Dear Brazil

My familiarity with you stems from an 8th grade involvement with Mormon kids and their "ward" dances. Interviewing to go, because I wasn't formally, well, Mormon. I had moments alone and behind closed doors with the "Bishop", assured him I would behave appropriately and dress modestly, and having met his approval, would be able to accompany my best friend and her sister/s to dances within the church's inner gymnasium, amongst church elders. Having chosen my outfit for its both stylish and chaste features, I would embark on this sub-culture and its many puritanical and ironic policies and procedures. However, it was at one of the aforementioned dances where I met one of the most impressive 17-year-olds that 14-year-old me had ever met. He brushed bleached locks back from his eyes and I saw he was wearing eyeliner, this one feature riveted the pre-sexual prowess that pulsated in my every fiber and reverberated in the echos of The Cure swimming around my head, swimming around the church gymnasium. He spoke of Vespas and hair gel, music I'd yet to hear as we made ourselves part of the shadows along the building smoking his cigarettes, then, back inside, dancing far too closely. Later he would send me semi-nude photos, mixed tapes and endless lists of "musts", included was the Terry Gilliam movie "Brazil", which gave me the beginnings of a decade long love affair with Robert DeNiro.

Furthermore, as a miserable girl working mistakenly in advertising in San Francisco during the "dot.com.dom" I began silently screaming for personal creative freedom. I took lots of classes through the Berkeley Extension program at locations throughout the city. In the face of the internet boom I focused on graphic design, and in one such class I met Jackson Puff, the only Brazilian I've ever known I've known. Jackson showed me a glimpse of Brazil, it is the only information about your home that I, to date, have. Jackson Puff, whose name was great, and grin, infectious, was pale and small and had pointy features, I would have called him Irish, British, almost anything but Brazilian, whatever that means to me. When the class project was to convey "love" as a graphic visual, Jackson prepared a presentation board of his passion through a time lapse collage of one girl dancing on a parade float during carnival... this girl, this barely dressed, dimpled cheeked, smiling, beautiful girl, Jackson's girl, as it turned out, was radiant and sensual. Still photos mounted in a lively array and posted at the blackboard, somewhere in a classroom in South San Francisco defines my idea of your Brazil.