La Voz de Galicia – January 25, 2019 →
I did not remember much more than that I grew up with them. I remembered the characters and some of the messages, but I was not aware of the depth of its content. I also never noticed that my love of difference during adolescence was probably linked to my exposure to them. This week, when I read in the news of the death of creator and director Lolo Rico and when videos of her show, La Bola de Cristal, were suddenly all over social media, I briefly thought about the fact that I never noticed the beautiful frankness with which they spoke to us, the girls of the 1980s. With a woman as its creator and director, with a hostess radically different from contemporary standards, with an invented language and an infinite curiosity to want to, to be able to, to learn to know. It was a true message of freedom, as she herself had confided, and that, in a way, made an impression in many of us.
Neither had I noticed the power of some of its messages: the love of literature represented by the phrase “if you don’t want to resemble them, read,” the critique of the system with its “Long live evil, long live the Capital!” its way of teaching us to think with its “unteach to unlearn,” and my favorite, “You have 15 seconds to imagine; if you have not thought of anything, perhaps you should watch less TV.”
So much may happen in fifteen seconds of imagination! In fifteen seconds one may think up so many things! Or one could simply disconnect and stop looking at disjointed images in one’s phone that, sometimes, are only good to waste time and to stop thinking. That phone that perhaps also turns us into one of those monsters about whom we are warned: “If you don’t want to be like them, read.”
