Pizza

Helena, Rita, and I went out for pizza last night, an experience rather different than what most Americans would expect.  While American pizza is generally cheap, considered a form of fast food, over the last ten years, Brazilian pizza has become gourmet, the sort of thing that people dress up to eat, expect unusual flavors like black fungus and arrugula, and drink wine.

From the moment we got to the pizzeria, Helena Iara set out to seduce everyone in the restaurant: she started with the waitresses, looking at them, throwing kisses (a new skill she learned this week), then opening her arms as if to say "come and get me!" before flirtatiously turning to hug Rita.  Next, she wanted to walk around the room, and stopped at each table to look up at each person.  When they smiled at her, she would move on to the next diner, as if to say, "Have you played with me yet?" By the end of the evening, she had "talked" with everyone and inspired people at one table to talk to people at another: an event had happened, and it brought everyone closer together.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog about Sara Blaffer Hrdy's hypothesis that babies are the foundation of human culture, because they are so hard to care for, that one person can't do it alone.  The baby needs grandparents and friends and aunts and uncles as well as her mother and father, because unlike most other animals, humans are born too early, too small and fragile to do anything for themselves.  I think that Helena's adventure last night, however, suggests that Hrdy begins with too much of a negative (or maybe physicalist?) frame: "babies are hard to care for, so people have to come together to guarantee the continuity of the species."  In this case, though, Helena brought people together through shared joy, not shared suffering.

Here's where I think Rita's thinking is really innovative: her research in the favelas of Recife and Rio de Janeiro showed that children play exactly this role as the glue of civil society, as the element that brings together families and neighbors into groups and informal organizations.  Children are community organizers, even in a pizza parlor.