Ricky Martin has landed a Las Vegas residency and he couldn’t be more excited. The “Living La Vida Loca” singer says that he had been offered a Las Vegas residency years ago, but it just wasn’t the right time. He sat with Despierta América this morning and talked about his residency and his twins who are the center of his life these days.
“Throughout my career, I have been fortunate to be able to share my culture through music while creating an exciting atmosphere where you have no choice but to have the best time, to dance and sing until we all forget our problems, to let go and be completely free…this new show will not be the exception. I’m inspired, and I can’t wait to show you what we have in store,” he told Billboard a couple of months ago. His residency at the Las Vegas Monte Carlo’s Park Theater will off April 5th.
During the interview with Despierta América, the presenters did a flashback of his past visits to the show. Including one at the Ricky Martin Foundation center in Puerto Rico for child victims of human trafficking. Ricky Martin was so upset when he heard the stories of trafficking of children, of being forced into being sex slaves and forced to do pornography.
“With that anger, I asked myself, ‘what can I do,’ so I got rid of that angst by putting my hands in the fire and began to work directly with the victims,” he explains. He worked with the U.S. Congress testifying, was in Austria in the anti-trafficking congress that created the United Nations, and even in Cambodia. Helping those children was gratifying to him because after he heard how grateful those children were, that filled his heart because he knew that those children were going to be o.k.
Ricky Martin always dreamt of becoming a father. He always desired children and his dream came true in 2008 when he became a father to Mateo and Valentino through a surrogate. “Being a father is the most difficult thing in the world, every day it’s something new, it’s the most difficult job, but the most gratifying,” says Martin. He says that when his babies smile it makes him melt because he’s given so much just to get that smile.
His twins are a curious duo and they’re at that age where they ask so many random questions. “They ask me about my favorite car, to where space ends, and many times I don’t know the answer so I tell them that I don’t know and we go research it together to find answers,” he explains.
For Ricky Martin, his children and now husband, Jwan Yosef are everything.
“It’s my north, my center, my balance, my earth–I don’t stop being myself, I don’t wear a mask when I get on stage, what you see there is the same as what’s at home,” he says. The kids now understand that his papi is famous and when they found out they didn’t want to call him papi anymore, they wanted to call him Ricky Martin, but he said no because to them he is not Ricky Martin, but papi.
Being Ricky Martin is no easy task and being a parent to twins couldn’t possibly be easy, but he’s doing a great job raising those beautiful children!