23/8/99

What next, Esterika?

    You drive through the drab dun of the desert, into the stony grays of the city, make a right, a left, step into Esterika Nagid's home and SHAZZZZAM!! You're assaulted by a visual lashing, a mad melee of colors that must be against the law.
    Esterika is outrageous. Everything about her -- where she lives, how she dresses, what she does -- screeches psychedelically.
    Just say "Esterika" in Beersheba and you get a response: people chuckle, roll their eyes, shake their heads in disbelief. "What will she think of next?" they say; one woman described her as a "bulldozerit."
    Esterika loves it.
    She's an impressario in a region not exactly brimming with dynamic showmen. She pulls off extravaganzas like a Miss Fat Israel competition, and most recently, a beauty contest for elderly women. She stages fashion shows, runs a modeling school, cultivates Miss Israel winners. She's always planning, plotting, concocting.
    "Now I'm doing a Miss Elegant, for women who dress well, have taste, even if they're 80, 90 years old. I want to do something with identical twins, and Ethiopians -- they're so exotic, so beautiful! Ah, people will cry 'racism!' -- so what? I organized a Tunisia Night and we had a contest, no one said that was racist."
    In August, she'll be staging a Miss Pregnant pageant, but this one won't be in front of an audience: just for TV. "It takes a lot of planning, and with pregnant women, you never know what's going to be in another hour. We can't afford to take chances.
    "Watch the show and you'll see: some of these women look like a million dollars." Her voice rises a notch. "Anyway, who says you have to be thin to be beautiful? I put fat women on the runway, and kol hakavod to me, no one else makes them feel pretty."
    She loves people, but they can be a mite difficult. "You know how it is, they're sensitive, or emotional, or shy, everyone wants to win, this one thinks she's the most beautiful, that one thinks she should have won. And if there isn't a person like me in the middle of it all, it's a mess." 
    She encountered unexpected emotions with the Gorgeous Golden Agers. "We had an old blind woman. She cried, she was so happy to go down the runway in front of spectators she couldn't see. Another thing happened that time. I had the women line up and I put contestants' numbers on them, and some of them refused. They were in Auschwitz. They said it's enough we have numbers on our arms."
    She toyed with another idea, but you know this one's in really bad taste, because even Esterika backed down: a Miss Ugly (and Mr. Ugly) contest. "I decided it's not nice, not esthetic. I don't
want to make fun of people."
    She operates throughout the country, from Eilat to Tiberias. She once traipsed to Bethlehem with her models for a fashion show -- at the height of the intifada.
    Because she is surrounded by flocks of the most beautiful young women in the South, Esterika, 48, is also beseiged by salivating men desperate to get their hands on her girls. Forget it, guys: Esterika doesn't just manage them, she mothers them.
    "I watch over them until they get married. I don't just get their signature on a contract and send them out. I know what's out there for a beautiful young woman. I get phone calls, 'Can you give me the phone number of what's-her-name, this Natalie something-or-other, with the body like this and that?' -- what, I'm going to let these wolves loose on my girls?"
    (A few minutes later she says to me, "Want to meet a nice girl?" Coming from Esterika, it's the hechsher from heaven.)
    She gets her models work in advertising, promotions, the film industry, doing political gimmicks and, of course, fashion shows. She trains them in the modeling school in her home. "I teach them how to walk, apply makeup, personal hygiene. I think every girl, not just models, should take such a course, to learn to be womanly."
ESTERIKA doesn't exactly mellow out when she's away from the spotlight. This woman leaps out of bed in the morning, and gets cracking: on her home, and herself.
    Her home is ...
    It's ...
    Umm ...
    It's not an environment, it's an impact. When her front door swings open and you get your first look inside, you literally reel backward from the force of tumultuous bedazzlement.
    No tacky, gaudy, glitzy bauble or shmontz has ever been created that isn't on display here. The living room is off limits to all but the cleaning lady (a full-time job for this room alone), but that's ok -- there isn't space for an ant to move among the statues, pillows, trinkets, figurines and knickknacks. Absolutely every fabric, style, ethnicity, artistic material and color -- except black or white -- occupy every available inch. You cannot see the walls. You cannot even see what there is to see, because your eyes cannot help but flit from one ostentation to another.
    Esterika looks pretty much the same. The day we met she was gussied up in what I can best describe as a dress woven from a New England autumn. The flavor of the day ranged from lemony to tangerine, with glittering rust accoutrements, dangly things teasing her pronounced cleavage, and a motherlode of jewelry.
    "I need COLOR. Other women, they can't dress like this. Me, the more mekushkash (ornamented), the more balaganim (chaos), it suits me."
    She creates her own clothes, inspired by no known trend of couture. Often, she will assemble an ensemble for women who ask, who want to stand out in a crowd. "But sometimes I tell them, 'Honey, you have to be an Esterika to dress like this.'
    "I was in America, people stopped me in the streets and offered to buy the clothes I was wearing." She cackles