Laura Pausini turns 50 today: “I and the women of generation X think about what to invent tomorrow, and not about how to retire with dignity”
“Most of all I remember the future,” he said Salvador Dali who lived in space rather than time. The past, present and future were continually intertwined in her stories, which became memories of things to come. Laura Pausini has many memories of things to come, because she has always been projected into the future. Her latest tour is divided into three sections: present/future/pastwith the future in the middle, that is, now, and he tells me why on a sunny afternoon in which we talk about birthdays to come, boxes in the attic that contain what we will become, clothes that shine and words that change the world.
Tom Ford total look, Panconesi earrings
“I believe that on two birthday occasions one suddenly feels decrepit: at nineteen and at fifty,” wrote Gesualdo Bufalino. When we were little girls, a woman – over 50 – was asked to make a decent retreat. Does time still flow at two different speeds for men and women?
If I think about the last two years that I have gone through, I realize that they correspond to the greatest growth of my career (I’ll summarize because you don’t say it: in no particular order Laura won the Golden Globe at 47, received an Oscar nomination at 48, won the Latin Grammy Person of the year at 49 years old, recording 25% more audiences in this last tour both in Italy and abroad, ed), but I was preparing to “finish”, because when I was 20 I was told that this would happen. Early in my career, my team – made up of men much older than me – told me: “you are a young woman, but we have to do everything immediately because in music women, after 40, no longer do anything”. So I had planned my future (the albums that were to be released, the things I wanted to sing), contemplating twenty years of activity: I had thought that at 50 no one would ever propose to me to publish a new album, or to go on tour. I had therefore foreseen that I was – at this precise moment – doomed.
We women have fought a lot for gender equality, and I can say that, at least in my environment, we no longer hear phrases like “you sold well for being a woman” (which was said to me after the first album in Sanremo) , or “Only men do San Siro”: Today, the women of Generation X and I are thinking about what to invent tomorrow, and not about how to retire with dignity.
