Lies My Mirror Told Me by Wendy Harmer

Author:Wendy Harmer [Harmer Wendy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2023-09-09T00:00:00+00:00

12

Scotland the brave

Toilet cubicle mirror

Boeing 747

35,000 feet up, somewhere over the Indian Ocean

Bleargh!

There’s a dead person wearing your clothes.

You look like hell.

But you’re going to the Edinburgh Festival! Then Paris and New York!

First time overseas. No sleep for you. It’s all too exciting.

Still hours to go before you land in London.

How do people do this?

I went to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe four times in all, but no outing was more shambolic than the first time, in 1985, with Richard Stubbs.

It had been a hectic year, with a return season of Characters at the Trade Union Club in January: ‘Gretel Killeen is the housewife. Maggie Lynch is Sarah Daytripper. Julie McCrossin is the doctor. Mandy Salomon is Fiona Smout. Sue Ingleton is Shelia Shit. Wendy Harmer is Wendy Harmer.’

A Sydney Morning Herald review from Prue Charlton notes that our first outing in an obscure venue had taken ‘everyone by surprise’ and been the hit of the previous year’s Sydney Festival. ‘Female comics, at that time, were so few in number and located in such far peripheries of the entertainment scene that it was hard to know where they’d come from. Unlike most women comics, Harmer does not adopt a character: hers is simply the style of the traditional stand-up comic, a style which requires a degree of self-assurance that most women would regard as unattainable.’ It also proved, said the writer, that ‘feminists could be funny’.

Who knew?

In April, due to demand, we transferred to the prestigious Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf Theatre, where, on opening night, cleaning lady Val gaily mistook Premier Neville Wran and his wife Jill for Max Gillies and Susan Renouf.

The aroma of sheep lanolin embedded in the old floorboards took me back to the days of the shearing sheds I’d known as a kid. I could barely tear myself away from the floor-to-ceiling windows, which afforded an enchanting view of the harbour by night. A spellbinding setting for a theatre.

I returned to Melbourne on a high, with critical acclaim in my swag, to appear in the second TV series of Gillies, but I bowed out of the third series to work live on stage with Richard. My heart was in stand-up.

We’d performed as a duo at St Kilda’s Dick Whittington Tavern in a show we called Do You Come Here Often. I do not know how we managed it, because ‘Stubbsy’ was hosting the breakfast show on radio 3XY, going to air at 5.30 a.m., and was getting by on only a few hours sleep. I was in the ABC’s TV studios during daylight hours.

For me, cocaine helped.

I’ve never been much of drug taker. Enthusiastic, but an amateur. Can’t do marijuana. My first two puffs on a joint made me vomit, and I’ve never been back. Ever. Tried magic mushrooms just the once; hallucinated for two days. Never again. No ‘trips’ for me, either. Took ecstasy; slept for eighteen hours straight. I reckon it was horse tranquilliser. No!

One night, after a million vodkas, I snorted Amyl on the

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