Deja vu

I'm in Portland - this is weird, I actually have a house now. But it's almost unlivable. There is hot water and electricity now, but still no fridge, stove, bed or furniture, and most rooms are being painted. My pile of stuff is completely inaccessible so I just have 2 skirts, 3 tops and the same little skirt and flipflops day after day. Kind of like camping. So I am still basically homeless, like usual....

Lions are in a really interesting state right now - they have 3 brilliant professional leaders but all 3 are gone. Brian and Derek are touring constantly with Pink Martini; Randy's making a career shift into long-distance trucking! It's Randy's departure that's really triggering the crisis. Everyone's used to Brian and Derek vanishing periodically, but Randy's always been there, day after day, every single rehearsal, always on time, always with the door key and the surdos in his truck. Brilliant leading, knowing all the dance cues, gigmeister at every gig. "Randy is the rock," says Pauline, and she's right. Well, now Randy's going... I couldn't even open my beer without him the other day (he had a drum key in his back pocket that he was using to pop open the beer bottles). Who's going to open the beer when Randy leaves???

The leading situation has been muddy. I was getting constant requests to lead - but from regular Lions, not from the head honchos. The group's actually in a great position, with probably six or more excellent capable players who could all lead very well (all of whom play way better than me anyway & have years more experience). This is an astonishing talent base to have available, but few of them are available consistently and so it's been pretty confusing what exactly is going to happen. I feel like a reluctant leader myself since VamoLa's been wearing me out and I need a break; I know from experience that leading is too draining to do if you also have a full-time job - it just makes the rehearsals exhausting and no fun. Anyway, I'd tried to ask Lions admin about it but never got a reply, so I wasn't sure what was going on. On Sunday I got into what felt like a terribly awkward situation, with 3 Lions asking me at the beginning of rehearsal to please lead, but no guidance from any actual leaders. Nobody led for a long time and finally I stepped in and led a bit, but felt extremely weird and non-legitimate about it. It's not my group and I'm new there. Next thing I knew my VamoLa reflexes had gotten going full bore and I'd flown into a big thing about clave and the repique calls and getting crossed. Which they DON'T really need to hear about... they know that already!!

Once I instinctively used the waving-arms callout cue and it turns out they don't use that here; so I explained what it was, and then later realized that must have come across as "What, you guys don't know this standard Rio cue??" which wasn't what I'd meant it all.... I cringed later to see another player using my cue, 'cause I didn't at all mean for them to switch their cue.... they already have a perfectly good callout cue. dammit, I totally didn't mean to sound like such a snob. I was just trying to figure out what vocab they use here and was trying to adjust. It seemed like I was getting cold shoulders from folks afterwards and I felt pretty bad about it all.

oh well.

I think the cues here, if I have it figured out right, are:
crossed arms = stop with a cut? usually with a cut?
pull hands down = hard stop on 1

They don't seem to use the clap-over-head "repique call coming up" cue, or at least I haven't seen it yet, and they don't use the elaborately long waving-arms callout (the one I got to blathering about today). I haven't heard them do the long caixa callout. They've got about 5 of the 9 paradinhas that I use, plus an AWESOME cool buzzy one that is new to me. Most of the other 4 I've spotted embedded into some entrada or other.

They seem to use paradinhas mostly in set sequences as entradas, which is a really beautiful way of doing it, though I kind of miss the startle factor of random paradinhas just on their own.

I wonder if they'd be interested in learning the Banga entrada or the Monobloco entrada?

So anyway... I don't actually know whether I'd be useful as a leader or not.... it'd kind of be better if not... Felt kind of pushed into it today by circumstances and unhappy about it afterwards. I got to almost vibrating with worry and jumping with edgy comments during a big discussion that they had when Brian showed up, about the leader thing. It's all extremely deja-vu-y for me; once again the urgent need to learn an entire repertoire from scratch plus dance choreographies, once again with the leadership crisis and the worrying about keeping a group going. It's kind of freakily reminding me of VamoLa two years ago, actually. Many of the comments today were totally eerie for me since they were almost verbatim copies of stuff from VamoLa meetings back when they had their original massive leadership crisis. I was not anticipating having to jump into that kind of high-pressure leadership thing here. Kind of wanted a break from that; I wanted to lay back and just work on my new job and have fun working on pandeiro & caixa and working on pagode and maracatu.... I moved here so I could join a stable group that wasn't having constand leadership crises... ironic huh?

I really want it to work out here and am pretty worried that I may have screwed up today, acting too bossy, when it is totally not my place to do so. I need to calm down, stop fretting so much about the band, and just have faith that things will work out here and that I will not be homeless again next year.