Reckoning by Magda Szubanski

Author:Magda Szubanski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2016-06-15T04:00:00+00:00

POLITICALLY CORRECT POO

As I had promised my parents, I re-enrolled for the following year. Among other subjects, I took the drama elective. Despite my ardent politics a tiny ember of artistic hope still flickered. Until the fireball incident. Our teacher gave us an exercise: we were to imagine that we were fireballs. Some people were brilliant at it. I wasn’t. I was painfully self-conscious, and halfway through my fireball sputtered out. I loved the theory—Artaud, Grotowski, Brecht. But I quickly realised that whatever talent I had wasn’t suited to drama school. I stopped going to class.

I finally found a home with my friends Sue and Marc and Peter in Palmerston Place. A bright sunshine yellow and brown, two-storey terrace right opposite uni. Sue was a botany student. Marc was a dapper Frenchman who was studying computer science, I think. Pete was tall and handsome and a rising star of the left intelligentsia. They were a really great bunch and were good-natured about my lack of domestic skills. We used to go and see bands and movies and march in rallies together and smoke pot around the heavy wooden kitchen table. (Well, the others did. Pot does not agree with me. It makes me feel insaner.) I was the house clown. I would do impersonations and accents and try to make them laugh while they toked on the joint. They would roll back, sucking in hard, furiously waving their hands at me to stop, trying not to let any of the precious THC-laden smoke escape their lungs. We had some great laughs around that kitchen table. And they would always say, ‘You should be on the stage!’ But I was haunted by my failed fireball.

We would sometimes go to see comedy at the Last Laugh in Collingwood. The Laugh was already an institution and all the greats of alternative comedy, including overseas acts like French and Saunders and the guys from The Young Ones, played there. I longed to be up on the stage but I still hadn’t a clue how to go about it.

I loved all things edgy and unconventional. It was the era of great northern English post-punk-cum-new-wave music. Bands like the Buzzcocks, Magazine, Joy Division, Gang of Four and Howard Devoto. Songs with dystopian, sexually transgressive titles like ‘Orgasm Addict’, ‘(Love Like) Anthrax’, ‘Homosapien’ and my all-time favourite, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart (Again)’. ‘Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)’ became my anthem. We would have parties and pogo round the lounge room until the walls shook and our retinas nearly detached.

Then one day Pete did something slightly shocking: he decided that he was going to teach himself to cook. It was a rare thing for men to have culinary expertise in the 1980s. Pete had prematurely greying lambswool curls and long fingers that were never intended for manual work. He was a natural intellectual and he later became an academic. He approached the task the same way he would an exam—he bought a cookbook, he followed the instructions and he made osso buco.

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