Nothing was for my age. My mother liked me to like the Sound of Music, the Wizard of Oz, Lady Di. At most I was free to enjoy Grease and Jô Soares. We didn’t talk about sex, it wasn’t elegant to show off, it wasn’t good to be an artist, we didn’t read Cristiane F. Makeup and glitter were distant prospects – and being a provocative girl was totally out of the question, just in front of the closet. In front of the closet, I was everything Madonna taught. I learned Portuguese at school, and imagined love in soap operas, but, being a woman, I learned that from four vinyls and an American girl with a mole near her mouth.
Of course, it was all very subjective. And at the time, I didn’t even understand all the lyrics. What I understood – and this gave me an immense desire to go ahead – was that there was another possibility of being in the world, different from what was reproduced at homewith women at the piano, straight hair, soft and sparse speech and well-behaved clothes covering closed legs.
I still don’t know if I’ll go to Madonna’s show, and the truth is that I haven’t heard what she produces for some time. Today, at 48, my mirrors look for other futures, but the gratitude I feel for Madonna Louise remains intact.
Remember her speech a few years ago about the courage to be around strong women? Never forgot. And I practice the sport with the seriousness of the rebellion that she herself gave me.
Madonna, who lost her mother at the age of five, exercised, intentionally or not, a fundamental motherhood during my adolescence. I am, like so many friends, grateful and passionate. One of them, and no wonder the most brilliant of all, the writer Fernanda Young, named one of her daughters Cecilia Madonna.
At Fernanda’s wake, in fact, a few minutes before a farewell that no one imagined would happen so soon, someone played, if I’m not mistaken, ‘Lucky Star’. In mine, I warn sailors, I think I’m going to want ‘Live to Tell’. Or ‘Material Girl’.
