Making it Better for All

Hello there,

Its been a while. Its been rather busy. Work especially has been deadline-heavy, so roll on the post-cutoff calm - and Christmas.

And yes, Christmas is about to roll around once more and once again I try to cope with the northern immigrant dissonance of a winter festival in the middle of summer. I know European settlement in Australia is only 200 years old but I guess I must be a bit tied to the pagan ways of following the seasons. I do wish we had a midwinter celebration of lights here to help literally enlighten the winter. And then celebrate midsummer at Christmas time instead of copying the northern hemisphere in its images of a snowy landscaped Christmas.

And then there's the whole Christ story itself. I used to be a strict catholic, brought up by strict catholics, but as I grew older I started to question what kind of God thought it necessary to allow his son to be tortured to death. What kind of rule said that had to happen. He's god after all, he could make and break rules with impunity. If he chose not to do that, then I chose not to keep company with that particular deity.

Same for the virgin birth thing. When you read past the gloss of deification its a rotten way for a baby to come into the world with an unwed mother forced to travel far so near to delivery time, with no accommodation at the end, giving birth in a byre just so daddy god could prove the point that he's still 'from the block'. Hmm it begins to smell like something a human of limited imagination would write, rather than an all knowing deity.

Don't get me wrong, Jesus is one of my heroes. He stood up and spoke of love in a time and place that was decidedly short of it. His words - his true words, not the edited gospel ones - talk of new ideas about actually loving your neighbour. He didn't make any rules about condoms or gay people or the evils of marrying a protestant (one of the biggies from my childhood). He just said that the greatest law was to love the creator, and to love your neighbour as you love yourself. You can spend your whole life just trying to get that little bundle right without anything else. Everything else was added by us humans under the Jesus brand.

So, even for us pagan heathens, there's something in the Jesus story to celebrate and reflect upon. The love for a baby, the fellowship with the animals and our position here together upon the earth. The baby depends on his parents for survival, we humans depend on our animals and our plants for survival. We're all part of the chain of life and throughout that chain we need to apply what we know to make it better for all.

Enjoy the run up to the holiday, enjoy reflecting on what it means for you, and wherever you are hold your people and your animal companions close to your heart because they are what its all about.

Despite the Daily Shit

Trends, signs, synchronicities. Interesting times.
Just when I think that its good, in my more creative area to settle for the status quo I get some pretty prime indications that its time to move forward and progress. Meanwhile in the area where traditionally the world would be telling me to be ambitious and push forward at all costs, I'm finding a fantastic pool of calm and contentment. Life, huh? Who'd know?
My work colleagues at Council - that raggle taggle mob of souls who are genuinely dedicated to serving the community - guys I salute you and I salute the warmth and - dare I say it - love - you bring to the workplace. We're a diverse bag of personalities and preferences, but you guys make coming to work on a Monday a lighter experience, and for all that I salute you!
My Stuffed Mum Sistas - Kehau and Kate - who knew that nearly ten years after we all met, and after working on various projects together that in hindsight were perfect 'training wheels' we'd be embarking on the adventure of a lifetime together?
And then there are the wonderfully supporting partners - Steven, Jeff and Glynn - who act as chefs to feed us, photographers to make us look good and handymen to provide our infrastructure amongst other things - we love you guys and we are blessed for having you. Go Guys.
I guess I'm just having an attack of thankfulness, and a realisation that despite all the daily shit we must attend to, I'm pretty much enjoying life right now.
I hope you are too!

The Best Kind of Money In The Bank

There's a line of thought that says 'if you want a different kind of result, then don't do the same thing you've always done'. Or something like that. I may have scrambled it up but you know what I mean.

Its been something that's been on my mind - this different results business -and how the changes in the outer world begin with changes in the inner. Its been leading me to look at other ways of achieving things that I haven't managed to achieve as yet.

One of the things I've been looking at is how we can raise some funding for Three Stuffed Mums. For those who don't yet know we're premiereing at the Adealide Fringe in 2011, and its a comedy cabaret with original songs and standup comedy all on the theme of Motherhood. We're a self-produced show, and happy to be so, but when my son found the Fundbreak (www.fundbreak.com.au)site I couldn't help but be intrigued.

Fundbreak is a site that uses the phenomenon of crowd funding - where many, many people can make contributions that are as little as a dollar and as large as you like - to help creative projects get off the ground.

What I like about it is that on the one level, there is a possibility that you might actually make the money you need to get the show off the ground. But what I really really like about it is that it allows people who wouldn't normally call themselves patrons of the arts to make those small contributions and actually feel like they're part of the project. I'm a sucker for 'we're all in this together' situations.

One of the catches is that if you don't make your budget target, you don't get anything and the supporters don't have to pay anything, and we just shake hands and walk away. In that case, Three Stuffed Mums is lucky, as we are three rather than just a solo act and we'll get the show on the road one way or another.

What's really exciting about Fundbreak is that it might save some important projects that would otherwise never come to the public eye. Projects that can represent minority groups, the overlooked in society, the causes that are too new, too out there to make the journey if the gatekeepers are solely producers and promoters. However if a project can talk directly to its audience at a very early stage it can have a snowball effect that may give them the money they need, but more importantly can prove to the artists that their intuition was right, that there is an audience for what they have to say or show and that they're right to be promoting it.

I firmly believe that if a project is meant to be, and the passion of the artists and the interest of the audience is there, then the money will appear from somewhere. In the meantime, have a look at www.fundbreak.com.au - you can click on the link to the side of this - and the projects that are there, including ours, that are looking for a way to hit the stage, film or art galleries.

If you're inclined to support any of them, that's great. If not, that's also great - its all about choice. But I would ask that if you see a project that sparks something in your heart, leave a message of support for the project organisers, because those words of encouragement will surely be some of the best kinds of money in the bank.

That's the Way My Cooking Crumbled

I used to be able to cook not too badly. Indeed, I was, for one summer as a student, employed as a part time housekeeper to a trio of priests, which included me providing their evening meal each night, and while I never had any complaints, there was a certain build up of anticipation towards Fridays and Bolognese night. My Bolognese was an exotic hit with the Fathers.

It was actually a lovely time that summer with the Fathers. I was introduced to Gilbert and Sullivan, could actually afford my car insurance and gained a lifelong appreciation of Father Ted.

As the years went on and I became a wife and mother, cooking became a chore and the weekly trot around the supermarket for the shopping was torture. So you can imagine my joy to find that my new husband not only loves cooking but would rather take on that particular domestic burden in our household. As I discovered more and more just how good a cook he is, I cooked less and less until for the past year or so I’ve hardly cooked anything.

What I have cooked hasn’t had great results: the muffins turned out chewy, soup was like putty and the scones, well, even the dogs wouldn’t eat them.

Somehow my cooking gene had been extracted, never to be seen again.

But today I decided to venture once more into the culinary realms. I’m no fan of cooking for cooking’s sake, mind you. Can’t see the point in Masterchef if I can’t taste any of it – how do we know it’s good? You certainly can’t go by how it looks. I once produced a mocha chocolate pudding at school that got an A, but the teacher didn’t taste it. It was only after my mum spat it out I realised that I’d mistaken the rock salt for sugar.

So, today, I’m in the supermarket and was so totally overwhelmed at the amount of everything in the heaving shelves that I couldn’t even attempt a weekly grocery shop. So I just grabbed some chicken, fish and lamb and hightailed it home.

Made lamb curry for dinner for son and I. Check – turned out very nice.
Put the chicken in the new slow cooker with some veggies, coriander, garlic and tomatoes. Check – again, very nice and will freeze that for lunches during the week (gone off sandwiches. Bread is so overrated).

One thing I did realise is that slow cookers aren’t as slow as they used to be. My old one back in the early 90s needed a good 10 hours to produce the results my new one did in four hours. So it’s not so much a slow cooker as a medium cooker. But then again I guess life is at a faster pace so it’s all relative.

Anyhow, for hubby’s dinner I decided to cook veggie sausages. They were the usual shape – kinda tubular – and occurred to me that it is the most useless, stupid design ever.

With minimal contact to the frying pan, one cooks sausages by singeing a tiny segment at a time – theoretically. But our high-tech frypan isn’t totally flat so they go rolling around and by some bizarre law of physics, no matter how you turn them the same singed, blackened strip continues to frazzle while the rest of it sits pink and raw.

I think its about time we introduced to South Australia more of the sensible Scottish Lorne sausage - or as its colloquially known ‘skwerr slice’ – a square sausage that cooks more or less evenly (despite growing an unexplainable bulge in the middle) and can be quickly and comfortably whacked onto a plate or roll.

I was off work in August for a couple of weeks due to some kind of flu thing. I was so ill back then I did something I never normally do – I watched daytime TV. And the thing was, everyone was cooking, but nobody was eating. Strange.

Ah well, after tomorrow we’ll be back to the normal routine with hubby at the helm. He can heave a sigh of relief that he’s survived another bout of my cuisine and I can go back to doing what I do best – pouring the wine.

Eat, Pray, Love and Get the Bleep Over It

I’m reading a book right now. At least I’m attempting to read it. It’s a book that’s been feted worldwide with not a negative heard about it. Its been made into a film with Julia Roberts with her endearing (yet unnervingly middle-aged) coltish ways trit-trotting across the northern hemisphere in a west-east direction. And I’m having trouble with this book.

Eat Pray Love is the story of one woman’s search for… actually I’m not quite sure what she’s searching for – something that’s a combination of God, Prince Charming and a shag (and I may be wrong but I’m only half way through the book so bear with me here if I’m wrong).

I’m not dissing the deep despair and emptiness she feels in her marriage that leads her to leave her husband, have a dysfunctional transitional relationship, then leave the US on a year of travels to find whatever it is. However maybe I’m just a tad impatient with the sheer indulgence of the exercise.

Throughout the entire half of the book I’ve read so far, there has been nothing to make me want to like her and I didn’t know what that was until yesterday. And that one thing is that she demonstrated care for no one or nothing other than that which could directly serve her.

Even in one episode where she is struggling the mantra her guru insists is said each morning at the Ashram in India, she finally finds a way of getting through it by concentrating with love on her nephew (who she apparently loves more than anything in the world but its taken half a book to mention him in passing). There seems to be a shaft of selfless light shining through for a moment but then it was all back to her when she finds a passage in a holy book that says how someone else, many years ago, got through the mantra by concentrating on her beloved nephew and so it therefore was God’s way of telling her she’s on the right path. And back we go to stage one.

I’m not criticising her for being carefree, I guess I’m just irked by her excess of indulgence, choice and money and the assumption that these are required to go on this holy quest.

Hundreds of thousands of women have done the journey before her (myself included), but without the necessity for a passport. They’ve done it in their own kitchen, their own backyard because responsibilities have curtailed physical movements.

And maybe that’s the nub of it. Maybe I’m simply jealous and that’s what’s colouring my view. I’m reaching an age where I’m slowly divesting myself of responsibilities. Since my teens I’ve had the responsibility of looking after my parents, and then having a child. Well the parents are now gone, and the child is growing fast, and I’m entering a time where I’m having more fun than ever before, and I’m blessed enough to have a partner who’s at the same stage and who’s with me on the fun quest.

Would I have taken myself off to Italy, India and Bali if I had the freedom and resources? Probably not.

When I picture her life as it was, it makes me feel quite panicky. There’s no reference point other than the self, no anchor. And that self is in freefall and at that stage not to be trusted for any judgement call. I wonder if she would have learned the same lesson by volunteering with homeless people or by devoting herself to some service to others? Probably, but it wouldn’t have the glamour of the world trip. Cynical? Moi?

I may finish the book loving it – I’ll let you know. But in the meantime I reckon it should be called “Eat,Pray Love and Get the Bleep over it”

Back to the Wall

Much as I love South Australia, there are a few things that puzzle me.
For instance, I almost always refuse to eat alfresco in cafes. I just don’t understand why they take their precious customers and put them in the most unpleasant place to eat and drink - right out at the kerbside.
Look at any European café, and its outdoor tables are huddled against the building, allowing pedestrians to walk on by in peace, allowing vehicles to park at the kerb if they want to and generally streamlining the process of either going where you want to go or sitting down and having a coffee.
Switch to SA and as a pedestrian you have to do a kind of Indiana Jones operation if you’re walking past a café, as you have to dodge the crossfire of waiting staff travelling to tables loaded with food or from tables loaded with used crockery. Just as restaurant owners would complain if someone built a pedestrian thoroughfare through their restaurant, its no fun wafting through the aromas of other people’s meals on the street just to get somewhere. Sometimes I’m so tempted to steal a chip as I fly past, just because I can.
Sometimes they kindly put bollards at the kerb, which I don’t find too reassuring because it implies that previously there was a risk of rogue vehicles ploughing into diners at some point. Plus you also get to suck in those lovely exhaust fumes that will add a certain je ne sais quoi to your Fettuccini puttanesca.
So, please, Councils and Restrauteurs, use whole of brain thinking when you’re planning your next alfresco project and take the diners back to the wall!

Show stuff and Dads' Day

Hello,

I haven't written a blog for a few weeks now. Suddenly I seemed to have dropped the habit of the weekly outpourings. Ah well, its best to go with the flow.
Its not that I haven't been writing at all - I have - just not the blog. The most important writing has been happening in aid of our upcoming Adelaide Fringe show, and what an experience that has been.
Some shows can seem like a struggle from the start, even if you can't pinpoint the exact cause. And others like this one seem to have a life of their own from the point of conception. I'm working with colleagues Kate Burr and Kehau Jackson on something that we think will tickle many fancies this coming Fringe season, and the show is writing itself.
We decided to move from straight standup to comedy cabaret. Of course with cabaret comes music, and as none of us are musicians it would seem that might be the first obstacle.
To date we've now written five songs - words and music to four of them and words to a traditional tune for the fifth. Like those bumble bees who fly because no-one has told them that they cannot according to the laws of physics, we couldn't see why we shouldn't write our own stuff. The main reason was to avoid the copyright palaver of using other peoples music, but its now taken on a life of its own - move over Carol King, Peter Allen and anyone else who's in the way. Wood Jackson and Burr are recreating the Brill Building here in Adelaide. Watch out for more info soon on a show you'll definitely want to see.

**************************
Its Father's Day here in Australia, so I'd just like to give a shout out to all the good Dads.
Also, to the men who've been good fathers to me in one way or another:
To my own Dad John, who passed away two years ago, love you and miss you dad.
To my darling husband Steven, thankyou for being such a great dad for Michael and Andrew, and for David.
To my brother in law Dave, thankyou for being an alternative father figure throughout my life.
To David's grandad John, thankyou for being a great grandad and teaching him to enjoy fruit!
To my father in law David, thankyou for welcoming David and I into the family and being a lovely dad-in-law.
To Father John McL, thankyou for the love and spiritual guidance. I miss you and think of you often. I know you're still looking after me from wherever you are.
To Jim Martin, my best mate's dad who's done so much to help me - especially when I was at my lowest ebb.
To Arnold Halliday, who welcomed me to the Halliday family almost 20 years ago.

All fine men, all good men, and all should be proud of their abilities as dads.
Happy Fathers' Day!