Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir by Padma Lakshmi

Author:Padma Lakshmi [Lakshmi, Padma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-03-08T07:00:00+00:00

chapter 8

I never decided to stop modeling. By 1997 or so, I was getting bored and less and less ambitious. I would work only if I needed the money, but I had no healthy desire to really make as much money as I could. And it’s hard to get anywhere with modeling if your look goes out of favor with fashion and its trends. I was not a waif. I once got fired from a Sonia Rykiel show because I gained too much weight between seasons. I was bored and it seemed modeling was bored with me, too.

Fortunately, another career began to take shape. Because I was a foreigner who spoke Italian—a relative novelty—I was a sound bite favorite of the news crews that covered the fashion shows for the style-conscious Italian media. Eventually, RAI television asked me to join the cast of Domenica In, Italy’s version of the Today show. I asked the director about showing my scar on TV. “Everyone knows that you have a scar,” he said. “Don’t cover it up.” I spent every Sunday for six months on live Italian TV in Rome and lived the rest of the week in Milan. The show provided a sort of training ground for every TV job I’ve done since. Each live show lasted six hours, and it aired without even a five-second delay. The anxiety this induced motivated me. I could finally make use of my mind. Sure, I was more Vanna White than Katie Couric, but at least I finally had a job where the goal wasn’t to shut up and look pretty. Plus, these were those heady pre-Internet days when a slipup wouldn’t make it around the world in a matter of hours. No one from back home would even watch the show.

The producers played up my role as the screwball-comedienne foreigner still learning the language. I had my own segment on the show called Parole a Parole (Word for Word): I had to attempt to provide the definition of a difficult Italian word and an elementary school student would get to guess whether I was right or wrong. In my dressing room, I had hundreds of letters from kids vying for the honor. The producers loved that sometimes my Italian would fail me. By then, I could speak the language rapidly and intelligibly. I just happened to speak a strange pidgin dialect that was part cab driver—my unofficial teachers—and part profane fashionista, thanks to Daniele and his friends. This occasionally made for exciting television. When one of the show’s other hosts teased me on air, I teased back, attempting a gentle insult like “jerk” but accidentally using the word stronso, which essentially means “piece of shit.” The slipup earned me a clip on Blob, the Italian version of Talk Soup, a show so popular it spawned a verb—blobato, as in “Mi hanno blobato!” (“They blobbed me!”).

Soon after, a film agent signed me on and cast me in an Italian costume drama set in Cuba at the time of the conquistadors.

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