NEXT WAVE: Wael Zuaiter, Unknown

NEXT WAVE
Wael Zuaiter: Unknown
Creative Nonfiction and Theatre Works
30 April 2014
Theatre Works
to 11 May
theatreworks.org.au

Illustration by Matt Huynh

The storytelling in Wael Zuaiter: Unknown is exquisite. Compelling and original, it uncovers truth and doubt but focuses on a personal story, because people may not listen to opinion but they do listen to story.

Jesse Cox makes radio documentaries but wanted to tell his Aunt Janet's story differently. He sits at a desk and talks. With cinema-screen-size hand-drawn animation, audio recordings, photos, and live music that almost breathes with Jesse, his unpretentious and gentle telling leaves the structure unseen and draws its audience into a story that's far more complex than its romantic beginnings suggest.

In 1972, Australian painter Janet venn Brown was living in Rome in a tiny flat with an amazing view of the Vatican. When she first arrived in the city, she met Palestinian translator Wael Zuaiter and they had been engaged for seven years on 16 October 1972 when he spent the day on her balcony working on his loved Italian translation of 1001 Nights and later left to go home.

At his door, he was shot and killed.

His was the first assassination by Israel's Mossad for his connection with the Black September group who held Israeli athletes hostage at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games and killed them.

Jesse tells Janet's version of Wael and shares his own research, which included trips to Palestine, Israel and Rome. He wanted to find out the truth. . He finds many truths, and if the heart of this story is his love for his Aunt, the guts is the questions that remain.

Wael Zuaiter: Unknown is political and historical but is connected to us and to now by a personal link that ensures its politics and history won't be forgotten.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: Rocky Horror Show 2014

Rocky Horror Show
Ambassador Theatre Group & John Frost
26 April 2014
Comedy Theatre
to 13 June 2014
rockyhorror.com.au

Having toured the UK for a year to celebrate Rocky's 40th birthday, the Australian-cast version have snapped on their fishnets in Melbourne.

It was great when it all began. So I've been told.

In the 1970s, the Rocky Horror Show was this raw subversive show that shocked mainstream theatre and found an unexpected and long-running connection with an audience who were just as raw and wild. It wasn't long after opening in London and the US, that this weird rock and roll show about a transvestite alien ran at midnight in an old cinema in a dodgy part of Glebe in Sydney. It was rough and unpredictable and, just by going, you declared that you were part of the generation ready to tell stuffy old Australia to get real and loosen up.

I know it's impossible to see that Rocky, or even one that's anything like it, but it doesn't stop me wanting to.

The current production is so far from those first ones that it's hard to even see them as the same work.

When Erika Heynatz's Usherette opens with a simply sung "Science Fiction" in front of a ripped curtain, the tone hints that it's going to be something that goes back to the roots of the show.

But it doesn't. No fishnets have holes, no makeup runs, the blood is offstage and everything is shiny sparkly and glittery clean. It's just so nice! And with an audience of lovely people who are able to buy expensive tickets and wear their best frocks and buy Rocky-branded phone covers and nail polish from the merchandise stand, it's as subversive as the big red hands in the Coles ads.

Which isn't to say it isn't good. And as a slick commercial professional production of Rocky Horror Show, it may be as good as it's ever going to be.

The design pays loving homage to the past productions (and the film) but, with the likes of a taxidermied dodo and its own curtain-call costumes, it has an originality that lets it stand alone. The cast are all ridiculously beautiful, there's no hint of a missed step or note, and each obviously love being in this show and bring something new to their so-well-known characters. Throw in a live band and a lighting design that's reminds us that it's a rock show and it's hard to fault.

And maybe that's the problem. The show's played like everyone knows exactly what's going to happen. There are no surprises. Maybe there are no surprises left? It finds its own moments (thanks Vaso), but it's such a reflection and celebration of 41 years of Rocky that it's never given the chance to be or find itself.

Which also leaves us watching the super-lovely Christie and Tim instead of Brad and Janet. And Erika, Kristian, Tony, Ashlea, Brendan and Nichols are all bloody marvellous, but none find a new truth or bring a reality to their characters that lets us care when things go bad for them.

But every Rocky is remembered for its Frank N Furter.

Since 1992, Craig McLachlan has been Frank a few times in Australia and the UK. He's hilarious and sexy and adorable, and milks every laugh he can – even before they come – then milks some more. I can't decide if his over-playing to the audience is endearing or needs to be stopped. At first it felt out of place, but he wins everyone over with his repetition and constant wink to the audience that it's all a big joke.

It may be unfair to compare Craig's Frank to Reg Livermore's 1974 Frank, especially being based on hearsay, photos and the Australian-cast recording, but Reg said this:

"My advice to any prospective Frank is this: if you're remotely concerned about whether the audience thinks you're really like that, if you care at all what an audience thinks about you personally, you'd be well advised to take off the corset and head home. Frank is like that; he's worse, and must be played that way. Frank is the fearless embodiment of all that's unspeakable, let alone the unnatural; his antics encourage many laughs, but first and foremost he presents real and terrible threat. Never forget, the audience must be wary of him, they should never take their eyes off him, and if they do it's at their peril."

Now that's a Frank and a Rocky Horror Show I'd love to see.

This was on AussieTheatre.com

Photo by Jeff Busby.

FOLA: Make the call

FOLA
Make the Call
zin
26 April 2014
St Kilda, near Theatre Works
fola.com.au

It started sitting on a bench waiting for a phone call.

It ended sitting in a park with a kangaroo.

It was brilliant.

Click on the pic to see it big.

Interview: Richard O'Brien

With everyone having seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show film, how do you convince them to see another live production? I asked its creator, Richard O’Brien, when he was in Melbourne on his way to play the Narrator in the Adelaide season of the current touring show.

“It’s fast and sexy and snappy and it’s live. You can’t beat the live experience. It’s like the difference between real sex and porno. You can’t beat the real. So I’m told!”

 Richard O’Brien and Brendan Irving. Photo by Jeff Busby

The Rocky Horror Show opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London in June 1973. They had no idea what they were starting! Last year, Rocky turned 40 and a new UK production celebrated with a year-long tour and the Australian cast version opened in January in Brisbane. It opens this week in Melbourne.

 “The Time Warp” in 1980

My now signed 45 from 1980

At 71 O’Brien still looks like Riff Raff (the character he played in the original production and the film) but less pervy and unnervingly charming. He put down his glass of wine, took my hand and casually sung “Ahh, Anne-Marie”.

Richard O’Brien sung my name! My 1980’s teen self can die happy.

In 1980 Australia, teen life revolved around the top 10 on Sunday night’s Countdown. Being a just-teen, I was an expert in all things chart related but was unsure about “Ashes to Ashes” beating “The Time Warp” to number one. Having just discovered Rocky and Bowie, I was torn.

Being too young to have seen Reg Livermore’s 1970s Frank in Australia, it was the film that brought me into the Rocky world; a world that was so different from my conservative church-school life in conservative Adelaide.

Here was a world where difference was celebrated, a world where men in heels and fishnets were as sexy as all go get, masculinity and femininity weren’t assumptions of gender, and sex was fun. And fun and funny is what O’Brien still wants this show to be.

The Rocky Horror Show, 1973, Royal Court Theatre, photo Douglas Jeffery

“It was never ever ever meant to be a sex show. It was never ever meant to titillate in that sense. In fact, I hate when it starts to get into that area. We have had productions where Frank and the bedroom scenes start to move into a different ground and I get … No, it’s got to be always funny, not salacious and rude. That’s not what it’s about and I don’t want it to ever be like that.”

Rocky is clearly still a work that he loves and, quite rightly, has a protective ownership of. He’s still involved in the granting of production rights and told me that Australian amateur rights aren’t going to be released in the near future.

Forty years on, it’s still THE show that everyone wants to perform and we talked about what it is about Rocky that let it reach so beyond its intent and to have been, and still is, so loved in Australia.

“It’s interesting isn’t it? I think Australia was a fairly repressed society – not in a fascistic way or totalitarian way – but it was just part of the fabric of Australian mentality.

“We might have said we were open and outgoing and all the rest of it, but the truth of the matter is that ocker mentality seems to strike about 70 percent of the Australian male population – and still does to this day.

“That 30 percent of genial, nice, ordinary middleclassless (his wonderful word) human beings, like ourselves, make up the big swell of Australians, but inside that 30 percent was a strong church element who saw Rocky as a bit, you know, ‘mm-mmm’ and, of course, there was the homophobic kind of thing that runs through them. But put that together with the ocker and put Rocky into that society and you have something that is quite volatile and consequently very entertaining.

“It’s against itself and in spite of themselves and somehow or other it works terribly well inside these kinds of societies.”

Tim Maddren, Christie Whelan Browne . Photo by Jeff Busby

He said as an aside that when they went to Amsterdam the show was “a damp squib”. “What were we bringing them? They take drugs, do rock and roll and have sex with men like that all the time.”

The film

It was in the USA, in cities similar to Australia’s, that the 1975 Rocky Horror Picture Show found its popularity – after initially flopping – and developed its midnight-screening, dress-up, act-out cult status that transferred the ownership of the film firmly to its audience.

The midnight screenings started in 1976 at the Waverly Theatre in Greenwich Village, New York – the 1980 film Fame includes a screening at the Waverly – and at about the same time in Austin, Texas. Austin is a university town and O’Brien said how university students in the US were among the first to pick up the film as their own.

Richard O’Brien & Patricia Quinn. “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”

“It was the disaffected youth and the lost and awkward kids who wanted to be in show business but didn’t know how. They could join their little club and dress up and be these people each night and they didn’t have to worry too much because the films rolling on relentlessly, so it doesn’t matter if they trip up. It’s all included in the fun and they were very much making it their own.”

O’Brien also admits to not being as enthused about the film.

“Well, the film is good, but it’s slow. When I first watched it, we didn’t pick up the cues. It’s not soporific but has a kind of dream-like somnolence quality that I find rather disappointing in a way.”

But as it found its place and its fans, the slowness found its purpose as he was often asked (and said in his best mid-American accent), “Did you make the gaps between the lines so you we could say our lines?”.

He always answers, “Yes”.

Shock Treatment

After the film’s unexpected success, O’Brien wrote another film: 1981’s Shock Treatment.

Bringing back Rocky’s Australian director, Jim Sharman, and designer Brian Thomson (who won a Tony for his design for The King and I that’s just opened in Brisbane), Shocky followed Brad and Janet’s story once they were married back in Denton. It featured O’Brien, Patricia Quinn (original and film Magenta), Nell Campbell (original and film Columbia) and included Barry Humphries and Ruby Wax.

It also flopped.

It was about people living in a tv studio where the prize was celebrity and fame. This was unheard of in 1981.

Richard O’Brien & Patricia Quinn. “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”

“We predicted the ‘wanna be’ generation, which the Spice Girls kind of exemplified when they came along. That’s exactly what we were talking about. And then Big Brother came along and they go into the house and are living in a world of TV. And then The Truman Show. We were 25 years ahead of that and not necessarily even attempting to view the future.”

So what about a remake or a stage version that puts it in the now?

“I think it’s deeply flawed through the story line and I don’t know what to do about that. I think the soundtrack’s cool and certain journeys are good, but I think it needs somebody else to sit down with it.

“In the last 20 years I’ve been asked at least 10 times – generally by well-intentioned young people. If somebody were there with a fine brain and a track record …”

Or maybe it’s time to have another look at the film (cough, YouTube if you can’t find the DVD).

"Shock Treatment"

The Time Warp of 2014

It’s nice to think that Australia was a different place in the 1980s. I know that Rocky Horror, live and film, had a huge influence on its fans from that time and I like to think that we grew into adulthood without a lot of the prejudices that continue to shock us today. (It also made me see everything Sharman directed at the SA State Theatre Co – and discover Shakespeare – and made me read John Wyndham to find out what a “Triffid that spits poison and kills” was.)

But all these years on, we seem to have found ourselves in a politically regressive time warp where ockerism and conservatism are combining to force us to leap to the right and hurtle backwards. Perhaps we really do need another dose of Rocky.

As O’Brien said, “It’s an antidote to all those pre-conceived ideas and preconceptions of what the world should be about and it has a liberating joyous feeling.”

“And we must never remember that all those guys out being butch are still putting on a pair of fish nets occasionally.”

 This was on AussieTheatre.com com.

The 24-Hour Experience, part 5

 FOLA

24-Hour Experience

29–30 March 2014

24hourexperience.com.au

I went home after the morgue. I sent a goodnight tweet to those still going at 7 am and woke up at midday as they were starting the final picnic.

I went home because I was meant to be at Comedy Festival shows that night. I didn't make them and I wish that I'd gone though. I don't know if I would have made it, but I know I missed some great stuff.

Here are Ali Alexander's pics.

Would I do it again? Hell yes!

Finally, there were lots of artists involved in creating the Experience and all the 24 works. Please visit 24hourexperience.com.au to see who they were. And, on behalf of all of us who loved this experience, the final thank you must go to the volunteers who looked after us. 

Hour #18 The Culture of Forgetting 5 am

Hour #19 Inheritance 6 am

Hour #20 A Day And A Night 7 am

Hour #21 Confessional 8 am

Hour #22 Random Choir of Mutual Wonder 9 am

Hour #23 How TV Makes Our Lives Exciting 10 am

Hour #24  Tell Me What You're Really Thinking 11 am

Hour #25 Picnic 12 pm

These three did all 24+ hours without a break. 

The 24-Hour Experience, part 4

FOLA

24-Hour Experience

29–30 March 2014

24hourexperience.com.au

The lead up to 1 am gave us time to lie on bean bags and seats in the Federation Square atrium, be grateful for chocolate and wish we'd nicked some wine from dinner. It was good for us who were getting sleepy, but was a bit of a downer for the new starters. My favourite bit was a teenage girl, who was out for drinks, asking me what drugs we were taking to do this. She didn't believe that it was just chocolate and adrenalin.

But it was nearly time for an underground adventure that promised a hardhat and the use of torches because we were going to something called The Trench!

Hour #14 Under the City 1 am

Photo by Ali Alexander

The sound and video installation in the "trench" was beautiful. It was about drains through the city  – water and sewerage – and the people who work in them. The calming soundscape of water echoed and bounced off the walls of the large concrete room, but it wasn't a trench. It was a large room, a couple of flights of stairs down where we didn't get hardhats or need our torches. It's so wrong to be disappointed by something that was really good, but we were tired and excited about going into an underground trench. 

Hour #15 Beaufort Wind Lounge 2 am

This was a two-parter. While half of the group went into a wind tunnel installation in BMW Edge (no pics, but it was very lovely), the others sat in bean bags and were served green tea and Japanese treats.

The tea ceremony didn't start well because we upset the artists by moving all of their placed-for-the-piece-to-work bean bags. But we moved them back and understood that they they were in small groups so that everyone could have a very beautiful and intimate sung tea-pouring ceremony. Which then proceeded to prove that the world is split into two groups: those who like squidgy, flaccid, sweet-but-savoury Japanese desserts (like me) and those who don't (I had an extra one to make up for them).

And 2 am may be the strangest hour. Adrenalin is both running out and kicking in. It's an hour for activity and laughter rather than gentle contemplation. 

Hour #16 Theatre Is My S(k)in 3 am

No pics for this one. We were crowded into one of the gallery spaces in the atrium and listened to an artist who has worked as a stripper and lap dancer. 

Her story was genuine and fascinating, but there seemed a sense of disbelief that no one was terribly shocked by it. The time of night was spot on but, even though I understand putting it in a posh art space, the story didn't connect to the space.

But we got whiskey. And I have never enjoyed a whiskey more than I did then.

Hour #17 The Rest is Silence 4 am

This was what we'd been waiting for. 4am. It was time to go the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine and the Donor Tissue Bank. We were walking through the back streets of Southbank to go to a morgue!

This was the event that drew the most people to the Experience with more people joining us on four-hour tickets. The staff who met us there were astonished at how many people turned up.

Out of respect to the place, we were asked to make it no-photo zone.

This wasn't a performance. The staff who work there ran through what they do when a body comes into the Homicide Room (this is where crime and accident victims are brought), then took us through the Tissue Donor Bank (where human tissue is collected and stored).

For all the marvellous concepts and artists and everything else wonderful about this experience, this was my highlight.

It was just like a crime TV show, but so much better. We stood behind a glass wall looking into the room where bodies are assessed and post mortems are carried out. The staff wear wellies, it's sterile like an operating theatre but there are lots of knives and hoses.

The staff wheeled in an empty gurney and assessed the 'body'. This included a forensic pathologist coming in after being at the opera and another member of staff calling the family to ask about tissue donation. It wasn't gruesome and there was never a moment when the 'body' wasn't treated with respect. 

Next we had to put on the sterile gowns, shower caps and booties (putting the booties on at 4.30 am was a real test) and it was into the Tissue Donor Bank where we saw frozen skin and powdered bone and were allowed to ask anything.

Even though I have tissue donor ticked on my drivers license, I had no idea what it meant. While organ donation has to come from a live (brain dead) patient, tissue (skin, heart valves and bone) can be collected up to 24 hours after death.

Burns patients need hundreds of skin grafts. People having orthopedic surgery need extra bone. Heart valves go to people having heart surgery.

If any of my family and friends ever have to wonder, I am a donor. I have no concerns about what happens to my body after I die and hope that it can be put to as many good uses as possible. 

Some of us stayed longer and talked to the staff about their experience of working there and of having a large group of enthusiastic and over-tired arts-goers coming to see them at 4 am. They also asked us about our experience and best answer was: "I expected it to be about death, but it was all about life".

The 24-Hour Experience, part 3

FOLA

24-Hour Experience

29–30 March 2014

24hourexperience.com.au

Hour #10 Australian Gothic 9 pm

Photo by Ali Alexander

Ok, so we're sitting in the old exercise yard at the Watchhouse of the Old Melbourne Goal. This was where many like those-now-mostly-known-from-Underbelly-etc beat the shit out of each other and it hasn't changed since it was closed in the 1990s.

But we were sitting on our portable seats, eating excellent choc top ice creams and watching a film about convicts in Tasmania.

We then went for a wander through the Old Melbourne Gaol cells. This place was closed much earlier (1929), but it's still a place where people were hanged and it's gently creepy wandering about night and looking at it as art.

Hour #11 Tales from the Laneways 10 pm

Photo by Ali Alexander

This was an unexpected continuation of the stories that started in the Elizabeth Street toilets. It was also a non-photo performance; after all, we don't take photos in the theatre.

I thought I knew all of the tiny laneways in the city; I didn't. And, even the most friendly daytime shopping lanes feel very different in the dark.

Here were stories that we don't always want to see. Stories about people from behind dumpsters, in corners that never see a street cleaner and in front of passers by in the middle of the street, but are still ignored or turned away from. Raw and real enough to confuse passers by, the triumph of this work was that it found compassion and hope in the lives of people who don't have much hope.

Although, my favourite moment was a couple coming out of a club and having no idea what they were looking at. I wanted to call out, "Don't worry, it's just middle class white people watching actors pretending to be druggies and calling it art." God, I love this city.

Hour #12 A Band On Every Corner 11 pm

On the approach to this hour, those in for the long haul were considering breaks, coffee and time out. 

But a group of us were caught in front of St Paul's cathedral where exhaustion led to dancing. Except me, I became bag bitch because I was far too tired to dance. 

There were four bands, but I have no idea if two of them were seen by anyone on the Experience. No matter, as they would have been seen by passers by, which is terrific, but proved that Experience performances needed to be focussed.

Hour #13 The Midnight Hour 12 am

Sadly, midnight was the most disappointing hour. What should have been a celebration of halfway, a farewell to the first 12-hourers and a welcome to the next 12-hourers was a bit blah. 

Getting popcorn from a giant piece of popcorn was neat, but the films being shown on the Fed Square screen didn't fit the mood of exhausted excitement and anticipation of the dark hours that were to come. And the group split up, so we couldn't say goodbyes and pop the party poppers we'd been saving since getting our Experience packs some 12 hours earlier.

Photo by Ali Alexander

But we could now start the count down until the morgue visit and the chocolate supplies bought earlier came into their own.

The 24-Hour Experience, part 2

FOLA

24-Hour Experience

29–30 March 2014

24hourexperience.com.au

It turns out that I didn't need to go home after a mere five hours, I just needed some alone time and a pandan bun.

Hour #7 Bathing Beauties 6 pm

This is the show that brought me into the experience of the Experience.

The pool at the gorgeous Melbourne City Baths is old enough to still be measured in feet. We sat wearing headphones in the gallery above the pool and listened to stories about women who swim – the pressure, body shape issues, pain, joy, competition and freedom – while watching women who fit their own images swim: synchronised, racing and pleasure. Place, theme and story merged beautifully and it felt like the stories belonged to the space.

Hour #8 The Catalyst Club 7 pm

Photo by Ali Alexander

The Catalyst Club was formed in 1910 by 19 women who were Melbourne University alumni. They called themselves the Cats and the secret club still meets today. This meeting was performed at the Victoria Room at the Queen Victoria Women’s Centre (so close and yet a world away from QV) and men were allowed to attend.

There were place cards with information about past members, like writer Joan Lindsay, and the performance was a meeting with a paper, a meal and a discussion.

The food was excellent, it had to fuel us for a few hours, and we got to wear cat ears!

Hour #9 Behind the Public Eye 8 pm

photo by Ali Alexander

It's amazing how energy and enthusiasm change when it gets dark, or after some wine and profiteroles.

This work took us into the underground toilets on Elizabeth Street. I've living Melbourne for over 11 years and I've never even noticed them,

Here we saw stories of people who use these toilets, from the desperate to the angelic, and the stories continued above ground.

This was another work that connected space to story emotionally. It was also the beginning of the works (and us) interacting with the public.

Coming up: The Old Melbourne Gaol, laneways and dancing in front of the cathedral.

The 24-Hour Experience, part 1

FOLA
24-Hour Experience
29–30 March 2014
24hourexperience.com.au

It's been more than 24 days since the 24-Hour Experience, the final event of the Festival of Live Art.

My only excuse is that it was in the middle of six weeks of festivals and my tweets tell me exactly how I felt by the hour.

24 hours. 24 shows. A new one every hour in a new location in and around the city.

Designed to explore and reflect on Melbourne's hidden, secret or ignored spaces, the works ranged from earnest to joyous, personal to voyeristic, and already-forgotten to highlight-of-the-year.

I started at noon with the goal to make it to late in the night or at least until 6 pm at the City Baths.

I finally headed home at 5.30 am. I saw 16 shows.

With people on single-show, 4-hour, 12-hour and 24-hour tickets, there were about 50 people doing each experience, with the core group bonding more by the hour. It was like travelling, in that strangers became friends very quickly. And if we go back next year, it'll be a reunion.

Hour #1 Freewheelin' 12 pm

This involved wheelchairs, taking photos and posting to Instagram with iPods that didn't want to play the game. But we met a lovely dog called Lilly on Princes Bridge and her dad took this pic.

Hour #2 The Performance of Everyday 1 pm

Lunch! And our first headphones for the day. We ate while listening to verbatim conversations overheard in another cafe. I so hope they were verbatim because the one about the 40-something woman having laser-eye sex with the 23-year-old man was too wonderful to not be real.

Hour #3 Is there theatre in justice? 2 pm

We're in the old magistrates court as a the barrister prepares for a case. He asks if we think he's a real lawyer or an actor. At 2 am, I looked up and said, "Why didn't we say, 'You're a barrista'?"

Hour #4 The Library of Indestructible Dreams 3 pm

This was my first wow moment and the first one to let me feel the personal connection. It happened in the busy first floor of The State Library.

Earlier in the week, we'd been sent an email asking us to choose a book from the library. I chose an early edition of Winnie The Pooh from the rare books collection. I never expected it to come out and was happy with a Where is the Green Sheep?. 

Green Sheep was waiting for me, but then I saw a plastic bag with my name on it.

It held a 1946 edition of Winnie the Pooh. It wasn't the 1926 one, but it was old and loved and from a time when books were something precious. When I was a child, the paternal side of my family weren't winners, but they gave me books and for that I will always be grateful. Winnie the Pooh was my favourite and one of the first books that I read by myself.

The experience was to follow directions to a spot in the library where two people would meet and read each other a page from their book.

Hour #5 The Guest List 4 pm

photo by Ali Alexander

Finding undeveloped, original Melbourne buildings in the city is always astonishing. This one was in the Lower School House of the Wesley Uniting Church (between Lonsdale and Little Lonsdale streets, where it would have sat a stones throw from the brothels).

The most wonderful part of this performance, by Aaron Pedersen, was that the audience responded when he started talking about the wedding he was attending. He didn't expect the response, but it seemed like it had been written to be exactly like that.

Hour #6 Queerum 5 pm

photo by Ali Alexander

I hit the wall early.  At 5 pm I wanted to go home and had had enough of bloody art and bloody artists. So I didn't go to the installation in a house in Carlton. Instead, I had coffee and a large pandan bun, and headed to Aldi for late-night chocolaty supplies.

Coming up: Bathing Beauties at the City Baths, a cat and quiz dinner, and going into the underground men's toilets.