai.

11:45. We're supposed to start playing but of course HALF the drummers are still missing. I haul their surdos (sans players) into a formation by myself. I realize I've forgotten to check surdo tuning.

And where are the dancers? We have only one dancer! June is the only one who's showed up. It's 15 minutes to parade start time. What has happened to our 12 dancers? Finally Oriana shows... then Stacey. Three. Where are all the others? One dancer says to me worriedly "All the dancers were carpooling and were planning to be dropped off here, but they just discovered that the streets are closed for the parade so they can't get here, they're trying to get here now, they're trying to find a way closer." Of COURSE the streets are closed for the parade. The streets are ALWAYS closed for this parade. aiiiii....

I check who's actually here and come up with a parade formation. Problem: surdo and caixa line-up. It is like a little SAT math puzzle: "You are leader of a samba band. You are starting a parade in 10 minutes."

"Your guest on third surdo needs to be in back row to be able to see other third surdo.
The front row of drummers needs to have a first, a second, and a third surdo.
Each first surdo needs to be next to a second surdo.
One of the first surdos needs to be able to see the other first surdo.
The other first surdo needs to be on the right-hand side of the line.
As many surdos as possible need to be near Alexandra, our third surdo player,
All surdos need to be within 5 feet of a loud caixa or 3 feet of a soft one.
The lead caixa player is missing from this parade.
We have only one other loud caixa player, Brian, who will be switching to repinique occasionally.
There are 3 old-hand caixas who have just rejoined this week but are out of practice and not loud
There is 1 guest caixa player who has impeccable time but does not usually play caixa."

"How do you arrange your drummers?"

All right. Surdos in two rows: 4 in front and 3 behind. I tuck the 2 strongest caixa players in between the surdos of the second line, where they can be heard by the most surdos at once: they'll blast the front line surdos but also be heard by the surdos on either side of them. I line the rest of the caixas in a third line, warning them all "Caixas - always be sure you are very close to AS MANY SURDOS AS POSSIBLE. Make sure surdos can hear you." Bells on the side. Chocalhos in back- damn, I should have centered them - no time, we're about to start. Cuica player given freedom to room - this is Ray, wildly dressed up in colors and a crazy hat - he typically roams the edges of the crowd like a crazy samba clown, and they love it..

Spare drumsticks and repique stick are in the wagon.

11:50. The nude bikers are assembling. The street has been cleared. The crowd is huge. Two topless girls with a huge sun banner have positioned themselves in front of us - the start of the parade.

Where are my dancers??

Start playing. Run through samba and funky.

11:55. About eight breathless dancers come flying up out of nowhere. They hurl on their shoes, their headdresses, fling their bags into the tiny wagon. I'm still missing my main first surdo. Suddenly he appears - looking exhausted, as if he's had a narrow escape from some frustrating last-minute problem. He straps on his surdo and finally we're ready to go.

We go through samba, into funky and - yikes! The parade's starting and we're still in funky! Quick as is musically possible, I call them back to samba and,
ta-da,

we sail out into the vast street,

the crowd packed tight on either side, THOUSANDS of eyes on us,

the dancers suddenly, magically in their flying arrow formation, all glitter and feathers.

Brilliant Oriana in front leading them seamlessly through the three Donna choreographies. I see them start to wave their arms. That means they're starting a choreography. Oriana glances back. She's waving "1" with one hand - choreography #1. She counts it off for the dancers, glances back to see they've got it, catches my eye to be sure I got it too, and off they go. I can see that the crowd is starting to applaud, but I can't actually hear them.

It's brilliant. It's fantastic.

The dancers are so beautiful.

The band sounds nervous at first, but within a minute it settles in. Solid and sure.

I'm walking backwards for a good chunk of the parade (to give cues to the band) and so I'm the only drummer who sees that we are being followed by several enormous flowers, stilt-walkers and some kind of huge robotic dragon. Nude body-painted bicyclists start weaving through the crowd.

Our breaks are a little wobbly at first but tighten up. The 8 is good. The Ned is good. The transition into Funky is, miraculously, very solid. (It's a brand-new transition.) The paradinhas are clean. Recklessly I decide to try the Tihai - what the hell. The tambs are ragged, but the rest of the band responds clean and loud, and to my surprise it gets a HUGE crowd cheer.

Oh, yeah! Finally I can relax, for the first time all week. The preparation is over - and now it's time to just enjoy the parade and play our asses off.

It is so cool to know that the dancers are in such good hands - I almost never take my eyes off Oriana and it is so calming, somehow, to see her start waving her arms again for the next choreography - I know she has everything under control.

I start to realize I don't even have to be facing the band when I call them in. They get the call every time, they always get the pick-up now - they're steady on the 8-count entrance now - I don't have to worry.

Only two near disasters:
#1 - I call a bell and caixa solo, and the bells immediately go so far astray that I have to shut them up again. My fault - I should have remembered that the bells tend to get lost when they don't have a surdo playing along. They'd even specifically warned me that they get confused if they can't hear a surdo, but I'd completely forgotten.

#2 is kind of funny - I call a caixa solo and immediately it starts to fragment because somebody is playing unbelievably far out of time. I look around for the source, baffled, and find that Justin happened to have, just then, been inviting a tiny little kid to bang on his caixa. The little kid is going CRASH, CRASH, CRASH, with all his heart, and this one little 4-year-old kid is louder than all of the Vamola caixa players! (His technique sucks, though) All the caixas falter in confusion and the groove starts to fragment! I dash over and slam my hand in between the caixa and the little kid's stick. Then it takes the caixas an oddly long amount of time to get organized again, and I'm too slow in realizing that I need to add a strong player on a prominent instrument immediately - surdo or chocalho. Caitlin intelligently joins in on chocalho on her own, saving the day.

We pause a long time by the Fremont bridge while the belly-dance army behind us assembles its huge mobile pyramid. A great time for us to stand still, relax, go through all our breaks. We do the VamoLa break over and over, we go through Funky and the paradinhas, and it occurs to me to do a repinique solo in one of the VamoLa breaks. I've actually never done any kind of repinique solo in public before, but I am pretty confident about just a plain ol' repique ride, so I just stick to that, and, hey! It sounds good! And it is kind of fun! Actually it is really, really fun!

We pass under the gigantic Aurora bridge, home of Seattle's best public-arts statue, a huge troll who crouches under the bridge with a VW Beetle clutched in one vast stony hand. Under the bridge marks the end of the intense first phase of the parade, which has most of the media and the thickest crowd, and it's my personal cue for, time to relax and change things up. I invite Brian to lead for a while. He's completely smooth and competent at it, calls a variety of breaks, catches the dancer cues just fine, plays the calls beautifully. He's so obviously a competent parade leader that I relax into playing his caixa and immediately I shatter one of his thick drumsticks with a sharp CRACK that sends the broken end spinning through the air clear across the street. Sorry, Brian!

On and on. Brian and I trade back and forth a couple more times.

Finally we arrive at Gasworks Park. It's over.

We do a weird little stage show - very weird - VERY bad (lesson learned: Never, ever, ever, commit to a stage show without being sure you can run through every piece at the rehearsal before). Then I stagger home with Jeremy, Uma and Christina, who all seem to have had a fine time. We lounge around in the yard eating cherries and raspberries, then drive to Portland. I am dangerously teetering on the edge of collapse - it's been a week now with barely any sleep, little food and a lot of stress - so I launch into full-bore high-octane hell-for-leather Chat Mode to keep myself awake. Christina helpfully gets me going on many fascinating topics involving horseback treks through Argentina, and deforestation and endangered species, and I manage to stay awake and we manage to get to Portland in one piece. I drop everybody off, head to dancer Tanya's place (she's kindly offered me a bed, for the umpteenth time). Tanya has a HOT TUB now!!! So, a half hour in the hot tub. I totter to bed at 10pm and wake up at 10am. Stagger through one more odd Lions rehearsal, at which I feel fairly useless (there are no caixas, but all I have is a repinique). Drive allllll the waaaaay back. Arrive in Seattle and sit in a stupor on the spread-open futon. I watch Planet Earth for while.... gazing wide-eyed and empty-headed at the astonishing scenery of oryx galloping over sand dunes. It's so beautiful and relaxing.

It's all over.

I have been back in the US for three months. In that three months, I taught 35 students about how their bodies work, and it went REALLY well, and they learned a lot. Many said it was the best course they'd ever had in the Honors proram. I taught 15 others about sleep and dreaming and the nature of consciousness. I played with the Lions at the Fundo de Quintal show, and it went REALLY well, and they were fantastic. I led VamoLa in the Solstice Parade, and they did REALLY well. I'm so proud of them. It's been so rewarding to work with them. And I called a Harris' hawk and he flew right to me, and I held a gyrfalcon on my hand.

I'm going to go to sleep now for a year.