Español
June 21, 2026
by Victoria Roberts
I was on my way to my sixth chemo in a round of eight in Mexico City. I felt my feet sinking into the floor of the Uber, as if I were driving and trying to brake. I just didn't wanna go. I had been pretty good so far, and I had been pretty lucky. Very little nausea after treatments. Terrific new Mexico City friends who put me up in their apartment whenever I came to town from San Miguel for treatment.
I asked the Uber driver to turn up the music in the car. Fortunately, we were on a pop station. A lot of 70s music. My era.
When "Galileo" by Freddie Mercury came on, I was in my element, and overjoyed. How I love Queen and Freddie!
Before I knew what I was saying, out came the sentence, "Freddie Mercury, el cantante, fue mi primo. Ya murió. Es primo del lado de mi mamá." In English, "Freddie Mercury, the singer, was my cousin. He's no longer with us. He's a cousin on my mother side."
"No me diga." "You don't say." The driver was impressed.
I'm not even a good white liar. I felt guilty, even lying to a stranger. He's getting a thrill out of it, was my excuse to myself, he'll go to lunch and tell his family, "guess who I had in the car today?"
As I had lied so quickly, and I'm not in the habit of lying, what came after was a pleasant surprise. It was fabulous to be Freddie Mercury's cousin. I loved it. I felt better. I remembered before the braces when I had gap buck teeth just like Freddie and my auntie, his mum, my mother's sister.
When I got to the hospital, I walked down the corridor feeling I was some kind of powerful pop royalty by association. I understood why people lie. Such a great feeling to not be who you are. To maybe be better, or different, more important, or just not the same old you. I was important, invincible, and ready for chemo.
When I took another Uber home eight hours later, I got a driver tuned to the same radio station. I was still riding high on Freddie. The stations must be on a cycle because "Galileo" came on again.
"No, don't do it," I was ashamed of having lied in the first place. However, once you have told your first lie, you're a liar. There was nothing to be gained by holding back.
I sank my feet into the car rug, in delight this time, and started over again.
The chemos ended. Some months later, my hair grew back. And it happened again. With people I would only see once, I told a group assembled at an uncomfortable lunch table that it had been my mother's idea to pair Cousin Freddie with Montserrat Caballé to sing "Barcelona" for the 1992 Summer Olympics.
Though I understand re-invention and the vacation from one's dull self it provides, I'm often straining to know more about people I have just met in San Miguel. I don't quite understand who they are, because the information given is conflicting. "No cuaja." In English, "It doesn't quite gel."
Just give them a bit more time, find out more. I try.
But the more I try, the less I know. A puzzle, without all of the pieces.
And then I realize, they're just Freddie's other cousins. The ones on his father's side.
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Nona Rules
Nona Rules introduces audiences to Nona Appleby, the long‑standing creation of New Yorker cartoonist Victoria Roberts. An Australian octogenarian with a razor‑keen gaze and a talent for cutting straight to the heart of things, Nona steps out of her illustrated world and onto the stage in a performance that blends monologue, image, and the curious wisdom of a woman who seems to know far more than she says.
Drawing on Roberts' decades of theatre and artistic experience across Mexico, Australia, and New York, the show reveals Nona as both familiar and uncanny: part bush auntie, part mystic observer, part living memory of an Australia that hums beneath the present.
As she speaks, Roberts' cartoons appear throughout the performance, offering visual echoes and playful counterpoints that deepen the sense of stepping into a private, peculiar universe.
The result is not comedy in the usual sense, but something more subtle: the laughter of recognition, the surprise of truth delivered sideways, the quiet feeling that you've been seen — kindly, but completely.
Nona Rules is a small encounter with a large spirit, and she lingers long after the lights go up.
July 9-11
Thursday 6pm; Friday, Saturday 1pm
Teatro Santa Ana
$275
Tickets
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Victoria Roberts is a New York–born artist whose life and work have moved across continents and disciplines with the same curiosity, wit, and clarity that define her drawings. Raised in Mexico City and Sydney, she first became known for her weekly comic strip My Sunday in Australia's Nation Review.
In 1986 she returned to New York and joined The New Yorker, where she has been a regular cartoonist ever since. Alongside her cartooning, Roberts has maintained a lifelong connection to the theatre. She began acting as a child in Mexico under Margarita Urueta Wise.
At sixty-five, Roberts undertook formal actor training at CEDRAM in Michoacán, earning her diploma and later performing in its 2025 season of Bluebeard.
Her current show is dedicated to her mother and grandmother, Inés Roberts and Lilian Roth, well-known San Miguelenses.
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