Rachel Arieff
Comic and mistress of ceremonies at Anti-Karaoke

Who could be capable of converting Mondays -- the worst day to put on a show -- into the night to go out? Who could transform something as stale as karaoke into the must-see event of the week? No one else but Rachel Arieff, the most amusing woman in Barcelona. She invented Anti-Karaoke, the underground karaoke every Monday at the Sidecar Club, "the CBGB's of Barcelona", as a result of "the loneliness I felt as an artist" when she arrived in a city without a tradition of stand-up comedy. Because "an actor or a celebrity reciting a monologue that was written by a team of writers is not stand-up comedy," in spite of the fact that Rachel claims to have met the Catlonian version of Lenny Bruce, "a garbage-man in rural Catalonia".

Before establishing herself in the Plaza Reial, Anti-Karaoke began at the Llantiol, the café-theater in the Raval, where the first Thursday of every month Rachel offers her show Cómo ser feliz todo el tiempo, a spectacle with stellar moments such as the discovery of El Peque, a combination toy-and-knife store in Barcelona. "Both at the same time!", remarks Rachel, wide-eyed. One of the things she likes most about the Catalonians are their "atomic contradictions", manifested most extremely in the case of El Peque.

Her Barcelona trauma: "When I go to the bank or the post office, having to say to the waiting customers: 'Who's last?' This is a big culture clash for a person from America. There, when you enter a public place, you don't talk to anybody. The only people who do that are psychopaths. Over there, if you walk into a bank and start talking to everyone, you might get stabbed. I talk dirty all night on stage, but it took me months to get over my fear of speaking to the people at the bank."
-Marta Salicrú