Tag Archives: Adelaide Fringe Festival

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Mystery Pub: In Future Nursing Homes There Will Be No Jaydens

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I message Claire with a brevity I hope conjures a sense of espionage. I enjoy these conspiratorial moments.

5.37pm in the TAFE car park.

We meet at precisely this time.

Success! Claire thinks we’re walking. It’s only 750 metres or a ten-minute stroll on this warm afternoon.

So, to continue the mystery, I decide to drive us.

This month’s Mystery Pub is the Crafty Robot, a brewery on Grote Street with a sprawling beer garden and cavernous, concrete interior. Come early evening we’ll all be in another interior of a more cosy nature.

Making her (overdue) Mystery Pub debut, my sister Jill breezes through the gate, and we assemble about an outside table.

Claire volunteers to procure the drinks. Returning, she clasps a white wine, a (0.0%) beer for Jill, and a Blonde Ale (4.5%) for the only non-blonde in our party, me. With sips and nods and brief individual analysis, all are deemed satisfactory.

We chat and eat a shared dinner of deep-dish margherita pizza which has recently transitioned from being a (dysfunctional) quiche. There’s also a plate of indeterminate potato stuff. Inside a Quiz Night rumbles into animated life. Peering through the glass I see the MC moving about with insistent evangelism. I imagine him asking, ‘On which Beatles’ album does Ringo not play a cowbell?’

We speak of the Fringe and our aspirations. Claire enquires.  ‘What are you doing, Jill?’

‘Got a few shows booked. 27 Club (about the musicians like Hendrix and Cobain who all shuffled off at this tender age). One in Stepney too.’

Claire recalls last Saturday’s play in the library. ‘Prometheus was hard work. Youth theatre. After a few minutes I was waiting for it to end.’

I agree. ‘It asked the audience to work too hard.’

Conversation then moves to the immediate for we’re going to the Fringe’s premiere comedy club, the Rhino Room and specifically its subterranean venue, Hell’s Kitchen.

The fifty-first edition of Mystery Pub concludes. We’ve had a splendid hour.

*

Until Claire was appointed as the Auslan interpreter for Brett Blake’s stand-up show we’d not heard of him. Ambling in, Jill and I have no real expectations but present ourselves with open minds.  

Hell’s Kitchen is tiny, the size of a modest suburban lounge room. It’s close and hot down there (as befits a venue called Hell) and the stage is only elevated a few inches. It does the trick. Claire’s on a chair to the left of Brett.

You might know BB from his recent appearance in a betting ad with Shaq O’Neill. He clicks up a photo in which he’s standing next to the seven-foot basketballer and is about half his height. Upon shaking his hand he describes, ‘My hand got lost in his palm and I didn’t touch one of his fingers.’ This is all context for his main story about being arrested when he was seventeen.

As the show progressed, I formed a view. Blake’s a brilliant writer and storyteller: observant, skilled with language, assured.

His routine’s about growing up in an outer suburb of Perth (tough) and his homelife (loving), school life (challenging for all) and escapades at large (hilarious and harrowing).

I roared like a drain (what does this actually mean?) across the sixty minutes. The highlight was BB talking about cars and youth and motoring perils. Mid-anecdote he said,

‘Jayden? Jayden? Silence. No reply. The nursing home was quiet.’

He continued. ‘This is because in the future there’ll be no Jaydens in nursing homes. Why? Because they’ll all have met their untimely ends. Every Jayden will perish by accident in a shitty old Commodore. No Jayden will live to fifty.’

The room erupts. The truth in it—absurd, yet undeniable—hits us all and there’s bellowing aplenty.

Later, I wonder how many ways the mandatory forearm tattoo can be spelled.

Jaden. Jaydon. Jaiden. Jaidyn. Jadyn. Jaidan. Jaydin. Jadin. Jaedon. Jaedyn. Jaydyn. Jeyden. Jadon.

What’s your favourite?

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Adelaide’s Widest Variety of Pink

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J and D

Autumn in Adelaide. It’s magnificent, and probably better than Baghdad in summer or Vladivostok in winter. The days are warm and still and the evenings are great for all manner of alfresco activity such as the Fringe Festival, centred upon the Garden of Unearthly Delights.

I was there with two dear old friends, Poof[1] and Trish[2] and we took in Judith Lucy and Denise Scott and their show Disappointments. In the football match of our lives it’s after half time and we’re, hopefully, into the Premiership Quarter[3] so the themes of dealing with aging,  bodily degeneration and the like are targeted at our demographic. It was fun, well as much fun as this comedy of cruelty could be.

Our after-show conversation was especially provoked by a rapid-fire monologue in which Judith catalogued how unspeakably awful pop music of the 1980’s is. Poof[4] and Trish[5] disagreed, coming to an enthusiastic, but ultimately incorrect defence of this cursed decade! Our friendship enjoys robust debate. The centre point of Judith’s argument was Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl” whose only redeeming quality is surely the correct use of the possessive apostrophe within its title.[6]

You know I feel so dirty when they start talking cute

I wanna tell her that I love her but the point is probably moot

See? ‘Tis a nonsense. Imagine a radio station dedicated to this swill? If you’d really like to wallow in colossal disappointment and have every joyful atom sucked from your being, I recommend listening to Mix 102.3, lurking poisonously on the FM band and doubtless streaming right now across an undeserving galaxy. Love the more putrid songs of the 1980’s? Here’s five in a row! Love those crappy INXS ballads that should never have been on their otherwise great albums[7]? We’ll play one an hour. Up for those rubbish Bowie tunes, from the time when he’d truly lost his way and we thought he’d never return? I’ve got one right after the news! It’ll make you tense, if not physically and spiritually sick.

When Mix 102.3 is not undertaking 1980’s aural terrorism[8] it’s playing Pink. Astonishingly, it’s slogan is “Adelaide’s Widest Variety of Music” but if there’s any truth in radio sloganeering, it should be “Adelaide’s Widest Variety of Pink.” Delusion dictates that it must play Pink multiple times within each freaking hour of their godless day. Listen for any length and you will certainly wish you were trapped in a CIA black site, and about to be folded into a dark cupboard for a fortnight. If you were bound by rope to a chair, listening through bleeding ears, and somehow decided to drink a shot of Bundy[9] every time you heard her banshee gibberish shrieking from the radio speakers, you’d turn into Sir Les Paterson[10] or Elizabeth Taylor[11] within about fifteen minutes.

I love the 1990’s. In among the grunge of Nirvana and Pearl Jam, who I also like, there were lots of sunny songs with great melodies and fetching harmonies. The Sundays and Weezer spring to mind. Then there’s Teenage Fanclub and their signature tune, “Sparky’s Dream.”[12]

It opens with gangly guitars and this great lyric

If she lived in space, man

I’d build a plane

Aside from the aeronautical impossibility it’s a song of optimism and joy.

I reckon Judith Lucy would like it. You’ll never hear it on Mix 102.3.

 

[1] Not her given name, but certainly her real name

[2] Not Patsy, under any circumstances

[3] Australian Rules football metaphor indicating the most crucial section of a grand final

[4] Not her given name, but certainly her real name

[5] Not Patsy, under any circumstances

[6] See previous two blog entries for more on this

[7] Shabooh Shoobah from 1982 being one

[8] As developed by the CIA, ASIO and Stock, Aitken and Waterman

[9] Dark rum from Queensland, another act of war

[10] Hideous but hugely funny cultural icon

[11] Apparently enjoyed an aperitif

[12] Note correct use of possessive apostrophe here too. See, it’s not so hard, people