The following is taken from Cry for Me, Argentina: Stories From My Messed-Up Life, the new memoir by comedian and Tamara Yajia. Cry for Me, Argentina is out now in paperback and the excerpt below is reprinted here by permission of Bloomsbury Press; all rights are reserved.
Not long after, a movie came out that shook me to my core. A movie made specifically for me, which combined my two greatest loves: Argentina and Madonna. That movie, ladies and gentlemen, was Evita. Evita awakened a new kind of monster inside me. A monster that continues to inhabit my body and will be with me until my dying day. (In the present, I have actually banned myself from listening to the Evita soundtrack, especially when I’m drunk. Hearing it causes me to go into a blind stupor during which I begin to cry, wave my hands in the air and sing at the top of my lungs, as if possessed by an annoying demon of song, dance and emotion.) The first time I watched Evita, it felt like a sign from daddie god and mommie Madonna to not give up. It was right around that time that my middle school talent show was announced, so I decided to give performing one last chance. I was going to get on that stage and enchant my classmates with a song from the Evita soundtrack.
By this time, I had actually made one friend. Her name was Tracy, and she was 80 percent deaf, a ballet dancer, and a fundamentalist Christian. Tracy sat next to me in science class, and I lured her in by telling her that my uncle was Peter Engel, the TV producer best known for creating Saved by the Bell. Listen, in my defense, Nilda’s maiden name was Engel, so there was a small chance that Peter Engel and I were very distant relatives. This wasn’t the only time I lied during this period to get people to talk to me. I might have told a few folks, including teachers at school, that I was Evita’s niece. They had no way of disproving me, after all. Judge me all you want, but I firmly believe that anyone can be Evita’s niece if they want it hard enough. I also spent hours logged on to AOL, chatting with girls my age, pretending to be Kate Winslet. “Ask me anything about my experience filming Titanic,” I’d write to some 13-year-old in Wyoming.
“How was Leonardo DiCaprio?” she’d reply.
“Leo is my best friend,” I’d answer. “He’s actually such a goof and he has B.O. sometimes. But don’t tell anyone I said so, hehehe.” I didn’t limit myself to only impersonating women. After Meet Joe Black came out, I pretended to be Brad Pitt for a while. What’s absolutely insane about this is that, as an adult, I ended up becoming friends with Brad Pitt, like for real. I spent a summer hanging out with him. “My summer with Brad Pitt,” I call it. He once served me the most exquisite charcuterie board I’ve ever eaten. We played board games, went to concerts, and one time I farted in front of him and the smell was so bad that it made his eyes water, but that’s a whole other story. I also pretended to be Posh Spice. There was one girl in particular that I managed to fool for a really long while. Her screen name was AshleyFairy12, and she lived in North Carolina. We talked every day. One time I told her I was having a lesbian affair with Scary Spice. Eventually, Ashley told me that her dad was making her delete her AOL account because he didn’t believe that she was chatting with the real Posh Spice and thought I was a child predator. “I know you’re the real Posh, though,” she wrote. “If you have time, would you mind sending me an autograph,” she added, giving me her address. AshleyFairy12 then logged off forever.
Anyways, back to Tracy. Tracy was a bit of a dud. She constantly pressured me to go to her Christian youth groups, where some closeted gay dude would tell us that everything was a sin and that we were going to burn in hell and die if we didn’t love Jesus. He once devoured an ice cream sandwich in front of us and told us that ice cream was the devil and that now the devil was inside him. I hated it. It made me miss Judaism. But Tracy was all I had, so when I told her I was planning on singing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” in the talent show, and she answered, “Let me do it with you and instead of singing it, let’s do a choreographed ballet to it!” I said, “Of course. I love ballet,” even though I didn’t.
Tracy and I started our performance by entering the stage in what’s known as a ciseaux in ballet, which is a pretty impressive leap where one leg flies in front of the body and the other leg in back, like a wide-open pair of scissors. We wore costumes that Tracy’s mom had bought us: white, shimmery dresses with pleated attachments on the back that made us look like we had wings whenever we opened our arms. I’d always been very outspoken and very in control of what I wore onstage, and I initially thought these costumes were totally wrong. They had nothing to do with Evita, a complicated woman who was seen as a whore and a social climber but also a protector of the proletariat. But I was in no position to make demands. I was also a stranger to ballet, a dance that required years of training. So the month leading up to the performance, I practiced my fucking ass off. The practice paid off, because I nailed that initial jump. And I was wrong about the costumes, which turned out to be a hit. During the first minute of the song, I looked out into the audience of preteens to get a vibe check and … people were into it! This motivated me to keep giving it my all. I spun in place, stood on my toes, and danced like the pro that I was. As I contorted my body, regaining my confidence, I thought to myself, “Maybe this won’t make me the most popular girl in school, but it’ll definitely put me on the map.” We were reaching the end of the song, and Tracy and I began descending into the splits. But as I slid my right leg down the floor, I felt a pop in my groin so loud I was sure that it was audible to the entire auditorium. I then pushed down harder, wanting to finish what I’d started, and felt an intense pain that ran from my vagina down to my thigh and which made my eyes roll to the back of my head. When the music ended, my discomfort was visible to the audience, who gave a slow, scattered applause. I tried to get up and out of the splits, but … no go. I was unable to move. The pain was too much. While Tracy got up and took a bow, I sat there holding my crotch, moaning in agony. And then it happened, some teenage twat sitting in the front row yelled out, “She broke her pussy!” Everyone in the audience started laughing. Everyone except for one person, Sean, the gay boy from my math class. He thought it was the most stunning performance he’d ever witnessed.
I was taken off the stage in a wheelchair. My parents were called to pick me up, but they were both at work. The nurse went down the line of emergency contacts until she reached Dorita, Dina’s mom. Dorita answered and agreed to pick me up. She happened to be home polishing her gold jewelry with a special cloth she’d bought on the Home Shopping Network. I sat in that wheelchair for an hour waiting to be picked up, which gave me time to think. Mostly I thought about my career and how it was dead. After the shame and embarrassment I’d gone through that day, I told myself I was done performing and promised myself to never get on a stage again. Trying to re-create what I had in Argentina was impossible in the United States. I also realized that the performance had put me on the map at school. But unfortunately, not in a good way. Going forward, I’d be known as “the girl who broke her pussy.”
