The faded portrait of the tiny unibrowed woman, made even tinier by standing next to the gargantuan mass that was Diego Rivera, was impossible not to notice—even for an 11-year-old German girl.
“It looked so funny. She had something, you know?” Anna-Maria Gesine Schreiber said, recalling the day she and her mother Petra sat at the Casa Azul café in the artist district of Berlin 18 years ago. It was the first time she had ever seen, or even heard of, Frida Kahlo.
“It was how she looked, and how she was standing. It looked like she had a lot of experiences with bad things in her life,” Schreiber said, in her best English, which is surprisingly good. “She was looking—thinking about something sad. And I’m a little like that too. So maybe it caught me.”
In her native country, Schreiber created numerous Frida-themed stage productions, monologues and fashion shows, many alongside fellow German actor Torsten Schemmel, or “her Diego,” as she once thought of him—they no longer date. “Our relationship is much better now,” she said.
Slender and serious, the 29-year-old stage artist bears a striking resemblance to her hero—the woman she flew 13 hours on loaned funds, to honor.
With this month marking the 60th anniversary of Kahlo’s death, the German Frida-look-a-like travelled with her mother to the city to participate in Fiestas Fridas San Francisco, a month-long celebration of Kahlo’s life and death, both of which occurred in July.
But it was Schreiber’s own brush with death nine years ago that would eventually land her in San Francisco.
Driving on a slick Berlin road on a wet autumn day in 2005, a speeding motorist clipped the rear of Schreiber’s car. Panicked, she steered the wheel trying to regain control. She did three full spins before crashing against a rail on the opposite side of the road. That’s when she looked to her right and saw a pair of approaching headlights.
The oncoming car crashed into Schreiber’s passenger side, sending shattered glass into her face. For three months, Schreiber laid in a hospital recovering. She was lucky. Had she steered the opposite way, her car would’ve spun the opposite way, and the oncoming car would’ve hit her directly.
“If I would’ve had a passenger, he would be dead,” she said. “It was extremely shocking.”
She remembered how Frida too had been in an accident, so upon returning from a four-month stay in Mexico in 2009, she decided to dump her secretary government job for a chance to study acting.
“I was too old,” she said. “The school didn’t want me.”
A year later, the one-time serious little girl was besting the competition at a prominent Frida-look-a-like exhibition contest in Vienna. Her first-place prize was a professional photo shoot.
“At this time,” she said. “It was for me a little girl’s dream come true.”
But for the mother and daughter duo, who hail 325 miles from where Frida’s father Wilhelm was born, their San Francisco stay hasn’t been all smooth.
They went from roughing it in a filthy hostel on Minna Street on their first night, to surfing from couch to couch, paying their way with gratitude.
“I’ve had a lot of other, really crazy, freaky, funny, nice experiences here this week,” Schreiber said. “Such is life.”