Nature

With much of the urban spaces closed for Good Friday, it seemed like a good time to get out to the country for once. A friend took me up into the Dandenongs, to walk appreciatively through the giant tree fern forests and enjoy a rare warm sunny day in the Melbournian autumn.

I took Tony and Tonya, although it was a little far from the ice for them. Their appreciation of nature was… mixed.

 

Some people like mushrooms. Others want to smash them with a crowbar.

 

Nature. Bah! Take your ferny glens and your babbling brooks and shove them up Nancy Kerrigan’s... aspirations.

 

Tony takes the road less traveled by iceskaters.

But in a development that’s sadly normal in Australia, where every single animal wants to kill you, Tony and Tonya encountered some of the native flora and/or fauna, with predictable results. 

 

But thanks to Tonya finally using her crowbar for good, they escaped to skate another day.

 

Come evening, back in the concrete jungle, we traipsed off to the Jazz Lab in Brunswick to see a musical about the Elephant Man. I don’t remember the 1980 biographic film having quite this many dick jokes, but I was a callow youth at the time so maybe they went over my head. Questions might also be asked as to whether John Merrick really had a makeover from a French fashionista and then vogued in front of the aristocracy at an opera house, or had his worldview challenged by a transvestite Russian prostitute. But suspension of disbelief is one of the great gifts of the theatre.

The sound mix was terrible, and there were possibly just a few too many dick jokes, but the performers had beautiful voices and blistering energy, and in the end they received not one but two standing ovations. Melburnians are easily wiled by an avalanche of dick jokes.

Perth audiences, by contrast, are famously miserly with their public displays of appreciation. Maybe it’s because we don’t trust these artistic types and their high-concept tomfoolery? Melbourne audiences will respond rapturously to almost any performance, but never moreso than now, as they slowly emerge from COVID restrictions and are consequently starved of both live performance and human interaction.