The face is reminiscent of actress Nastassja Kinski in Paris, Texas. The same youth who seems aware, even disillusioned, of the passing of time, as in the heroine of Wim Wenders’ film. Same look, a little lost. Same shyness. But, when Lily McMenamy starts to speak, her whole body comes alive. The features become incredibly expressive, the long thin arms wave. And, while we interview her on this January day about her career, which stimulates her, she peppers her story with imitations: an individual she met the day before, an old acquaintance…
Of the characters, she will play seventeen at the Bourse de Commerce, in Paris, which invites her to play the only one on stage A Hole Is a Hole, as part of the program of concerts and performances echoing the vast retrospective devoted to the American artist Mike Kelley. And Lily McMenamy, 29, will multiply on stage, moving from one character to another with prodigious speed. “They are different versions of myself. »
The avatars of A Hole is a Hole, for which she wrote the screenplay and designed the scenography, form the story of her life. A life like no other. Parents, first. Lily McMenamy is the daughter of Hubert Boukobza and Kristen McMenamy. The first, born in 1950 and died in 2018, was one of the great figures in the Parisian nightlife world. An epicurean character, colorful, businessman, he owned restaurants and above all managed Bains Douches, in Paris, a nightclub which he made into a hub where French celebrities, Hollywood stars and fashion personalities would meet.
The American Kristen McMenamy is a model, among the most respected in the industry, having worked in the 1980s and 1990s with some of the greatest photographers, from Steven Meisel to Paolo Roversi, including Peter Lindbergh and Juergen. Teller. All this marked A Hole is a Hole. Thus, in these seventeen characters, there is the father, overwhelming (of love, of excess), but also a nightclub bouncer, a cheeky character like Edwige, physiognomist at the Palace, nicknamed “the queen of punks.
A broken doll
How many children who grew up on the benches of nightclubs or in the backstage of performance halls have done everything to escape this environment? How many pulled away from the cars in which they had been passengers, too soon? Lily McMenamy spent a rather quiet childhood with her mother in London. She remembers with emotion the “virgin mojitos” sipped at the bar of her father’s establishments, or the bodyguards charged by the latter to watch over her in her nightclubs when she came on vacation to Paris.
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