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1. Every woman I see looks naked. Completely naked. It's an optical illusion of sorts because I am wearing my nonprescription sunglasses and squinting from 40 yards away at a dozen female forms that line the point where sand meets surf. Turns out, as I edge closer, that said females are showing off -- though "showing" seems a wildly misleading verb -- the famous Brazilian bikini. You know, the bikini you see on all those outré Rio postcards. The bikini that has crept its way onto the cover of almost every men's "general interest" magazine in America. The bikini that shows everything without quite showing everything: sliver of a thong downstairs, spaghetti straps upstairs -- vermicelli, really -- anchored by a pair of nipple badges.

2. With the exception of the beach vendors touting their biscuits and beer, I am the only man in sight wearing a T-shirt. The clothing of choice favored by the men is, well, let's just say this is ball-hanger country.

Welcome to Copacabana, the mother of all beaches. The Cote d'Azur has its sophistication (plus a recent outbreak of jellyfish); Anguilla, its incomparable white, powdered sand; the Hamptons, its conspicuous consumption; Santa Monica, Calif., its silicone. But Rio de Janeiro's fabled stretch of seaside is in a class of its own, not least because of its fairy-tale topography: a two-and-a-half-mile golden crescent, buffered by a backdrop of priapic green mountains.

What made Copacabana the epicenter of Rio's razzmatazz, however, was the spectacular public relations hoopla launched by the Copacabana Palace when it opened in 1923. The Copa was South America's first luxury hotel and, to this day, remains its glitziest. Located slap-bang in the middle of Avenida Atlantica, the oceanfront road that runs the beach's entire stretch, it's the kind of hotel that likes to measure out its greatness in boldface names -- a calculated campaign that in its heyday attracted Walt Disney, Noel Coward, Orson Welles and Marlene Dietrich.

The Copa, people still insist, is where Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers first danced together for the shooting of "Flying Down to Rio." Truth is, the whole film was shot on the set of RKO Studios and Malibu Beach. No matter. By the '40s, Hollywood was dancing to the tune of "Brazilian bombshell" Carmen Miranda, whose cartoonishly fruity turbans managed to permanently cement the fantasy of Rio as the capital of the exotic tropics -- despite the fact that her compatriots considered her a gringo sellout.

3:15 p.m. A lean black man sits perched atop a set of lifeguard steps. He holds just the right earnestness in his gaze to suggest he knows how to do his job. He is also flanked by two attractive young women.

"Excuse me, do you speak English?"

Quizzical looks from the women. The man, though, lights up with a smile and starts chatting away in what is possibly English, though his accent borders on the unintelligible. His name is Michael and he is not a lifeguard at all. He is, astonishingly, an English teacher.

"I don't like the beach, no," he says when I ask him what he likes about Copacabana. "I come to keep the ladies company. I don't need no sun, no. Sun is not for me. No thank you." To complete his dedication to ironic lifestyle choices, Michael tells me he has a nice little pad right on Avenida Atlantica, directly overlooking the beach.

Michael would have been right at home here around the turn of the century. When Rio's first tunnel opened in 1892, cutting through the mountains and opening up the coastline to the rest of the city, the rich barely showed any interest in the beach as a form of pleasure. The only reason they came in the first place was to escape the endless epidemics that then plagued Rio.

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