THAT LOVE SONG...

 THAT LOVE SONG...

you once spoke

that your love was mine

And no one was going to separate you from me

Now you come saying goodbye

What did I do

Why would you treat me like this...

It was the time of Jovem Guarda, and the most common thing to be played on the radio stations were the versions of foreign songs... "Somehow it got to be tomorrow", transformed into "Ternura" by the hands of Roberto Carlos, is one of the most beautiful songs of that era. And it was valid for her interpreter, Wanderléa, the nickname that identifies her until today.... "Ternurinha". There's no way not to be daydreaming when you hear the first chords of this song and our eternal muse starts to sing it. We are immediately transported to a parallel world, and our character suffers for his lost love...

But why am I talking about Wanderléa and this song, in particular? Well, actually, it's not about her that I want to talk about today, but about memories that sometimes come to mind. Ah, yes, it's good to clarify something... at the time of Jovem Guarda I was still a child, five or six years old. He wasn't even a teenager yet. And we listened to our favorite songs on the radio. I would say that the greatest invention of this era was the transistor radio because it could be taken anywhere and it was small and light. And it was beautifully designed, for the most part. Well, at home we only had the normal radio, really, connected to the electricity. It was a difficult time for everyone. But, in any case, looking back today, looking at the distance, it was a pleasant time...

My mom loved soap operas, I think I've said that hundreds of times here. So much so that I learned to read from photo-novel magazines. It was only later that I was introduced to comic books. The magazines, my mother borrowed from my cousins, who worked as maids and received these from their employers. Then, when my uncle came to live with us, for a while he was a partner in a newsstand and brought some magazines for his sister. And comic books for me. Yes, my uncle was a sweet person... he wasn't. Is still. Thank God he continues to walk among us...

As I said, my father was a fan of country music, and he didn't allow us to listen to any other kind of music. But he worked, and during that period the radio was released so that people could get to know other types of music. It's a bit complicated, isn't it? So much fuss over a simple song... anyway, music wasn't part of our daily lives, normally. As I said, my mother loved soap operas, and her favorite radio station was Rádio São Paulo, where she played soap operas practically all day long. I ended up becoming a fan of several authors, including Dulce Santucci, Ivani Ribeiro and Urbano Reis. Of course, there were more authors in the station's cast, but the names that stood out to me, and there's no particular reason for that, were these three...

I think the biggest asset of the radio soap opera is to make you imagine the whole scene, just listening to the actors. You end up imagining how the square where the lovers meet, the garden, the house... you have to imagine the cars circulating through the city's avenues, the horses and cattle in the field... the fights between the characters... .and the characters themselves. As in a book, what counts is your imagination...

I can say that, together with my mother, I listened to hundreds of radio soap operas, each one lasting an average of half an hour, the first one starting at nine in the morning and the last one at ten at night. of course, we didn't listen to all the soap operas... after all, we couldn't stay around the radio all day... but we followed at least five or six a day. Of course, I don't remember most of them, but some productions were quite successful, including among children. I remember that I was in the third year of primary school when a children's radio soap opera with the name "Biluca, meu xodó" premiered. It was the story of a little orphan boy who had been adopted by a family and who was always messing around with his stepbrother. At school, this little soap opera was the subject of the children. Of course, more on the girls' side, because "boys didn't listen to these things, that was a woman's thing"... but of course they also listened, they just didn't want to admit it...

This telenovela, in particular, was very reminiscent of the Mexican series "Chaves", because just as the protagonist of that series is always messing with the residents of the village "unintentionally, wanting to", Biluca, even without any malice, left the people around him with her hair standing on end with her shenanigans... but there were other soap operas, the radio station wasn't just children's stories, was it? And other stations produced something like that too. National radio, which presented the "Silvio Santos Program" daily, had on Fridays, if I'm not mistaken, a segment called "stories that the people tell". They were horror stories, usually about fifteen minutes long, where the cast of the station made you imagine the appearance of the monsters and ghosts in people's lives. At the end of the program, the famous phrase, recited by Silvio Santos... "It could be a lie, it could be true... in short, these are stories that the people tell". There was also a program on Rádio Bandeirantes that reserved one day for horror stories. There was a program called "Patrulha Bandeirantes" that daily presented a police story, staged by the station's actors. Except on Thursdays, when "Patrulha Bandeirantes leaves you face to face with terror", as the program's vignette said. Ah, yes, and Rádio Piratininga in São Paulo presented daily, before "A Voz do Brasil", a radio soap opera with bang bang, a style that was very fashionable at the time, called "Juvêncio, o Justiceiro do Sertão". This, yes, the favorite soap opera of the boys. And, as I've said several times in this little corner, every time the telenovela troupe performed in circuses around the periphery, it was a guarantee of a full house, because the masked man was simply idolized by his fans.

Music has always had the power to make us dream. And soap operas had the power to multiply that dream. "That love song" was a soap opera written, if I'm not mistaken, by Dulce Santucci who had the privilege of introducing Gigliola Cinquetti to the soap opera audience with the song "Dio come ti amo". It was a romantic soap opera, but it was also a crime thriller. The central character of the story witnessed a murder, and at the time of the event the radio played this song... and every time the girl heard "Dio come ti amo" she was terrified, because the murderer wanted to kill her, since she was the only witness to his crime... of course, not only does she not die in the story, but she ends up falling in love with the handsome detective who saves her from the killer's clutches...

Yes, it was a pleasant time... although, in a few years, today's kids will remember those days as an enchanted period because, just as our past seems so beautiful being seen today with our eyes of longing, for them all this will also seem like the best of all worlds...

It's eight hours and fifteen minutes, and for a change the weather is cloudy, with the possibility of rain during the day. The umbrella that will be present in our bag, as well as the coat...

Stay with God, and may He pour His Blessing on our heads. May this be the best Wednesday of our lives and may He allow us to reach the end of the day with the feeling of having accomplished what He expects of us... kisses....