Michela Giraud: The Truth, I Swear!

Michela Giraud walks onto the stage to upbeat music and opens her performance with the line, "I won't make it to 40." She introduces herself to the audience as "Emily Ratajkowski," remarking, "If you'd ordered her on Wish, this is what you'd get." She discusses her thoughts on parenthood, latestnetflix.com contends, expressing a preference for sons who would be obsessed with her while rejecting the idea of raising daughters.

She shares details of her personal background, stating that she was born in Rome on July 28, 1987, describing it as a city where problems are resolved "by setting them on fire." She recounts building her career across television, cinema, and the internet, noting that she signed up for VAT and earned a spot on the *Forbes Italia* list of the one hundred most successful women.

She explains that professional visibility has not altered her everyday reality, observing, "When you become famous, your life doesn't change. You're still the same piece of shit but now everyone knows it." She describes checking her reflection each morning to see if her stomach resembles a "Fiat Qubo," and she recounts waiting at a deli counter while an older customer takes forty minutes to buy gorgonzola cheese.

She turns to an incident from May 2021 when she read a news item about Demi Lovato identifying as non-binary and adopting the pronoun "they." Unaware of what the term meant, she compared it to the Italian television magician the Divine Otelma and wrote, "Demi Lovato says she wants to be addressed as 'they' like the Divine Otelma." After posting the remark on Facebook and receiving praise, she posted it to Twitter and turned off her phone.

She took a train and later powered her phone back on, encountering a barrage of online hostility that included messages like "You deserve to die!" and "I'll dance on your straight grave!" She looked up the term "non-binary" after the fact, discovering its connection to the LGBTQI community on the eve of the release of an LGBTQI-themed film in which she had acted.

Three hours after posting, she deleted the joke, which drew a second round of criticism accusing her of cowardice. When political figures from the right publicly defended her freedom of speech, she cited the idea that "Everybody will be a fascist on Twitter for 15 minutes."

She recounts the invitations and gifts that followed her television prominence, including an email from a television writer who invited her onto a broadcast to discuss how, "even though you're not stick-thin, you keep living your life and doing your thing." In response, she sent an ironic reply about dancing alone at night and using her rubbing thighs to light the fireplace.

She addresses the commercial category of "curvy," comparing it to the final season of *Game of Thrones*. She recounts visiting an outlet store where the curvy section was fenced off like a "Jurassic Curvy Park," and she rejects mandatory body positivity on the grounds that feelings naturally swing between feeling "like Beyoncé" and feeling "like Magalli."

She questions other labels assigned to women, such as being branded "tough" in media coverage. She then turns her focus to heterosexual white men, joking that their social stature has dwindled to the point where they will eventually be placed inside a dedicated nature reserve titled *The Walking Straight*.

Addressing her classification as a "young comedian" at thirty-four, she reflects on being raised in northern Rome within a middle-class, Catholic, military family. She describes a household governed by "the fear of God," where her grandmothers used various statues of the Virgin Mary to keep her from feeling self-satisfied.

She recalls her parents enrolling her and her sister Cristina in ballet lessons. While the other girls executed steps cleanly, she struggled with the drills, describing the exercise as "My own personal Hiroshima." Their instructor relegated the sisters to the back row and told their father that his daughters were the heaviest in the class.

She recounts how her mother monitored her during adolescence out of concern that she might die or become pregnant. At a seaside disco in Calabria, she gathered the nerve to step onto the dance floor, only for an attractive teenager to approach her and say, "Michela... Your mom is here," pointing to her mother standing nearby in a nightgown with a slipper in hand.

She speaks about her sister Cristina, who has Asperger's and speaks without social hesitation. She recounts moments where Cristina openly reacted to people she considered poor or unattractive, as well as an Easter lunch at a Tuscan farmhouse where Cristina responded to another child's singing by belting out the chorus of "Shallow" across the restaurant.

She describes her teenage summers spent trying to hide in bushes while Cristina called out to nearby teenagers to introduce her. She recalls the intrusive inquiries acquaintances made about Cristina's condition, including questions about whether she possessed a disabled parking permit or was "Bamboleiro."

She recounts asking her mother during childhood why other families avoided them, to which her mother answered that while most people carry thoughts in a saucepan, Cristina carries hers in a colander. Michela closes the performance by dedicating the evening to her mother, grandmothers, and sister, before shouting a parting curse at her former ballet teacher: "Fuck you, Ms. Pina!"