Life not a partyfor drum queens

For 18-year-old Raissa de Oliveira, there are only two seasons in a year - Carnival, and the rest.

For most of the year, the pretty, diminutive teenager is a journalism student from a rough part of Rio de Janerio. In the weeks leading up Brazil's annual festival of Bacchanalia, she becomes a cross between a pin-up girl and a star athlete as the drum queen of one of Rio's top Samba schools.

The schedule is exhausting - gym workouts, endless media demands, and late-night "ensaios," or rehearsals, for the big competition parade through the Sambadrome - and it shows as Oliveira enters the room in her family's small apartment.