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 My father's favorite sound was that of a woman laughing at something he said. He used his sense of humor, a virtue that women value far more in men than vice versa, not as an aphrodisiac, but to attract an audience. Without one he couldn't do what he did best - be entertaining.
My father, named Morry, preferred female audiences because they laughed harder at his humor than male ones. Maybe that's because Dad, rather than tell jokes, told true stories about himself and his male friends, tales of sexual misadventures that often made fun of male sexual prowess.
One of Dad's favorite stories involved having discovered, in the mid 1960s, that a vibrator (which plugged into a wall socket) could give his young girlfriend far more pleasure than Morry "unplugged" ever could.
But one stormy night, as sex was reaching a "crescendo," a sudden power surge followed by a power blackout, gave his girlfriend a strong jolt and then stopped the vibrator cold. This left her shaken and unsatisfied and left him feeling like a failure.
So, the next day, Dad bought a battery-powered vibrator. "After all," he would plead, raised circumflexed eyebrows over small twinkling eyes. "I couldn't let the power company control my sex life."
Just before turning seventy, my father flew down to Rio de Janeiro, not just to visit his expatriate son, who had recently left the United States to live here, but also to see whether the girls from Ipanema were as sensual as Jobim had described.
My living in a building full of old people in the poorest part of Botafogo was not, however, the ideal location for going "aahh" as women passed by. And when Dad finally went to Ipanema beach on a cool weekday it was nearly deserted. So he returned home with his verdict about carioca sensuality: "I could get more sexually excited walking through an old folks home."
But this complaint really only disguised what really bothered Dad - not having an audience, preferably a female one. Since I'd not been in Rio very long, the few Brazilian women I knew were "journalistas" at the Jornal do Brasil (JB), where the U.S. news agency I worked for rented an office. So, when one of them invited me to a party and said I could bring Dad, I saw a way of salvaging his trip.
Dad felt immediately at ease at the party, full of attractive women, some of whom were curious to meet him. Dad stood out, not only because of his age, but because of his comic contours - the square body of a short, heavyweight boxer, and the round face of a baby, joined by a nearly invisible neck.
So, when Sônia, a cute JB journalist I knew said hello and I introduced her to Dad, she asked him, in English, how he liked Rio. "A lot more, now that I know where they keep the pretty girls," he said in English, looking around approvingly. That gave her a mild chuckle.
That minimal, magical sound was all Dad needed to launch into his stories. He began by telling Sônia of the time he went to a Jewish wedding where the rabbi told a group of guests, among them my father, that the marriage was taking place on the shortest day of the year. "And if all goes well," said my father, " it'll be the longest night of the year."
As Dad began belly laughing at his punchline - he was his own best audience - Sonia let out a long giggle. And their noisy duet drew others into our small circle. And as it got bigger, Dad started telling his best stories, like the one about the vibrator.
The mostly English-speaking Brazilian women who gathered around Dad were a bit shocked by that story's intimate disclosures. But they laughed anyway - not only at the story, but at their surprise that such an emotionally-closed and puritanical society could produce such an openly libidinous old man.
That chorus of laughter crowned my Dad's trip. It meant that he had not only found an audience, but had done so in a foreign country. He was, in his own mind, a hit internationally.
This article was originally published by daily newspaper Folha de S. Paulo.
Michael Kepp is an American journalist who has lived in Brazil for the last 21 years and who has written for Time, Newsweek and many other U.S. publications. He is the author of the book of crônicas Sonhando com Sotaque - Confissões e Desabafos de um Gringo Brasileiro. For more information on the author and book consult www.michaelkepp.com.br.
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