All the world's a stage

Westcourt Street Theatre announces Summer Season
Review by Beverley Mitchell

With the departure of former co-artistic directors Drug Dealing Granny and Her Drug F#%ked Son in February of this year, the Far North Queensland arts community has been wondering who could possibly take over the helm at Westcourt Street Theatre after such directional stewardship.

Last week the company finally answered that question with the launch of its Summer Season 2012-13 program.

With the bold move of an unconventional performance time of 6:30am Monday, the season launched with what at first appeared to be a run-of-the-mill production of the classic work Who Can Yell F#%k Off The Loudest. The three man cast was capable, though not ground-breaking, despite fine support from a small female chorus. Then, five minutes in, the magic happened. Without warning, newcomer to the company Partied A Bit Too Hard Over The Weekend scaled a creek-side paperbark and wedged himself high in a fork of the tree, flatly refusing to come down and asserting the new Absurdist direction the company has chosen to take. In a stellar ensemble performance the rest of the cast implored him to come down until interrupted by a commuter vehicle attempting to pass by. On cue, the ensemble slipped off stage leaving the actor alone in the tree, arms flailing weakly, calling out hoarsely. Not since last year's guest appearance by Female Domestic Violence Perpetrator Across The Road, with her masterful rendition of You're F#%kin' Useless, Darren ... Wait, Where Are You Going? (sob), has an actor managed to so perfectly capture the pathos and solitary existentialism of the individual in the midst of the hubbub of modern life. A true star is born.

With such a promising start to the performance program the residents of Westcourt are no doubt eagerly looking forward to the Build Up and the Festive Season, as they warmly welcome their home grown talent back to the stage after eight months of touring and rehearsals.

Westcourt Street Theatre, Boland St, Westcourt, QLD
Tickets: Free, no bookings taken

***

Seriously folks, I am not making this stuff up. What I have come to affectionately call Westcourt Street Theatre is a highly amusing (if somewhat sleep depriving during the late shows) feature of living in my dear ole' suburb of Westcourt, Cairns. I have seen or heard some world-class performances, covering the whole range of heightened human emotion, sometimes artificially enhanced, sometimes not. I have laughed my head off, made notes of the time of incident, and called the police - sometimes all in the course of the one performance. Mostly I have just heard the word 'f#%k' a lot.

Attention Seeking Disorder

"Who, moi?!" - Trouble, aka The Bubble

As a life-long companion to cats, I have observed their attraction to sitting on newspaper on occasions too numerous to calculate; particularly if their human is reading one in bed. I had always thought it was the satisfyingly crunchy texture, the amusing rustling noises, the nest-y quality, and the fact that, should they deign, they could shred it into confetti on a moment's whim. There is also their predilection for mat-like surfaces and desire to be the monarch of anything new to enter the home.

But no, now that I read my newspapers online, I have discovered that there is nothing they like more these days than to try to lie on my keyboard. The purpose of the exercise is something else entirely after all.

Cheese: the meaning of life?

 

 There's not much in life that can't be resolved by eating cheese with a spoon!

Life's all been a bit big lately: after a few days off post-flinging myself down the stairs, I headed to my hometown, Adelaide, 3,400 kms away, for my grandfather's memorial. My brothers came over from Melbourne, several relatives came over from Port Hedland in Western Australia, it was surprisingly huge in many senses of the word. What I found particularly fascinating was the difference between my memory of Grandpa and the memories of some of my cousins. I am the eldest grandchild, followed closely by my first brother, and when we were growing up in the '70s Grandpa still worked. After us there is a gap of between eight and 17 years for my cousins and my youngest brother, and it seems Grandpa in his retirement was a much mellower man than the one I remember.

While in Adelaide, I got to spend some good, quality time with my family, got rip roaringly drunk on Frangelico with my youngest brother (my hangover felt more sugar- than alcohol-induced - ugh!), did the rounds of the Adelaide Central Market where I wished I could have bought the entire Gorgonzola pictured above, met my new baby nephew, and stocked up big time for my Etsy shop. I found some really great pieces that I am very excited about - coming soon! 

By sheer coincidence, there was a 25 year school reunion on the Friday night I was there. I wimped out because it was a long way from my Mum's house where I was staying that night, and by the time we got to the day of the wake I was so glad I hadn't gone - it would have been way too much emotion to tackle the reunion, which would have been the first I'd been to, and also see my grandma, who is suffering from dementia, and go to the wake all in the one weekend.

Grandma was a classic though. She was present when my grandfather died, but, naturally, her condition means she forgets this. Most of the time she forgets he's even gone. She suggested to my youngest brother and I that we should go and visit him in his room up the hallway in the nursing home, "But," she added, "He's not been very well lately. In fact, he's a bit useless these days!" Awkward!

If it ain't broke...

"Listen up.
The 'universe' DOES NOT CARE about you, okay?
It doesn't try and 'tell' you things or reward or punish you for anything.
It just doesn't give a F#$%! It can't! It's a universe... not your f#$%in' mamma. Alright?!
Thank you." - GDD, former housemate, now long-distance Facebook friend, Facebook post 2012, initials used to protect anonymity.


Every once in a while you get a moment to yourself to pause and reflect on the true nature of the Universe. For me that chance came a couple of days ago as I was rolling around in agony at the bottom of my back stairs.

I was having an incredibly productive day, of the type I haven't had since before my back went dicky. I'd just had my medical and X-rays for my permanent residency application to Canada, I'd had two sales on Etsy, and I'd finally gotten around to buying a new printer after hours of painstaking research. I'd even taken myself out for brunch at Caffiend and had their truly wonderful fetta and basil omelette. It was a benchmark day in my recovery. Life was good. 

I'd popped home to package up the Etsy sales and drop off the printer, then I'd planned to do a run to the post office, then the op shop to try to restock for Etsy, pick up the X-rays and deliver them to the GP, and then do a supermarket shop. Busy, busy, busy! As I headed out I stopped near the bottom of the back stairs to add one last thing to my shopping list on my phone, and then I stepped off... 

Except I wasn't on the bottom stair as I thought, was I? No, I was on the second or third, and I stepped off into the void and went crashing down, landing with a sickening crunch on my right ankle while my phone smashed face first into the concrete. As I lay there trying to breathe through the pain—watching my ankle imitate a tetchy puffer fish and running through the checklist of "Is it a sprained ankle, or a broken ankle?"—I contemplated that I may have been done in again by a case of be-careful-what-you-wish-for. 

Now I'll confess that in my younger days I used to be a bit of a hippy-dippy, esoteric, New Agey thinker, but I got over that. Reason has won that contest, though on occasion Wonder still tries to put her two cents' worth in. I don't believe that 'everything happens for a reason'. In fact, that's a platitude guaranteed to send me into a boiling rage. But I have observed that sometimes if you really want something to happen, it does. Hence you have to be careful what you wish for.

I'm not advocating 'wishcraft' or any of that Law of Attraction hoo-doo, I'm far more inclined to think that wanting something to happen makes you much more receptive to noticing when it does, and probably also makes you act in subtle ways to bring it about. But what I'm taking an awfully long time to get to is that, in my experience, if you are really putting it out there that you want something to happen you had better be specific—like make, model and serial number of desire—because otherwise it tends to come back to you any which way and you must wryly concede that you got what you wished for, just maybe not quite under the most ideal of circumstances. I'm talking getting fired when you hate your job but you haven't yet got anything else lined up, that person you've been crushing on turning out to be a dick once you are dating them or else confessing their true feelings the minute you've given up and started seeing someone else, that sort of thing. In this particular instance I have been very strongly focusing on how I wish I could have several days to work from home because I have so much written material to generate and I'm getting interrupted every five minutes in the office and can't concentrate, and, as is well documented on this here blog, I am really not loving my Android phone and miss my iPhone, particularly since Bek introduced me to Camera+ the other day, which like Hipstamatic is not available for Android users. Amazingly, my phone still works, even though its screen looks like a spider's web.

So, here I am, proving that is is in fact possible to limp with both feet (gosh, I must get around to explaining about that left leg!), trying to keep my fat, sprained right ankle elevated, compressed and/or iced as much as possible and contemplating either a replacement phone screen or the purchase of a second new phone in the space of six months (aaaargh!).

Not-so-lucky duck

I know I really should be posting about my truly delightful wedding to my truly wonderful new husband, but this evening, now that I have a minute to write again, I am inspired by something a little sad.

You see, there was this duck...

There is a creek that runs down the centre of my street. A couple of weeks ago one of my neighbours asked in a Facebook message if I had seen the new duck that was hanging out in the creek. There are a lot of native waterbirds that forage along the grassy verge, but I hadn't seen a duck. I made a joke in reply about how lucky it was for the duck that I hadn't seen it, since those who know me know I am a pretty enthusiastic consumer of the little dears.

Then I saw it. It was huge! Seriously, its body was about the size of a goose, but it was definitely a black and white duck. It was not even a Muscovy, because, you know, those suckers get big. No, there was no red wattle or anything like that, just a very pretty, very big, black and white, domesticated duck.

I saw it a few times and wondered what its story was - how it came to be all alone in the big (pfft!) city. But, well, we were getting married that week and then we went off to Fitzroy Island with the kids for a few days afterwards and I forgot about it. Then, a couple of days after Charles and the kids had gone back to Canada, I was driving my beautiful bridesmaid, Morgan, to the airport at an ungodly hour of the morning. It was still dark when I got home and as I turned into the street I saw the duck by the creek in the headlights, awake and scared by the light and obviously feeling vulnerable. My heart went out to it and I knew at that moment that it had once felt safe in someone's yard and now it was trying to be a big brave duck and not doing so well at it. I resolved to try to adopt it.

I spent the next couple of days keeping an eye out for it, checking up and down the street, thinking maybe I could herd it into my well-fenced yard and then it would have plenty of safe spots to roost. I'd get it a kiddie pool, the cats would befriend it, I wouldn't cook any more duck at home, and we'd all live happily ever after. I told Charles about it in a Skype session and he laughed his head off at me: "A duck? 'Safe'? At your house?" Um, yes, well, I realise that, on paper, my house would have to be one of the least safe places for a duck to be, but I've never actually killed one myself. Anyway, I couldn't find the duck.

This evening I drove to a friend's house just on dark. Coming up to a T junction three blocks from home, by another creek and the local shopping centre, I saw some red clothing on the road, a t-shirt or something, and I swerved around it. As I stopped at the T a four-wheel drive to my right slowed down and swerved around what I assumed to be another bundle of clothes, black and white. "Hello", I thought. "Someone's lost half their back pack of clothes." As I turned into the road and drove past the lump I realised the lump had feathers. "What the hell? Did someone's chicken escape?", I wondered. Having seen the 4WD swerve I thought I would do the citizenly thing and go and move it off the road because things were going to get ugly real quick on a road as moderately busy as that one. I did a U-ey and went back and as I pulled up I actually said aloud, "Oh, no! It's the duck!" And it was. I just knew it was freshly dead, too, since it hadn't been squashed yet. I felt so sad for it. I got out and grabbed some things from the boot to roll it off the road with. There were three young 'lads' on the other side of the creek watching me: the kind of teenage boy that in this neighbourhood probably would have tried to rob me and steal my car if they'd been on my side of the creek. In my sadness I called out to them since they were clearly following the drama from a distance:
"Did you see it get hit?"
"Yeah."
"Did it just happen?"
"Yeah. What is it?"
"A duck."
"Oh..."
Followed, in my grief, by the life story of the duck as I knew it, told as I rolled it to the gutter. My parting words to the boys were:
"Pity, it'd probably be really yummy!"
"Are you gonna eat it?"
"(Sigh!) No!!!!"
Mind you, once they suggested it, I thought about it for a second and decided I probably couldn't bear to gut and pluck it. It's a sickness, I'm sure!

So there you have it. The sad demise of one scared duck that boy, oh, boy, don't I wish I'd been able to find earlier in the week now, or that I'd left the house 10 minutes earlier so I would have seen it wandering on the road and somehow managed to herd it to safety. Mind you, given the poor visibility and the speed people drive on that road it probably would have resulted in me lying on the ground with my insides spilling out a little instead. But, please, in light of this, spare a thought for all the lost, abandoned and wayward creatures in your town that might need some care and attention. The charities I choose to support are invariably animal-related: for some reason I am much more emotional about and empathetic towards dumb animals than sentient humans when I am asked to dig deep. I can't even begin to analyse how I can be sad for the death of one duck, yet happy to eat others.

PS This post is also a cover for the fact that my last grandfather died this week. I'm not really going to go there online, so let's just concentrate on the duck for now, shall we?

Dream a little dream

This morning I woke up out of a dream about the wedding. It was very strong and got me thinking about other dreams of similar intensity and obvious subject matter. By the time I had gone through this thought process I had forgotten the dream, it had slipped back into my subconscious - the elusive little critter! No doubt it will pop back into my mind later this afternoon and confound me.

Late last week I had a great wedding dream: I was in a game show in which contestants had to dive underwater in an eight metre pool and retrieve items from a series of post-box-like compartments. I watched the contestant before me win the key to the Special Box through a luck-of-the-draw process and then he dived down, found the box that fitted the key he had been given and discovered a huge wad of cash. The Special Box was supposed to be for things that would be most prized by the contestant.

When it was my turn, first round I won the key to a box that contained some things I intuitively knew were relevant, but that I now don't remember. Second round I, too, won the key to the Special Box. Down I went, down, down, right to the bottom. I found the box and opened it with the key. The first thing I saw was a huge manuscript, like a modern publishing manuscript, not a monk's parchment. I pulled that out and put it on the tray I had for carrying my stash, thinking, "Maybe the thing of value is in the words of the manuscript..." Then looking back in all I could see were everyday items - little tubes of hair products, jars of gourmet foods and spice pastes. I was pulling them out, going through them all trying to find the thing in the box that was of the most value since I obviously couldn't get all this crap back up to the surface in the one trip I was allowed. I was also becoming conscious of having been underwater for a while and that my breath was beginning to run out. I burrowed deeper under the valueless products, which were by now tumbling everywhere, and on the bottom of the box I found an engagement ring and a wedding ring in simple white gold with a small solitaire stone. I was momentarily confused because they weren't my wedding ring and engagement ring and my first thought was just for their monetary value, but, der Freddy, it was a dream, of course they were symbolic. So, by now out of breath and beginning to panic a little in the dream, I loaded the rings onto the tray with the manuscript (and maybe a cheeky jar or two of truffle paste, you can take the girl out of the kitchen, but... ) and headed to the surface, taking great care not to drop the rings back down into the depths of the pool. I woke up just before I broke the surface. Nice lesson, non?

My Nana died three years ago. She was such a fun and beautiful lady and  huge source of inspiration for me. One night I dreamt I visited my grandparents' former family home, the site of many happy childhood memories. My Popa had died a few years previously, but he had been a fanatical gardener like so many of the rest of the family, and always had a beautiful garden. I got to the gate in the dream and saw that all the garden was brown, withered and dead and I was confused and a little upset. I woke up, it was very early morning, and ten minutes later my Mum rang me to tell me that Nana had died in her sleep overnight.

So, dreams, eh!? Sometimes prophetic, sometimes hugely symbolic and sometimes just a clearing house for the day's activities (I am hardly about to write romantically about the stressed out dreams I had about the Resale Royalty Scheme for Artists and ensuring equitable payments for artists under an agency sales method last week. They were just pure processing). Whatever. They are never boring and a really good one will stay with you all day and make the world feel a little different as you move through it.

Wifey

 

There's a thought process that's been preoccupying my few precious moments of navel gazing lately, and it's been gatecrashing my brain when I've been busy with other things: I am going to be a wife, I am going to have a husband.

That's even about as complex as it gets, no more words than that, but it's not a freak out or Oh-my-God-what-am-I-doing, it comes through with a sense of wonderment. As I've written before, even as a child I declared I would never get married. That attitude softened as I got older, but only now, at 42, am I really going to do it. The sense of being about to cross a threshold into another state is very strong right now. In the past I have been guilty of spouting the line, maybe even believing, "It's only a piece of paper, it doesn't mean anything." Hey Former-self, wise up! It does mean something. It means a very great deal.

I remember that on my first date with Charles, almost two and a half years ago, while he was talking and I was listening and watching, the thought popped into my head, "This is a man I could marry." As conscious as that. How cheeky! But I mostly noted it because I had never had that thought before about anyone else, ever. 

It has been quite a surreal process planning a wedding with a groom who is on the other side of the planet. Charles found out his divorce had finally come through when he returned to Montreal from his last trip here to look after me post-surgery. We haven't had a minute together in the last three and a half months to discuss it in person or squeeze hands with excitement. But tonight he and his children arrive, after 48 hours of travelling. At least with me being in a post-CIAF daze we'll all be similarly zombiefied and I am grateful for how busy it is at work right now, my impatience to be at the airport to pick them up is rewarded with the rapid passing of time.

Last night as I was making up my bed with fresh sheets, I was amusing myself with the thought that one more sleep and I would be sharing the bed with my husband-to-be. It was good to be conscious of doing something for 'us', as opposed to 'me', with 'him' 'over there'. For me this is actually going to be one of my biggest challenges in my new marriage: the Us-ness. This won't be helped by still being long-distance until my Canadian residency is approved, but as a long-time Little Miss Independent, even in my last long-term relationship (I purchased a house on my own in that one and it was a seven and a half year relationship), being more mindful of Us is a habit I'm going to have to get into. My selfish single-girl ways just won't cut it. There are also two fantastic children involved in this relationship, so you may begin to get the picture of why I have made Change the overarching theme of this blog.

Charles has definitely already proven his sticking power in our relationship: two years long-distance and travelling halfway across the globe to nurse me back to health twice have already fulfilled most of the out-of-the-box marriage vows I can think of. I'm hoping I can be just as good at Wifing for him.