Fun-Raising

The other evening, Mzzzz E turned up at my house, wearing something that almost passed as a skirt but might better be described as thin strips of denim stapled together. I had invited her to be my date for a school fundraising “Film Night” but had mistakenly used words like “support the school community”, “all for a good cause” and “think of the children” when doing so. Mzzzzz E – as a proud representative of the “deliberately barren” – had reacted accordingly by dressing in a manner that she saw as “recession punk-chic” but which I could only see resulting in some kid saying to Mr Justice in the playground: “My dad said your mum brought a hooker to the fundraiser”. And, moreover, when we arrived at the function, she got this hell-raisin’ glint in her eye that she always gets whenever she’s A) at a function with an open bar and/or B) awake. 

Turns out she was the least of my worries. 

The real problem was that my Financial Advisor AND my Mortgage Broker were both at the event, which also happened to be the first time I’d attended an evening fundraiser as a parent. And the whole heady combination made me want to run away from my Stupid Grown-up Life by drinking a lot. Like, a lot a lot. Luckily, Mzzzz E and some of the more notorious members of my mothers’ group were there as willing helpers. Or unluckily, depending on which way you look at it.

Next thing I know, Mzzzz E’s got everyone playing her usual game where you have to choose someone in the room you would, er, you know, “do it” with (see “Fi-Die-Lity“). And we’re all standing only metres from Brett The Principal and I’m thinking “This could so easily go terribly, terribly wrong” when The Mild-Mannered Lawyer took a bullet for me. She announced not one but TWO people she would choose for hypothetical rogering and everyone was so taken aback that they forgot to press me or anybody else for their answer. Phew. But then I had to go and blow my ride by going up to the maker of the film we were about to see and suggesting that she post some nude photos of herself on the internet to generate a bit more buzz around the film. Which, I hasten to add, made much more sense in the context of our conversation, but still….

But, arguably, the highlight of my evening was finding myself standing around with my Financial Advisor, his Underling and his Secretary. The four of us had one of those “This is Your Life” reunion moments, where we got to be together again for the first time since that day the secretary had brought coffees for all of us into a meeting room. I was really quite emotional about it and may or may not have even exclaimed something like “Well, what do you know? The old gang’s back together!”

However, the moment was somewhat undermined by the fact that the Underling appeared to be laughing at me.

“You’re laughing at me!” I accused him.

“No, no. I’m not laughing with you,” he said.

And then it dawned on me, in that way that things dawn on you when you’ve drunk too much champagne. “Ah, you’re happy!” I said, knowingly. “You’re just so very very happy!”.

But actually, now that I think about it, he was laughing at me. But really, I should have been the one who was laughing at him because he has to wear a suit every day while I just get to wear whatever I want. And he has to go to the city every day while I just get to stay at home. And he is going to be a fully-certified Financial Advisor one day and charge $700 an hour and… yes, he had good reason to laugh at me. I see it now. 

Just as I see now that it wasn’t a good idea to drink quite so much. I woke the next morning, hungover like a proverbial, and after using all my remaining resources to deliver Mr Justice to school on time, I decided the only course of action was this: put the two younger kids in front of ABC Kids for the morning and then walk to the local shops to buy hot chips for lunch. Which was one of those things I felt totally at peace with until I said it out loud on the phone to my husband and heard how it actually sounded. 

And I realised that I had become one of those parents who get drunk at school functions with hookers, play inappropriate parlour games, make pornographic suggestions to film makers, estrange their Financial Advisory Team with drunken banter and then shamelessly employ MEP methods on their children the following day. And I promptly switched off that TV and let my kids have a bath at 10:30am instead. And I didn’t feel quite so bad about myself after that, although the hangover continued to somewhat cloud things for the rest of the day.

The end, by me.

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From The Other Side

When I was at university, I was going to change the world through the power of Physical Theatre and the rhetoric of Feminist Performance Theory! I suspect these days that that my alter-ego, The Incredibly Pathetic Crying Lady, has more effective weapons at her disposal – pathetic sobbing and incessant whinging about the unfairness of the Late Pass Policy being two of them. But at university, I was Young and Idealistic and Full of Passion and prone to Capitalise Letters Even More Than I Do Today. 

Now, nobody knows exactly what happened, but during my final year of university, my rather over-inflated notion that I was put on this earth to do “Something Significant” got somehow deflated, and I slipped quietly out of the spotlight and into the shadowlands of administration, new media project management and happy homemaking. Oh, and the blogging. Don’t forget the blogging.  

Seventeen long years have passed since I last went to see an undergraduate theatre production. And another seventeen may well have passed, had my friend MM and I not been invited to see our mutual friend, the fabulous Mzzzzz E, perform in such a show. 

Of course, this required me to step onto the campus of a place I had worked at (in an administrative capacity, no less) some 14 years previously. I was pretty confident I knew where we needed to go, but hesitated because of some construction work ahead. Before we knew it, some guy in a shirt and tie and carrying a gym bag swept up behind us like some Shirt And Tie Superhero and asked us if we needed help. Turned out he was on his way to the Union Building too so he told us to follow him. 

As he charged on ahead, I turned to MM and whispered ferociously “Don’t we look like students?”, followed by “I mean, he was practically wearing a suit – a suit!” and then the awful realisation of “Oh god. I look like Somebody’s Mother.” And that “Somebody” wasn’t a charming little first-grader who still liked eskimo kisses in bed but a fourth-year engineering student who hadn’t managed to do anything but grunt at his mother for more than eight years and was about to buy an investment property with his live-in girlfriend. 

And sure enough, when I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the bathroom mirrors shortly before the show started, I was overwhelmed by how middle-aged, middle-class and frumpy I looked against the hot pink paintwork. The slightly-ironic slung-over-the-shoulder handbag with large red roses looked reasonably hip back in the ‘burbs. But in this undergraduate setting? Positively Mumsy.

MM tried to be nice about it all as we took our seats in the theatre. “Perhaps they all see you as someone’s slightly older sister?”. There was some uncertainty in his tone, but since the lights were starting to dim, I could totally pretend that he was actually looking utterly sincere as he said it. Which was nice. 

Anyway, I can honestly say that I enjoyed the ensuing performance and not just because Mzzzzz E might be reading this. Part of that enjoyment, I must admit, was the thrill of looking at the cast and imaging who their counterpart from my own University Dramatic Days might have been. And spotting who was gay and who was not (not many, it turns out). And which ones were most likely to recite the entire Monty Python oeuvre by heart without provocation. And who held the most promise for making a complete and utter tit of themselves at the cast party – most certainly, in my own time, it was me (cue for a host of “close pals” to step forward with tell-all exposés). 

Of course, I also tremendously enjoyed watching Mzzzz E perform. She was magnifizzzzzent! However, I never did ascertain from her how she, some twenty years after her own university drama days, had managed to make a return to that most noble of art forms. I guess, objectively speaking, she’s much more still “One Of Them” – she wears platform heels, sequins on her cheeks and is “on the Centrelink” (her words not mine) – whereas I’ve definitely crossed over to the Other Side. MM, who is a parent but still manages to wear a natty hat, still has a foot in both camps. But I like to think that eventually one of those feet will get rheumatoid arthritis (or some such) and he’ll have to Choose His Side, as they like to say in the Transformers lexicon.

But here’s the thing that I enjoyed most about the performance: it was the sheer joy of seeing people doing something that they loved doing and something that they utterly believed in. And doing it together. As much as I love blogging, it’s very much a solo gig – there’s no high-fives back stage and drinks at the bar after I’ve published another post. At least not with other people.

Anyway, I found myself wondering what the Other Side NDM would say to the young passionate thespian NDM should they ever meet. You know, in the event of one of those The Terminator-style time travel type scenarios. Which is Entirely Likely.

Would she say “Stay the course! Follow your heart! Change the world one interpretive movement sequence at a time!”? Or would she say, echoing Les McQueen from Creme Brulee, “It’s a Shit Business!” and tell her to repent the theatre and embrace a life of stationary requisition forms and budget reconciliation and as soon as she possibly can?

Somehow, I like to think the Other Side NDM would say neither. She would just pat that young girl’s skinny little arm and reassure her that “Sometimes life has the strangest way of getting you exactly where you need to be.”

But whether that young NDM would listen to someone carrying a handbag like that is anyone’s guess.

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Other People’s Husbands

The other day, I was leaving the school when I found two of the local dads, standing by the entrance of the school.

“Will you look at the two of you!” I commented. “Hangin’ out by the school gates and all.”

“We’re checking out the talent as they come in…” said one of them. 

“… pushing their prams, a little like this?” I said, waggling my bottom a little as I kept walking, all the while knowing that I was still wearing the clothes I had slept in. Which was a nice touch. 

“Yummy Mummies, they’re called.” the other one said. 

“Isn’t the term MILF?”, I said, oh-so-casually over my shoulder as I kept walking through the gates. 

“And what does MILF stand for, exactly, [NDM]?” they called after me. 

“Not on school grounds, boys. Not. On. School. Grounds.” I chided them and was rewarded with a machine-gun clatter of  boyish giggles. 

When I told my husband about the exchange, his response was: “Oh, you are just a walking blog these days.”

“In my defence,” I replied. “It wasn’t nearly as bad as that time I accused [MJ] of wanting to stick his hands between my legs at the miniature railway.”

My husband shook his head and possibly rolled his eyes a little as he recalled That Time. The wind had blown my nearly-empty coffee cup into my lap and I had berated local dad MJ for not having reflexes that were cat-like enough to have caught it in time. And then I suddenly changed my tune and  publicly applauded him for not using the cup incident as an excuse for thrusting his hands between my legs. Letting the coffee spill was, really, the Gentlemanly Thing To Do if you think about it. Which I obviously did. And made everyone else sitting at the table think about it too. As is my way.

It’s a strange thing, these friendships that have slowly been forming with other people’s husbands. Since I’ve had children, I’ve pretty much mainly met the womenfolk first – and then their menfolk later. [As an aside: I actually can’t think of a single heterosexual male I’ve befriended in the last seven years. They are even harder to find than a flattering photo of Amy Winehouse, not that I’m looking for either.] And my natural tendency towards the Opposite Sex has always been to hang a whole lotta shit on them. It’s good healthy fun!

But every now and then, I wonder if somehow I might have crossed that line into something that could be read as a) slightly flirtatious or b) incredibly aggressive or c) both. Which, if you think about it, is not a Good Look for a slightly over-weight and married woman facing 40 head-on wearing Socks’nCrocs and dried porridge on her t-shirt. 

I guess reining in your flirtin’ ways a little is all part of that Becoming a Grown-Up Thang. You  know, where you have to stop listening to (and singing along to) songs that have the F word in them as you do the school-run in the Tarago, even though you have P plates. Or talking too loudly in the playground about how you’re planning to hide a bottle of vodka in the Valco Mobile Home at the bush dance fundraiser.

Bor-ing!

It’s little wonder that so many people hit the bottle or the swinger’s circuit so dang hard the minute their kids leave home. Not saying I’m going to do either (for one thing, I don’t like jacuzzis) – I’m just, you know, pointing out a statistical truth. And, admittedly, a statistical truth that is not based on any hard evidence, like actual statistics or anything. Which is probably yet another of my behavioural traits I’ll need to rein in before one of my children bases their school project and/or PhD topic on my random observations. Don’t know about you, but I’m starting to think this “Responsible Adult” thing is just one long tough gig…

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