In Strangers' Arms

Adriana is definitely wild.

El Ateneo is filled to capacity. I ask the man sitting next to me why this show is so expensive. Varela has a big following, he says. And goes on, she came to tango from rock and roll. My neighbor warns me his wife may scream during the show; that’s what she does when she likes something. For no reason at all he recommends “La Fanola” a tango program in Radio Nacional from 1:30 am to 5:00 am. He likes to listen to the radio at those wee hours of the night!

Dressed in furious purple skinny pants, strapless top, silver high heels, waist length hair, she makes a dramatic entrance yelling “Buenos Aires cómo te quiero!” (How much I love you Buenos Aires). She likes singing here more than anywhere else in the world. “Even if I only make two bucks. My mother tells me that poverty must make me horny.”

I can understand why singers like to perform in Buenos Aires. Where could they turn the microphone towards the audience and have people sing lyrics they know by heart … and are crazy about?

The action between Varela and the audience seems like living room conversation. When she monologues she does it in a free association style. 
She interacts back and forth with friends, family, and even her psychoanalyst – who is in the audience.

She tells us she has been in psychoanalysis “one thousand years.” “Where are you Dr. Ivan?” (spot lights on him, up on the balcony). “Where are you mom?” (spot lights on mom, back in the “platea”) “I love you mom, even if you call me fifty times a day, even if you are a ball buster. I am going to dedicate the next tango to you mom. You are going to love it so much that you are going to fall on your ass” (her mother stands up and cheers Adriana). She confides in public: “Mama asked me not to use bad language tonight.” “I told mama to stay home if she could not stomach my foul language.”

Foot in her mouth: “I love you (looking up towards the balcony). “I love people upstairs because they have less money; they are good people and the best lovers.” (Oops). “I like people on the main floor too, I do, and they pay big money.”

“Ayy… my shoes hurt. May I take them off? Only one foot hurts, the right one.” From then on she performs barefooted.

She rarely sings standing up or sitting down, as most singers do. Unlike them she leans forward, contorts her body and squats. I enjoy her freedom to say what she pleases, her shamelessness, her speaking without filtering. No filter at all.

My neighbor whispers in my ear that Cacho Castaña (another wild tango singer with a rock and roll background) was in love with her and composed a tango dedicated to her “La gata Varela” (“Varela the cat”). At the end of the show the audience asks her to sing it. “To sing a song written for me?” “It would be … like masturbating … I would be praising myself.” But she did sing it. “After the thousand years in psychoanalysis, Cacho wrote my best x-ray in poetry.”