The Spanish-born songwriter, guitar player, dancer, and performer Charo is energy incarnate. Even today, after decades in the business, she is a ball of joy, wonderful to speak with, and a bright light in difficult times. Oh yeah, she’s also one of the best acoustic guitar players going.
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But with albums, tours, television show appearances, and more to her credit, some might wonder what Charo (born María Rosario Pilar Martínez Molina Baeza) has to say about the world around her. What are her thoughts on her craft, music, life, and love?
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1. “Many people think I am an idiot. I think I am a genius.”
2. “I am a person who has to move. I’m like a shark—if it doesn’t move, it dies. I’m in good shape.”
3. “My neighbors are quiet. I am not. I don’t know if they’re dead or alive.”
4. “I haven’t changed. My family and I live as we did in South Spain. I’ve had loud music, chickens, birds, and a bull in my backyard.”
5. “We used to have a bull. A real bull. At that time, Jennifer Lopez was my neighbor. God bless her, she took it. But other neighbors did not like it, that we have a bull.”
6. “If you believe in what you do, you are immortal. The day that you don’t believe it, the day you’re taking other people’s opinion, you better go to Tijuana.”
7. “Around the world, I am known as a great musician. But in America, I am known as the cuchi-cuchi girl. That’s okay because cuchi-cuchi has taken me all the way to the bank.”
8. “My costumes are the same measurements they were when I was 19, 20 years old. I eat pizza and ice cream, but whenever I gain three or four pounds, that sets off a red alarm.”
9. “Listen, even if you go wild, I like class. Everybody in show business never should forget that there is a line and that you should have class.”
10. “The family of my mother had a lot of money; the family of my father, nothing.”
11. “In 1988, Christmas, that was my last performance because I moved to Hawaii to raise my son.”
12. “In Spanish, we have a saying: ‘The woman and the frying pan belong in the kitchen.’ Ohhhh, I hate it!”
13. “I had no regret to the ‘cuchi-cuchi’ show. It showed me the way to the bank. It’s a gimmick. It’s fun. It has nothing to do with sex… it’s energy and fun… If it wasn’t for ‘cuchi-cuchi,’ I would be selling tomatoes in Tijuana.”
14. “My goal is to try new things, to make people forget their problems, make them laugh, and for them to talk about it the next day.”
15. “I love audiences. They are my oxygen. I only breathe with audience. When I’m alone, I am normally a miserable you-know-what.”
16. “I’m so stupid because I refuse to think that I’m getting older. I get up in the morning, and it’s like, ‘La, la, la, I’m so pretty.’ I still mingle with a lot of young people. I even go to college campuses to talk to them because I know how they think. They don’t think I’m boring, either. They think I’m cool, but I want them to think I’m hot!”
17. “My English is actually getting worse. We talk Spanish at home and switch to English only when we need it. Like when we go to the bank to get some money.”
18. “I don’t know why they pay me. I would work for free because I am entertaining myself, I am rejuvenating. I feel so happy when the curtain goes up and when the show is over and the curtain falls down, I feel very lonely again. I never was afraid of the stage, never had nerves. Because I prepare myself like the Olympic athlete.”
19. “When a man plays, you don’t look at him, you just listen. But when a woman plays, you look at how she looks, how she moves, her dress.”
20. “If I don’t practice at least two hours a day. I feel like one of those little dogs that makes a poo-poo. I have to practice the guitar every day. If not, to me the day was not worth it.”
(Photo by Michael Buckner/WireImage)
