Nelly Trenti died last Thursday evening at the age of 85. From the producer who makes the lunches they confirmed the sad news: “Today we have to say goodbye to our beloved Nelly Trenti. Our condolences to her family and her friends. We will miss that voice,” they wrote from her Twitter account.

Trenti was a legend of Argentine television, best known for being the host of Mirtha Legrand’s lunches.

A life as a pioneer

The first time she was awarded as an announcer, she found herself with a stiff neck. Two kilos weighed the sculpture made by Luis Perlotti himself. 1959. Another world. It was the first ceremony of the Martín Fierro, at the Cervantes Theater, and American singer and pianist Nat King Cole also had his giant gaucho that day.

“They had lunch today with Mrs. Mirtha Legrand …”. In 30 years, Nelly Trenti has repeated the crutch on the air more than 5,000 times. When “Chiqui” wept in front of the camera over the deaths of Daniel Tinayre and Daniel Jr., Nelly was also in mourning there. When the Narciso Ibañez Menta cake almost set the table on fire, Nelly was there to help put out the fire. When Mirtha celebrated the four decades of the cycle with 40 guests, there was Nelly leaving her strings in her 40 surnames.

His professional debut came when he was only 17 years old. The ISER professors sent her to practice at the old Channel 7 in Ayacucho and Posadas and the opportunity came. An announcer committed the foul and Nelly Trenti was asked if she had dared to read an ad. “There were no commercials recorded. We put the papers on the floor and if we forgot the lyrics, we peeked.”

its beginnings

Raised in the Constitution, with The Perez Garcia background and tone of the announcer Lidia Durán as “inspirational halo”, Nelly was “the school’s official reciter”. From a family of furniture makers, She graduated as a teacher from Normal 9. Until then, a “typical” life for a young woman of the time. She broke her mold thanks to her mother’s warning.

“One day I come home and my mom tells me she heard a call for aspiring actors and presenters on Radio Nacional,” he says. “I applied to all the competitions that were there, so I also signed up and that’s how I started my career in ISER. I had great teachers like Jaime Font Saravia and Iván Casadó “.

You walk and you walk and you walk and eventually you buy in Sadima. Verses of that style made it a popular voice, disputed by companies like Gath & Chaves. You have worked on Radio Belgrano, El Mundo and many other broadcasters and shared study with colleagues such as Pinky and Guillermo Brizuela Méndez. In the 1950s, she became the first woman to lead the Channel 7 newscast.

Flawless to say, he knew furcios were part of the game. He tried not to succumb when the whole studio burst out laughing, but he didn’t always succeed: “I once said ‘a tree hit a car’,” he laughs.

fitted hairstyles, baggy dresses, Nelly was never told how to dress and they didn’t try to objectify her when she broke the news. For this he joins the debate on women’s clothes in the news and on false moralism. “Everyone must do what is born. Freedom”, he proclaims. She has no secrets to taking care of her voice and feels “like a miracle” that the years have not eroded her voice.

Perhaps his great phonic challenge was to say in the following “lunch today with Mrs. Mirtha Legrand, the lady. Maria de las Mercedes Bolla Aponte of Murano “(Yiya). Or in the late 1980s he signals with a cold smile “planned power outages must be extended to all users, including sanatoriums and hospitals”. Poker face to tell dramas.

“We all need a Trenti to tell us we’re gorgeous,” says Argentina’s most illustrious voice on social media in fan forums. “The way they see you, they treat you. If they see you badly, they mistreat you.” Does Nelly agree with the legranesque maxims? “With everything. She’s a very wise woman,” she warns as a fan. And I add what few people know, that the lady with the false French surname also has a broadcaster’s license. “Mirtha has given up and been received, so the announcer’s day is also her day.”

History of fidelity

Madame Trento, the other lunch lady, joined two decades after the birth of the longest running program on Argentine television today. It was 1968 when “Chiquita” went to collaborate with Saturdays of kindness and Alejandro Romay and Samuel Yankelevich took her to an “aquarium”: “I want you to make a plan with lunch,” El Czar told him. “Eating and talking? Impossible,” replied Rosa María. “You will eat and with 12 people,” raised the bet

The first lunch in the air (a distant world of 1968 when Adrián Suar was two and a half months old) Nelly was fascinated by the format.

But she was just a spectator. There was still a difficult stretch up to the crossroads of destinations: Mirtha still had to change stations a few times, suffer several personal knockouts and professional slaps of the “lunches end where there are well dressed and well spoken people and the reality of the city is unknown”, as established by the controller Omar Gómez Sánchez in 1974.

In 1990, the exciting year of the World Cup in Italy, Nelly was touched by the other “Hand of God”: she worked at ATC, and producer Luz Seguí urgently asked her to replace a presenter. Nelly’s tone and Mirtha’s glamor mixed, they got a composition. The news then came from the mouth of Daniel Tinayre: “Chiquita wants you to stay, Nelly.”

Those summers when he decided not to go to Mar del Plata for “personal reasons”, the company broke up. And this pissed off the viewer. Hundreds of outraged people called the corresponding channel to ask why Mirtha was not introduced by Doña Nelly. VIP witness, he won’t talk about it, but Trenti was inches away from him that proof in front of the camera that humanized Rosa María Martínez Suárez with the “damn, shit”. Codes, pact of fidelity and silence.

“Sisters forever”, the bond deepens to the point that Trenti even becomes a friend of Goldi. Something strange happens in quarantine for her 30 years of working with Mirtha: she follows the program from home. And when he turns on the television he feels a triple emptiness, his absence in the sky, that of Mirtha in the big chair, and that of Goldie as the first spectator.

“Mirtha is a great princess and the girl follows in her footsteps,” he teases. “I really like how she takes care of her grandmother’s house, but I know that when all this happens, Juana will have to return the place. Chiqui will be back.”

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