Dressed in unassuming everyday costume complete with apron, Emy fusses around the salon rearranging chairs and shouting at her parrot to quit squawking. “Momento,” she implores and hops into the back room to change, reentering in a billowing white shirt and dangling silver earrings, her grey hair brushed into a bouffant. Transformed and looking ten years younger, she poses for a photo like a true professional, flag in hand, behind her Easter altar. “Victory,” she shouts, before fixing the camera lens with a hawk-like expression.

“I have a curriculum ridiculum,” laughs Emy, as her handwritten, twelve-page document testifies. Encouraged by both her mother and aunt, she acted in her first production when she was only eight years old. It was, of course, a Christmas Nativity. “My mother was very friendly with the vicar,” explains Emy. Through this friendship she persuaded him to establish a permanent space for dances and plays at the church that would in turn help raise funds. Teatro Broma y De Veras (Theatre Joke and Truths) was born and Emy starred in the first production, El Pasado by Manuel Acuna. Sitting in the audience was one Professor Francisco Ruiz Garcia who immediately asked her to join his Oaxacan acting group, “Youth and Action.” Emy has since listed from memory over forty of their productions in her resume, often minus dates and places but packed with endearing gems, such as the nicknames of directors.

Many of the plays were performed at the Teatro Macedonia Alcala, on Reforma, which has been entertaining Oaxacans with a variety of productions since its opening in 1909. Beginning life as a casino and theatre, it went on to serve as a silen cinema in the twenties. It hosted frequent visits from opera and dance bands as well as comedians like the famous quick-talker Mario Morena, better known as Cantinflas, in 1930. Currently closed for remodeling, the theatre reopens in September. “Will I be at the opening? Por sorpeusto.” Emy enthuses: “It means the world to me, it is where I made my debut.”

Her big break came in 1954 when she took part in a national competition held at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City. She received an honorary mention for her role as Margarita in Como Las Aves by Teresa Isassi. “It was one of the greatest moments of my life,” she recalls. “I was surrounded by men, roses, perfume and presents.”

She returned to Mexico City in 1968 for another competition in which she portrayed the grandmother in Garcia Lorca’s play of matriarchal dominance and sexual repression, The House of Bernarda Alba. “Lorca, Gorky, Ionesca, they are all my favourites,” she notes. A similarly inclusive response is gleaned when asked whether the silver screen held more appeal than the stage. “I’m lucky, I’ve tried both and loved them both.”

In 1983 Emy played Nick Nolte’s mother in the film Bajo Fuego (Under Fire) the rip-roaring depiction of the Nicaraguan Sandanista revolution. She also appeared in El Vuelo del Aguila (The Flight of the Eagle) an early telenovela depicting the life of Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz. She still keeps an eye on the novelas, (in the background Salome quietly drones away on the 1950s television screen) but doesn’t like all the sex. “Its everywhere,” she laments. “There’s no romance anymore.” She mimics a scantily clad recent evictee from the Big Brother household and berates a local play: “Good theatre cultivates and teaches you to imagine, it shouldn’t destroy the mind.”

Asked why she’s never married, she adopts a slightly different tack and squeals that she’s never had the time and, besides, she hasn’t missed anything because she’s had so many lovers. “I once had three at the same time, they never found out, nothing bad happened.”

While being discreet about exactly whom her lovers were Emy doesn’t hesitate to pepper the conversation with the names of other famous acquaintances. Her stint on the big screen enabled her to meet many Mexican greats like Pedro Infante, when he was filming Tizoc in Oaxaca. She also found herself singing with Oaxacan bolero composer Alvaro Carrillo one night, at her favourite bohemian haunt, Kiko, which once stood near the Zocalo.

Emy met some of her closest friends, Oaxaquenos and extranjeros, at the family-run beauty salon she had during the forties and fifties on the bustling street of Independencia. Many still visit her for a chat at the rather less glamorous boudoir in Xochimilco where Emy moved to in the eighties.

When her mother was ill Emy took a break from acting and decided to concentrate her efforts on her altars-decorative adornments made for Saints days and fiestas. “The altars are my life now, I can’t live without creating them—they are my theatre,” explains Emy. She has won numerous prizes for her works, which have appeared across Oaxaca in churches and cultural centers. Her Easter epic, which was on view for all to see through her window, filled the salon with an abundance of grapefruits, flowers, burning copal, breads, and maize plants surrounding a giant photo of Oaxaca’s patron saint, The Virgin of Soledad, and a model of Jesus on the cross. Emy delights in the drama of deep Catholicism, briefly performing a re-enactment of Jesus being nailed to the cross. “How that man suffered,” she moans in disbelief. Ceremony and symbolism also capture her imagination. “I am pregnant with the energy of aroma,” she wails, smelling a bunch of basil, rosemary and oregano, her favourite Easter perfumes.

When the religious calendar allows it Emy turns her attentions to selling unusual nik-naks from the salon. Miniature ball and chains, tambourines and massage sets are just some of the eclectic collection of objects laid out on the window shelf to tempt passers by. She also has a stash of lesser-known cigarette brands, possibly her most popular buy.

When she finds the time she fills it with reading, singing and painting “El niebla es muy bonito,” (the fog is very beautiful) is how she describes liking a little about a lot of things. “Even though I am old I feel fresh, because I am interested in everything,” muses Emy.

She’s also learning French, Russian and English, but adds, with a wink, “only so I can learn to say kiss me.”