Tag: Brazil

APRIL 22, 1886: BUT WILL YOU RESPECT ME IN THE MORNING?

Posted on by Richard Daybell

In a blow to lounge lechers everywhere, the state of Ohio passed a law making seduction unlawful. Covering any man seduction1over 18, it prohibited sex, consensual or not, with a woman of any age if the woman were being taught or instructed by the man. It covered all subject matter, leaving a lot of room for interpretation.  Other states jumped on the anti-seduction bandwagon. In Virginia, he’d better not try to engineer an “illicit connexion with any unmarried female of previous chaste character” using the promise of marriage. In Georgia, he couldn’t “seduce a virtuous unmarried female and induce her to yield to his lustful embraces.” In some jurisdictions, however, a woman could not press charges on her own behalf; only the father could do so based on his property interests in his daughters’ chastity.

Naturally, such laws were enforced with varying degrees of fervor. An unfortunate man trapped by the law in New York was headed for certain conviction until he proposed to his victim during the trial. Just to make certain, he didn’t back out, the judge brought in a minister and had the ceremony performed then and there.

A court in Michigan, on the other hand, went out of its way to favor the accused male. On three charges of seduction, two were thrown out because the woman was no longer virtuous after the first seduction. The other was tossed when the court ruled that her claim that they had sex in a buggy was physically impossible.

There’s an Awful Lof of Coffee . . .

Pedro Alvares Cabral sailed out of Lisbon in early 1500 with a fleet of 13 ships, following the route taken earlier by Vasco da Gama.  He strayed from the route, however, sailing far into the western Atlantic Ocean making landfall on April 22, 1500, on an island he named the Island of the True Cross.  Turns out it wasn’t an island at all but a big mother of a continent.  He claimed a big chunk of it for Portugal and dispatched a ship to notify King Manuel I of his discovery.  Manuel renamed the territory Holy Cross.  It later became known as Brazil, the fifth largest country in the world, home to the Amazon River, the world’s second longest, the Amazon Rainforest, an awful lot of coffee, and the samba.

February 9, 1909: I Make My Money with Bananas

Posted on by Richard Daybell

Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha was born February 9, 1909, in Marco de Canavazes, Portugal, not in Brazil, as is often assumed.  A year later, though, she did arrive in Rio de Janeiro, where her father opened a lucrative wholesale fruit  business, selling bananas of course.

One wouldn’t think a young girl could soak up much rhythm and culture from the good sisters of the  convent of Santa Teresinha, but by 17 she was singing in the cafes of Rio.  In 1929, using her mother’s surname to keep her career hidden from her disapproving father, Maria do Carmo made her first appearance as Carmen Miranda.  She was tiny in stature, standing only 5’1.”.  Nevertheless, she filled a stage with her Latin energy and machine gun delivery, melodic Brazilian bullets ricocheting everywhere.

She worked her way into singing on Brazilian radio and in movies.  She made her first recording, a romantic choro on one side, but oh on the other side —  a lively samba.

The samba was a lusty part of the social life of the people who lived in the hills beyond the urban refinement of Rio and its European influences.  Its rhythms were African, at once rustic and cosmopolitan, erotic and refined, measured and languorous.  And during the following years, she became the Queen of Samba (or Smiling Dictator of Samba according to one radio announcer).  Her crown an imposing tower of fruit.

She and her samba stormed the United States in 1939 – nightclubs, radio, and throughout the 40s and eary 50s, a string of movies – Down Argentine Way, That Night in Rio, Weekend in Havana, and the over-the-top Busby Berkeley musical The Gang’s All Here in which she sang “The Girl in the Tutti-Frutti Hat.” At age 36, with a salary of over $200,000, she was the highest paid woman in the nation, ninth on the Treasury Department’s salary list, ahead of Betty Grable, Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Humphrey Bogart.

In 1955, it all ended.  After filming an appearance on the Jimmy Durante television show, at 46 years of age, she died of a heart attack.

Mama Eu Quero

An excerpt from the short story, one of 15 in Calypso, Stories of the Caribbean

The Tropicana was a frenzied, pulsating place, as animated as the tourists and Havana socialites who crowded the casino, bar, dance floor and every table, there to be entertained by a half dozen celebrities, three full orchestras and the Tropicana’s own ballet troupe. It had not been easy for Jorge to secure a table, and when he did, it was some distance from where Carmen Miranda would shortly perform. He liked the table just fine, not wanting to be conspicuous in such a place. Delia wished they were closer but couldn’t say anything, and just being here was the high point in her sixteen years plus four months. She looked as mature as any seventeen-year-old in the place, sipping the wine Jorge had bought her and wearing another bright outfit that Carmen herself might have worn, but without the tutti frutti hat, of course, for that would be presumptuous.
Miranda’s Boys broke into a spirited overture, and suddenly there was Carmen Miranda herself, bouncing to the beat of “South American Way.” Jorge turned to see the look on Delia’s face, but there was no look on Delia’s face because there was no Delia. He scanned the floor, fearing she had fainted in her excitement. Nothing. Then he spotted her, crawling on hands and knees between the tables, toward the stage. He closed his eyes afraid to watch but finally had to look again. He spotted her as she squeezed unnoticed between the chairs occupied by the sleek black-haired man and his sleek black-haired companion, disappearing under the table next to where Carmen Miranda sang and danced.