1995: The Musical - Act One - #24

Music and musicians shape my memories of the year

Throughout 1995 I had a Brazilian hangover. I donʻt mean the kind that comes from a imbibing a few too many caiparinhas the night before. I mean that even though I was no longer working in Brazil or dating a Brazilian celebrity, in some way the identity that felt most “me” was the name I heard in the parking lot on New Years Day: Betchy, uma gringa brasileirizada.

The persona I slipped into when I returned from Hawaiʻi to New York in January of 1995 was more like the person I became each time I got off the plane in Rio or Sāo Paulo, the equatorial twin me that came forward when I spoke Portuguese surrounded by Brazilians in whatever location. My Brazilian connection - the relationships that carried forward and the new ones that showed up in 1995 - fed some deep places of my soul, my creativity, as if sent to nourish me so I could grow into what would come next.

In hindsight, Brazil was the transitional relationship, the love affair that carried me forward in passionate abandon as I left my marriage to Wall Street and corporate life.

I barely touched down in Manhattan before flying to Rio de Janeiro at the end of January. The Rolling Stones were taking their Voodoo Lounge tour to South America, performing in Brazil for the first time. There was no way I would miss being in Maracaña stadium with 99,999 other screaming, singing fans as the Stones took the stage. Alvenia was happy to make the call to secure VIP tickets for me. I made the rounds in Rio - a wild dinner at Belisa’s apartment in Ipanema with her new boyfriend who during the meal became jealous of our exuberant friendship and accused us of being lovers. That post-Nelsinho visit with his parents at which his mother gently counseled me against continuing to date her friend’s son. Good thing I had followed my intuition not to invite that man to her weekly family-and-friends poolside lunch.

Finally the night arrived. The electrifying opening act for the Stones concert was Rita Lee, Brazil’s Queen of Rock and Roll, personally requested by Mick Jagger for the honor. February 4, 1995 was the first time I heard Rita perform live. It was several months before we met in person. In poignant synchronicity I am writing this three days after her death at the age of 75. It hit me hard this week. In part because the news activated heaviness I am already feeling around a series of other passings. In part because I tuned into the collective grief and love, the President declaring three days of national mourning. In part because I had been immersed for a couple of weeks in memories that surprised me. I found new significance to our short friendship, insights to write about. Our conversations empowered me at a pivotal time that was a vulnerable time for her as well.

I know I was not alone in being transformed by Rita Lee. The meme that circulated on social media this week on my friends’ feeds consisted of snippets of her lyrics under the heading “I learned from Rita Lee”. That I feel pleasure to be who I am, to be where I am. That sex is choice; love is luck. That I am “more macho” than many men. That every woman wants to be loved; every woman wants to be happy.

Coming of age in the era of Brazil’s repressive dictatorship, Rita Lee’s courage fronting her band Os Mutantes with its psychedelic, Brazilian flavored rock: her sheer talent, intelligence, and collaborative instincts; her maturing as an artist with a shocking honesty in her lyrics presenting a woman in control of her sexuality and choices; this larger-than-life creative and personal life endeared her to generations of Brazilian fans and to her peers alike.

Besides having purchased several CDs of her music early in my collecting and listening to Brazilian artists, what I knew of Rita Lee was mainly from Paulo Coelho. Paulo and Rita had been friends for decades, written songs together, been imprisoned by the dictatorship, studied tarot together, shared innumerable adventures. Paulo had also partnered with another of the early innovators of Brazilian rock, Raul Seixas, writing lyrics to dozens of songs with him. Raul died in 1989; in 1992 Rita Lee played Raul Seixas in a short film about his life, winning awards for her portrayal. Paulo was understandably both proud and fond of her.

One night my painter friend Peticov called to invite me to dinner at his new loft in Chelsea. The friends who were gathered including Rita Lee, her bandmate and husband Roberto de Carvalho, and their young sons. At first she struck me as reserved, almost shy - not at all what I would have expected from her watching her perform and from the stories I’d heard from our mutual friends. It was probably just fan fatigue. She was on vacation with her family, why should she bother being nice to some random gringa?

Then we got into a conversation about - of all things- economics. By the end of the evening we were curled up on a sofa like kittens, deep in the kind of personal conversation two women of kindred spirit can find themselves in over the course of a few hours.

We were theoretically, at the time, both single women. Despite being on vacation with Rob and their children, she explained they were no longer a couple. They would raise their children and perform together, but she considered herself single. (For the record, they formally married shortly thereafter and to the best of my knowledge continued devoted to one another until the end of her life.) Rita Lee being paulistana, from the city of São Paulo as immortalized in my brain by Caetano Veloso in the song Sampa, and also being a recording artist, she personally knew all the men who had been my lovers and significant friends over the previous three years, some of them far better than I did. Oh we had a lot to talk about.

Rita wrote one of her biggest hits, Amor E Sexo, almost a decade later, but its sentiments were threads of our conversation in 1995. What was romantic love? How did sex fit in? We both were big fans of love, per se, but dismissive of the bill of goods about Prince Charming we were sold as girls and women. We could take care of ourselves, thank you. We were dubious about the Christian moral context for defining our correct relationships with men (she had recently been excommunicated for one of her costume choices in the Rolling Stones performance). Love aside, we both were enthusiastic fans of sex, but at the time, with her characteristic honesty and an out loud laugh, she described herself as not looking for a partner because she was perfectly capable of taking care of herself in that regard. Being a bit younger and childless, my concern was that my drive to find a partner was principally a biological imperative to hurry up and make babies—and that could cloud my judgment.

The thing is, Rita had just come through a period during which she had almost wrecked her career and her family with alcohol abuse. She would have more depressive episodes, life-threatening accidents, and finally a series of diagnoses - bipolar, Parkinson’s - in the early 2000s. And despite all of the challenges of a lifetime of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll, Rita Lee shrugged off all the diagnoses and regained her health -and perhaps for the first time her equilibrium. All of which she writes about with an almost journalistic unflinching self awareness in her 2016 autobiography that became a best-selling nonfiction book in Brazil that year.

Two years ago, she was diagnosed with lung cancer.

When I wrote about meeting Marina Silva in 1995, I described my predilection for intense friendships with mighty women in small packages. Rita Lee was another of those. As a parting gift to her fans, she wrote an “Other Autobiography” which will be published in a few weeks - an account of her life from the time of her cancer diagnosis. As a parting gift to me, oblivious to it as she surely must be, re-reading her autobiography and reflecting on our brief friendship provided new insight into the questions I wrestled with in my essay On Invisibility, Social Media, and Writing my Memoir.

Rita Lee curated dozens of identities in her artistic output of albums and shows, but in her writing she was fearless in confronting the reality of her lived choices and her interior monologue about the choices and their consequences. She inspires and challenges me to curate only for the sake of kindness to others, and to be ever clearer and truer to who and what I was and am in the stories I tell. The real question isn’t how I curate my identity on social media or in memoir. The real question is how much I curate my identity in the story I tell myself about myself…all the time, when no one is watching. And whether I have the courage to tell us the truth.