Jen

Do you ever get that thing where you know your presence and their presence has sparked happiness? You catch a glimpse of a long-gone one from across the crowded place and already they are making noise and being happy, and fuck it if you don't start to lose it to Smileyland too. You are not logical, you are just beaming and feeling a bit dopey but also feeling really happy to see them and happy that they are happy to see you.

And then when you're talking, you're looking at the changes and they're looking at the changes. You get a bit self-conscious about the wrinkles and maybe they are too. But hey, we're still us.

You're busy people, so too soon it has to end and you have to get back to work. But it's been great to catch up. Really. Really it has. So good to see you.

And that eye thing. When they really look at you and you really look at them, just that fleeting, caught moment... saddens me because the opportunities for those moments shrink day by day. How often do we catch up these days? Few times a year? Couple of times a year? Every couple of years?

So yeah, spent five minutes with a good one today. Beautiful person, beautiful smile. She doesn't read this blog so she will never know what a beautiful person I think she is. She shined today.

But five minutes? What the fuck is that about?

Kimesia Hartz Is Excellent in The God Botherers

Here is a 300 word review of The God Botherers. I have no idea why or how I left out the name of the actor playing the central character of Laura. Her name is Kimesia Hartz and she was very good.

Here is another, more detailed review. I agree with what this reviewer has to say. The second act in particular is impressive in the way it manages to seduce you with humour, then slap you cold with the harshness of its reality; this shit is happening to real people.

Do go see this play. It's very good theatre - and Kimesia Hartz is excellent.

Such A Cock Up

We're doing a function at The Big pointy Building. It's a VIP deal and as such the food is excellent. Excellent quality, excellent presentation, general excellence is flying about all over the place. We've been taught by the best in the biz and sometimes our team pulls it together quite impressively.

Function starts. Guests arrive. Waiters start heading out into the crowd with platters of our very excellent food. It's been stressful getting to this point but from now on it should be fine. It's just pumping the food out from here on.

A waitress comes back from her tour of the room and announces to this room full of focused chefs that "Celebrity Chef is here and he's such a cock!"

She is agency staff and doesn't really know us very well. She doesn't know who is who very well because standing right - right - next to her is our head chef who has worked very closely for Celebrity Chef for many years and is in fact a good mate of Celebrity Chef. Celebrity Chef is, in fact, one of the owners of the company we work for. He employs this entire room full of chefs. He is indirectly paying this waitress' wages tonight.

The waitress is the only person in the room at this moment who does not know these facts. She has no idea she has just said the most inappropriate thing she could say to this particular room full of chefs. The following moments are moments I feel she will always remember in slow motion. In the following moments, she is on the same page.

You should have heard the laughter. I have never seen this particular team of chefs sharing such laughter. It was spectacular.

At first the waitress didn't believe that Celebrity Chef was our boss, but as she looked around at the spontaneous hilarity, you could see the colour drain from her face. Well you could have if she hadn't been covering her face with her hands while chanting "Oh God I'm so sorry" repeatedly.

And although she was so embarrassed that she left soon after, and although she wasn't sharing our laughter at just how clumsy she was, she will be laughing one day. I thought I'd fau pased in my pants a few times in my life, but this was fucking brilliant.

I like to think the waitress might also have learned the meaning of discretion. Meaning being, don't announce to a room full of strangers that someone is a cock until you're reasonably sure of their thoughts on the matter.

A Woopsie At The God Botherers

Saw The God Botherers tonight. Wasn't sure about the first act although it had enough going for it. Good enough storyline even if it was similar to Damien Millar's recent couple of plays. Good acting. Some funny lines. That tap on your consciousness that snaps you out of the theatre and makes you think yeah, they're characters, but they're based on real people going through torment we theatre-goers are never really going to experience.

Review to come later. Just quickly though... a funny moment.

A point in the second act (by far superior to the first), the drama went up and the lights went down. Someone in the back rows started to applaud and I followed.

Far too hastily.

Because this was not the end of the play.

I got two hand claps in before realising my catastrophic faux pas. Girlfriend loved it. Cacked herself into the silence. I thought it was pretty funny too.

When the play was actually over and the lights went down properly and it was very obvious to everyone in the theatre that the play was very definitely over, I leaned over and told The Dreaded One, ""I'm not starting to clap until at least 30 other people have started."

Can You Speak Chinese?

I generally don't answer my landline. It's usually annoying marketing people. Real people usually call me on my mobile, so I let the answering machine take all my calls when I'm at home.

But today I'd just finished doing an interview with actor, writer and director Serhat Caradee, and 30 seconds after we'd hung up the phone started ringing. I thought maybe it was Serhat and he wanted to clarify something in the interview, so I picked up.

"Hello?"

"Hello," came a Chinese accent.

"Yes hello," I replied after a longish pause, thinking this was the lousiest opener to any sales pitch I'd ever heard.

"Can you speak Chinese?"

"No," I told her. "No Chinese. Sorry."

"Ah," she replied as though this was a bit of a problem. "Do you know who can speak Chinese?"

"Chinese people?"

"Is there someone there who can speak Chinese?"

I look around at my empty apartment. "No," I say.

"Ah. Okay. Thank you."

"Sorry."

"Thank you."

"Bye bye."

"Goodbye."

Maybe I should pick up the phone more often. It was pretty funny.

The Pig Iron People Review

Another of my diminutive theatre reviews. I would like to draw your attention to the line about Max Cullen. It is nonsense. It makes no sense. I fucked up in a way that perplexes me. The only explanation is that I was in the process of tweaking the line, I got distracted, and I didn't get around to finishing the tweaking.

Not good. Kinda funny, but not good.

Re previous post: Lots of laughs. Lots of goodness. I can still make her laugh, and that makes me happy. I bumped into my Silly and we had a good man-hug and agreed that we should hang out more often.

The Sadness Of Laughter

The thing is, you used to make her laugh so much. That's what she loved so much. And you were good at it. You had The Thing. It worked both ways - she was entertained by the weird way you saw things and you loved that sound, the musical sound of her surrendering to whatever stupid thing it was you had just said.

A long time later, you hear that same joyful surrender to laughter. It's coming from a different room, and you realise that it's been ages since you've made the laughter happen. You've kept trying, but it's gone. She's laughing at someone else now.

It's still a great sound.

Tour G-eyed

I went on a guided tour of The Big Pointy Building a couple of days ago. I did a 14 hour day previously finishing at about 11pm and had to be at the tour at 7am after a night of merciless insomnia, place of tour also being the same place I go to work each day.

I was Grumpy.

Look, really a very interesting tour of behind the scenes of TPB. It was great to stand on the stages of the theatres I've been seated in in the past, amazing to see the conditions the orchestra has to work under, great to just in there and, you know, poke about a bit.

But guided tours... oh fuck me. Oh fuck me they are awful. Why does every fucker feel the need to show off to the tour guide? The tour guide who clearly knows most of their stuff but who still breaks out the same boom-tish one liners they've been doing for years as though this is the first time. Why are all the questions so obviously designed to say to the tour guide and others in the group, "Ooh look - how intelligent and attentive I am!"

And the smarmy fucker with the waistline of his shorts pulled so far up his tucked-in T-shirt... cunt! Shuddup!

Horrible. Fuck off.

Think this is the third guided tour I've been on in my life. Never, never, never again.

(The tour guide was sweet and I did appreciate it all quite a lot. And mostly people are clumsy rather than arseholes. Also I have had lots of notsleep lately and increasing darkness in my eye, which I think is making me less tolerant of stuff. Guy today, he showed me his bruised ankle, getting the right amount of sympathy he might expect. His condition is obvious. My eye... you can look at it and it might look like a pretty nice eye, but you can't tell how bad this is getting.)

Last Night

I don't know why last night got so drunk. I really don't know what it was thinking. Last night seemed to be in a very good mood. Last night was, apparently, feeling reckless and in the mood for sucking the nectar out of life.

I like good people. I like the ones you look at across a crowded room and you smile because they're cool and they're a friend. You know that feeling? When you look at another human and you think, thank you, I did bump into some good ones. Do you ever get that?

A good one turned up last night. Been away a while and it was great to catch up. I think that's why last night got carried away with itself.

Last night was happy.

McSweeney's

I haven't got very much funny at the moment so I'm going to have to depend on the funny of strangers.

I recently discovered McSweeney's Internet Tendency (thank you Jillian).

From the page titled Open Letters To People or Entities Who Are Unlikely To Respond comes this gem about a gormless spider and this one about a crass T shirt. McSweeney's is my new favourite interweb thing.

Oh and this one just made me laugh so much I did that out-loud thing.

War Stories: Belgrade

I do get to talk to some interesting people. Missed out on seeing this play. Am hoping to see a couple of others this week though.

In other news, I've recently sent out a couple of short stories. Sent something to The New Yorker today, something else is off at Carve magazine, something is in the Age Short Story comp (announced in December, I think), something sent along to Meanjin. Going to hit up Going Down Swinging too.

It's been bloody ages since I've sent fiction out to several places at the same time. It's kinda fun. No expectations, understand, but it's a fun little thing.

President Obama, huh? Good stuff.