Feliz Dieciocho!

Who says only humans and roosters dance the cueca?



Happy Birthday Chile!  The 18th and 19th of September are the Fiestas Patrias - a festival commemorating the formation of Chile as an independent state in 1818.  
One eats empanadas, attends asados (BBQs), and dances the cueca, Chile's national dance.

(If you're interested, metafilter has quite a comprehensive post on the cueca today!)

There Possibly IS No Business Like Show Business

On account of being sik, I spent my evening on the sofa, snuffling pitifully and watching old Hollywood musicals.  I started out with There's No Business Like Show Business because it has Ethel Merman and Marilyn Monroe AND Donald O'Conner in it, but the film didn't seem to do much with any of them.  There was a great deal of noise, but not much music.  There was a great deal of technicolor drapery and swirling, but not much dancing or choreography.  Lots of jokes, not much humor, and a great deal of Marilyn Monroe wearing not very much at ALL.   Her character sings in nightclubs, but her costume has chrome nipples on tips of its spangled pneumatic front and that's all I have to say about that.  Poor Donald O'Conner was forced to dance the highland fling to a New Orleans Blues version of Alexander's Ragtime Band - and Ethel Merman?  She had precisely two speeds - full throttle and off, and no-one seemed to be able to get near the off button.

            After ten minutes and six musical comedy numbers, Mr Tabubil looked up from his book and said "You know what?  This is just like porn.  A tottery, badly acted plot to give a thin string of connection to the noisy bits.   And the noisy bits? They're an aesthetic abomination.  And the apparent sincerity of the actors?  Yeah, they're faking it."

            So we put on Broadway Melody of 1940 with Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell instead, and Mr Tabubil forgot that he isn't supposed to approve of movies that aren't in color, and we watched happily until bedtime.

La Ensambe Serenata

Yesterday was a public holiday in honor of Saint Peter and Saint Paul.  Chileans don't generally pay too much attention to the honorees of their many public holidays.   When a gringo asks, they shrug and say that they're not entirely sure, but ISN'T it nice to have an extra day to spend with family?

Chilean work days are very long, and I can't imagine that anyone worth the honoring would mind being remembered in happiness and family rather than by name. 

On this particular long weekend, we were taken out by a group of musical friends to La Maquina  (the Machine) a small club in Providencia to listen to la Ensamble Serenata.  La Maquina is housed in an old, high-ceilinged Chilean house.  Room dividers had been knocked out and floor levels now vacillate around an unspecified mean-floor-level.  The walls have been painted ochre-red and hung with large papier-mache carnival masks: one of the men in our party whispered to me that with the ochre color it was a VERY Valparaiso sort of club - and now I will have to go down to the coast and do the midnight-till-five club scene there, just so I can find other places just like it.  La Maquina was bold and cheery and squashed in with far too many tables, just like all the best clubs in every city everywhere. We were a large and cheerful party and had a large table right in front of the corner of the old house that had been roped off for the band.  

As he passed around the menu,  the proprietor of the place bent his head to ours and whispered that machas were available - not on the menu, but happening back in the kitchen for those in the know.

Machas Parmesanas are a very Chilean dish: surf-clams baked in their shells under a layer of parmesan cheese,  and cooked until the cheese is brown and crispy around the edges.  They are served by the dozen, on a plate swimming with a rich, cheesy broth, and they are always accompanied by with a basket of bread-rounds to sop up the juice.

To repeat, this club is called La Maquina, and it is situated at Seminario 65 in Providencia, Santiago, only 500-odd meters from the Baquedano Metro Stop. I note this, not in passing, but because the machas parmesanas that they serve here are some of the best machas that I have ever eaten - the sort of meal where you inhale the meat and lick the shells clean afterward and fight to sop up the broth - double dipping and be damned- until the plate is clean and shining and everyone has had almost enough, but not quite, so that you need to order another plate.  And possibly another one after that.

We sat at our cheery, squashy table and ate machas and drank red wine and weirdly de-natured strawberry daiquiris, and music happened all around us. La Ensamble Serenta counted  a flautist, an oboist, and a percussionist in a corner with all manner and sort of drums and cymbals. There was an acoustic bass guitar, a man with a perpetual and dreamy smile who alternated between an acoustic guitar and a mandolin, and Senor Claudio Acevedo, the band leader, who played nine instruments over the course of the night  - from maracas to a Bolivian charango and a squeeze-box, as well as two guitars, one of which was strung with something that made the sound come across all silvery like a harpsichord.

They played music that combined Caribbean Latin rhythms with Andean scales (for those not familiar with Andean Music, listen to El Condor Pasa, one of the most internationally familiar songs in the genre), lifting all that was best of both and fusing bright percussion with the minor chords and melancholy flutes so that toes tapped while we sat still and LISTENED. 

At intervals, the percussionist stood and became a tango singer.  He had a deep, dark, caramel-colored voice, the sort of voice created to be heard with your eyes closed and your hand wrapped around the hand of another listener, but he carried so much emotion outside his voice that closing your eyes was a terrible waste of him - his hands reached up before his eyes, his face twisted with pain and his back was racked with it, and we sat with our eyes wide open , eating and drinking his story until the very last ululating note.  As the evening passed, songs grew looser and toes tapped harder and people were clapped and rocked along with the music, and then, suddenly, after and hour and a half that had passed like a breeze, Senor Acevedo announced that they would sing their last song - and they did - and then they bowed and put down their instruments and left the building by the back door.

And the protocol was all bent - the closing of a concert demands a hemming and a hawing and at least two encore sets before the performers leave the stage, and here they were - gone.  We couldn't be having with that at ALL. 

In Australia - and the United States, an ovation is a critical mass of personal appreciation- there is a hail of applauses, and individual volleys of 'Encore!' are lobbed back and forth across the room like errant tennis balls until the noise rises like a storm.  The Chilean approach is rather more collectivist.  A Chilean audience stands abreast, links elbows with its neighbors and chants "Otra! Otra! Otra! Otra!"  ("Another!  Another!") until something happens to its liking.  Eyes may be dancing and mouths may be smiling, but the collective Voice has an edge that says that there had better BE an Otra, or there will be Trouble.  There is more than the whiff of a football mob about it.

A good band will pay attention to the way the winds are blowing: after just enough time for a quick cigarette and a single quick hand of poker, the Ensamble came back from outside and stood again behind their instruments.  They played a long rolling encore piece, and then they put their instruments down and Senor Acevedo took up a microphone and presented to us, one by one by one, each of the musicians.  We clapped and whistled and howled and stamped - and from the back of the room, ululated even - for all of them.  The flautist took up the microphone and told us that the oboist had learned that same day that he was to become a father, and he held out a hand to the back of the room where the oboists wife stood blushing and smiling - so we clapped and cheered and ululated for her as well. The oboist took the microphone from the flautist and pointed to the table behind ours, where, he said, all of the men there were a group of oboe-makers from France, visiting Santiago for an oboe-fest.  He went around the table, introducing each of them  by name, and we stamped our feet and gave every single one of them a great big hand of appreciation as well.  And while we were all turned around with our backs to the stage showing our appreciation to the French oboe-maker in the far corner, the band dropped their instruments and scarpered.

But we weren't NEARLY done.  We howled and whistled and clapped and cheered and ululated some more, and then we put our hands to the tables and began to drum.  We liked the sound of that, so we put our feet to the floor and began to stamp.  the sound thundered and the high windows began to shiver, and we raised our voices even higher and chanted 'OTRA' until the ceiling rang.  It wasn't that - or ONLY that - we wanted more songs; we had been sitting still and mostly quiet all evening while the live music bent itself all around us and now we were primed and firing and we wanted OUR turn to move. 

The band seemed to understand.  As the noise grew and harmonics in the floor became a susurration underneath the roaring sound, Senor Acevedo appeared once more.

He lifted his hands.

           "Silence."  He said. 

We stopped.

            "We will play two more songs." He said.  "The man who is to become a father would like us to play Ventana a las Estrellas for his wife.  And then we will play La Columbiana for you so that you all can dance."

Ventana a las Estrellas (Window to the Stars) was a sweet, simple, sentimental piece.  We sat through it patiently, nodding to the music, and when they finished we slipped loose and exploded.

The Band-leader fixed a gimlet eye upon us.

            "Now stand."  He said.  "Find a partner.  And DANCE."

And the band played La Columbiana three times all the way through without stopping.

And we danced in the narrow spaces between the tables.

Mr Tabubil wasn't dancing - he was in a three-way percussion battle on the table with the bassoonist from the Santiago Philharmonic and the Director of the Universidad de Catolica Chamber Orchestra.  Behind us, the French oboe-makers were stepping rather more soberly than there rest of us, smiling faintly and taking tentative stabs at a salsa. Their  host, a round, teddy- bearish Chilean gentleman,  was jamming it up alone between the tables.  When he saw me dancing by myself, his eyes lit and he snatched my hands and we were OFF - spinning and twirling and stamping along with a six-piece Chilean Ensemble Band, and a three part percussion accompaniment pounding out our way up to the sky.

As I live and breath - Charity?

I spent my Adelaide Saturday thrift-store-hunting with Zoe and the Architect.  Zoe is the queen of second-hand-stores: she knows every single one of them between Kapunda and Port Adelaide, and she spends her Saturday mornings in the over-stuffed back rooms of church halls across the Barossa valley. 

            We began in a little store on the edge of Tea-Tree Gulley.  It was the best possible sort of second hand shop.  From the outside,  it was small and nondescript, just a door and a window stuffed with raveled sweaters, a box of distressed paperback romances, and a hanging rack of geriatric car dashboard mats outside on the pavement. Only inside the shop revealed its true self - nested geometries stuffed full of books and vintage evening gowns and baby clothes and antique ski-suits, light-bulbs and crockery and wooly winter beanies and scarves and ties and handbags and shoes and dinner dresses -

            Oh, the dinner dresses... all of them all glittery and spangled and most of them desperately, eye-searingly, shoulder-paddingly pleated, sequined, studded and vintage nineteen eighties.

If my suitcase were as five-dimensional as the shop, I'd have taken home an armful.

            The hats were another kettle of feathers.  A door-frame behind the cash-register, approached at the right angle, unfolded into a long shelf of aerodynamical Adelaide Cup hats, trimmed with feathers and flowers and bunches of glass cherries and crab-apples.  I picked up a fetching black Merry-Widow wide-brim trimmed with most of a  white  feather boa and admired.

            A tiny old woman with white hair piled high on her head appeared from  behind the edge of a dust-mote.

            "She used to do amateur theatricals."  She said to me, fingering the feathers.  "The owner of the hat.  When she retired her husband insisted that she give away SOME of the costumes and she gave all the hats to us.  It's nice, isn't it?"

            "How much is it?"

            "I don't rightly know.  The others are between two and three dollars, but that one's scarcely dented - it could be as much as five.  Do you see a price tag on there?"

At length, and after some difficulty, I found a tag buried in the feathers of the boa.

            "TEN dollars."  The lady read.  "That's a bit much. Clara!"  She called out to another elderly lady  - this one was presiding over the cash register. "Do you think that we could give this nice young lady a discount?"

The lady behind the cash register looked up and I noticed that she had a firmer jaw than the white-haired darling, and that her hair was cropped firmly about her neck in a stiff, no-nonsense bob.  

            "You want me to give you a DISCOUNT?"  She said to me.  "Here?  In this shop?"  Stepping out from behind the cash register, she advanced on me with a contemptuous twist to her lips.

             "What sort of person asks for a DISCOUNT in a CHARITY shop?"  She said, pitching her voice to be heard through the whole room. 

            "It's  the Royal Society for the BLIND giving you that discount.   It's Children with CANCER giving you that discount- you know that, I suppose? Is THEIR money worth that much to you?"

She sneered at me.  "Don't you BELIEVE in CHARITY?"

Elderly women were popping into existence between hats and winter coats and  peg-boards of costume jewelry.  They all stared at me, open mouthed, their heads shaking, their hands rising up and boney, arthritic index fingers raised up to point-

I fled through a door into another room, where Zoe was rummaging through a bin of wooden block toys.  Shuddering and shaking, I  poured out the whole incredible story.  Zoe let out a shout of laughter.            
            "REALLY?" She squealed. "I don't believe a word of it!"

With epic narrative timing, a third elderly lady emerged from a shoe-box behind the toy bin.  She pointed a long index finger at my midriff.  Following the finger, I saw that I was still holding the hat - tightly, in both hands.

            "What were your intentions with this hat?"  She asked coolly.  "The original owner was a noted actress in our local theatrical community.  What were YOU intending to do with it? A birthday party, perhaps?"
She flicked the hat lightly with her finger and looked at me from beneath a raised eyebrow.  Very much beneath.

Stammering slightly, I said something about a past history of fashion school, and a consuming interest in historical costumes and how this hat would make a fabulous accessory for a late-Edwardian merry widow ensemble - I don't know what had gotten into me.  My brief admiration had run its course in front of the cash register.  I wouldn't have wanted the thing if you'd paid me.

The lady considered.
            "Yee-eesss…." She breathed critically.  "That would be acceptable.  But what you have to REMEMBER" she said, pinning me with a stern look and that long index finger "Is the ORIGINAL value of the hat.  Don't you THINK that you're doing rather nicely as it is?"
She turned on her heel and swept out to the cash register.

            "Here."  I said, thrusting the hat to Zoe with shaking hands.  "Put it back for me.  I don't want them to see me do it.  I don't want to be the lady who tried to cheat the charity shop - and surrendered."

Zoe shook her head to clear it, and girding her loins, sailed defiantly into the front room, where a three-way argument was going on.

            "I saw Water for Elephants last night and I thought it was LOVELY."  The white haired darling was saying firmly.

            "But what about the CRUELTY?" The woman with the long index finger said.  "The terrible things they did to that elephant - I wept!  I would hardly have called that film lovely!  I'd never have seen it if I'd known -"

The firm-jawed lady snorted with impatience.  "It's ACTING."  She cried.  "For heavens sake!  I can't believe you were both taken in by a crew of acting animals!  They're perfectly happy!  They probably loved every minute of it!  Really, if we cried about EVERYTHING we saw up on a movie screen - you two bleeding hearts - "

Zoe must have had her jaw hanging somewhere about the level of the floor because the woman with the index finger looked at her sharply and said "Are you all right - dear?" 

Zoe picked up her jaw to answer, but a young man entering the shop behind her though that the question was meant for him and spoke first.

            "Just fine." He said.  "Thanks.  Just looking around."

            "Ooooh!"  The lady with the index finger squealed joyously.  "Isn't he HANDSOME?   And what LOVELY manners!  It's been such a LONG time since a handsome young man flirted with ME!"

Her shoulders shaking,  Zoe turned and precipitously fled from the shop into the sunshine, closely followed by the young man, scarlet faced and steaming.

There must have been something in the water.

We fled into the hills and ate lunch sitting on a verandah that commanded a view of an entire valley- olive groves and acres of vines, with fig and sweet apple trees tangling in our hair and fresh autumn winds to drive cobwebs - and white marabou feathers on black hats  - out of our heads.

Unreal.

An Altogether More Charming Rant

Tabubilgirl was obliged to fly with United Airlines, and the experience did not leave her happy At All.

Other people say it better and wittier.

 

Standing ovations. Really?

The Melbourne audience stood and cheered for Mary Poppins. Why on earth would they have done that? 
            I've been told that the American passion for double-handed acclaim first arouse in classical concert halls. The Origin Story I have heard goes as following: ye suburban mid-century concert-goer in town from the suburbs for a night's dose of High Culture felt a crippling social anxiety during performances.  When the performance ended, feeling entirely out of his (or her) depth, and terrified of being viewed as some sort of Barbarian Invader crashing about in a Temple of Culture, he (or she) applauded wildly at everything. Just in case.
            And because everyone was – and is - at heart, afraid of being Found Out (Someone was applauding!  What do they know that I don't?!), everyone else began to join in, until as a matter of routine the whole damn audience clapped like maniacs.
            And now, more often than is pretty, instead of one’s lack of classic education being exposed through hesitance and confusion, the moment one stands up to bellow 'Brava!' one is exposing oneself as a clod. 
              There's no intimidating classical baggage around Disney music, darlings. If people will howl and bay and stamp their feet for this, one can only imagine what goes on in the New York Philharmonic. One presumes you get three curtain calls and a ticker-tape parade for showing up on stage in an evening suit with a cello.

Mary Poppins

Broadway in New York:

We'd hoped to see Mama Mia, because Kay has never listened to Abba (she can recite the plot of every original Star Trek episode, but she’s never listened to Abba. Go figure.) but it was Mama Mia's night off.   We couldn't get any cheap tickets for Fela.  I wanted to see A Little Night Music because Bernadette Peters was in it. Mr Tabubil and Kay wanted to see A History of The Theater because Patrick Stewart was in it, and in one of those compromises where nobody quite gets what they want, somehow we ended up with tickets to Mary Poppins. The movie was so much fun, how could we go wrong - right?

Oops.

It wasn't quite 'Lord of the Rings: The Musical' awful (although the actress who played the titular Mary had actually played Galadrial in THAT hot mess.*) but all things considered, it was pretty damned ghastly.
            Rather than slavishly following the movie, the Broadway stage show had drawn a great deal of its source material from the original books.  In the abstract, this wasn't an entirely bad idea, but they’d have done better to have stuck with the tried and the tested.  The delightful tunes from the movie had been replaced by new numbers that were... well, they certainly weren't memorable, except when it was for all the wrong reasons.  And worse, the few songs they’d hung onto from the last cinematic go-around had been mauled and muted beyond recognition and relevance.  They’d even made up a whole new set of lyrics for Supercalafragalisticexpialadocious that weren’t half as clever as the originals – or even vaguely related to the plot.
            Which was the other problem. There wasn’t a plot. Or rather, there were several. Six or seven, at least.
            The two children, Jane and Michael Banks, had apparently never been told about the on-stage microphones  – they confused acting with hollering and mugging, and needed a good shot of valium. Preferably in the sort of doses you give to horses.
          Not nearly soon enough, Mary Poppins arrived via Umbrella post, looking smug and showing off a lovely singing voice, and in short order she whisked the revolting children off for a walk in the park.  There, instead of jumping into chalk drawings and riding painted horses, she hewed to the books and brought the park statues to life to play with the little brats.
            Or rather, a very naked man in a very tight silver body suit leaped, spraddle-legged, off a pedestal and performed VERY disturbing balletic choreography all over the stage. If only he'd been wearing just a body suit – things might have been manageable. But some genius in costuming had placed a very very large and very wobbly silver fig leaf right over his gentleman's region. He was so very naked and the fig leaf was so very large - and he made such very wide jumps....
           At some considerable length he was joined by a trio of young bronze ladies with three fig leafs in strategic lady places, and while Bert the chimney sweep warbled in presentable American cockney about how "it's a jolly holiday with Mary" two satyrs in silver paint and sheepskins tore onstage bellowing "Baaaa!!!" and pushed the two children around the stage in gigantic baby's carriages.
            In the middle of the maelstrom, Mary tap-danced and simpered.  Next to me, Vee sat straight-backed and rigid, her lips pursed as she stared expressionlessly at the stage.  I snuck a look down the row at Mr Tabubil - his shoulders were bowed, and his head was in his hands.  His shoulders were shaking.

At intermission, Mr Tabubil gave it to me straight from the shoulder.
 "This show is psychotic."
            Kay nodded.  And nodded some more. "Can we leave now?  Please?”
            I looked sideways at Vee. Vee pressed her lips together.  "I can't say" she said "what I just texted my sister.  It's accurate, but it's not very nice.  I'm sorry."
            "Tell us."
            "Fine.  This show sucks donkey balls, okay?  Big hairy ones."
And suddenly we were laughing. So we stayed around for the second half after all. It was an improvement on the first half, which is a highly relative statement, but we were suffering together this time and all the horrible singing and dancing and plot derailments and non-existent character relationships became an absolute hoot.
            The show was a character study of a father who'd lost his ideals – and all hope. It was the post-feminist anguish of a career woman who'd married and given up her identity to tend an obsessive-compulsive tyrant.  The vertigo of a marriage in free-fall. Two children traumatized by, and worse- sung at, by giant dolls (that musical number had all four of us hiding under the seats and we were sitting half-way back to the balcony.  God know what it was like on stage with the awful things) because they didn't treat their toys with suitable respect and consideration.  (A commentary on the ongoing train-wreck in the grown up bedroom downstairs?)
            And - worst of all, the obsessive need for everyone to sing about everything in tones of syrup and sunbeams.  During one low point, when two sub-plots collided head on (think of two submarines off of the Jervis banks) I thought Vee was going to pop an aneurysm.  But she cheered up right quick when Mr Banks began his great second-act solo number - he stared into a teacup and sang three verses that began with "Before the mortar of your zeal has a chance to congeal- !"
            I don't remember the rest. Vee was laughing to hard for me to hear a word of it.

And then, at long last, the show ended.

And ended again.

Then it ended.

And then it ended again.

And then the lights came on and the cast took their bows and we tried to sneak out in the confusion of applause (the majority of the audience were apparently, astonishingly, enthusiastic about this atrocious twaddle) but the orchestra powered up one more time and the whole cast went three more rounds of Supercalafragalisticixpialadocious (with the most extraordinary hand gestures) before we could get away.
            We still don't quite believe that it happened. Or that most of the audience could have actually liked the ghastly stuff.
            Based on a sample size of exactly one, Vee’s right. Broadway has gone to pot.


* For the record, Mr Tabubil and I only went to see LOTR: The Musical when it was clear it was terminal and the tickets were being thrown at the audience in a desperate last stand. We stuck it out – all three acts, but we had friends who walked out - before the first act ended. They felt it necessary to make the point.

Sydney in Half a Day

We had half a day in Sydney before our flight across the Pacific. Neither of us had been to Sydney for years, and it felt like an auspicious beginning for our Big International Holiday - a chance to mooch a little around a city that is practically (if not geographically) speaking, right in our backyard.
            We left our bags at the Sydney Central YHA Hostel (wonderful place, would do it every time) and hopped a bus down to Circular Quay. Where we immediately took lots of photographs of ourselves with the Opera House right behind our shoulders to send back to the office at home on Mr. Tabubil's iphone. Sometimes you just have to be heartless.
            We had a good solid mooch around the Rocks. There were a lot of Halloween-y advertisements for ghost tours, but we didn't see any haunts. It must have been the wrong time of day. The Rocks is one of Sydney's oldest neighborhoods- the warehouses and flophouses and tenements of the old town, built all snug and tight against the rock cliff walls of the harbor. The buildings are sandstone, and caught about by narrow wynds and closes, now re-vamped with brick and steel and clever little water-courses.

Today the old buildings are mostly filled up with art galleries and Italian restaurants and DFX duty-free palaces, but coming around corners, you meet unexpected lanes that have been retrofitted for habitation, with washing lines and Volvos and banana trees squeezed into corners of the rock.

We wandered along the harbor wall under the big bridge. So many rivets. That's what you notice. The hundreds of thousands of millions of rivets that hold it together. There's a big fold-out picture book in the school library about the construction of the bridge; it’s an important revisionist history that focuses mostly on the advantages taken of the workforce, the institutionalized injustices and the apathy - and antagonism - of the government. There is much discussion of the terrible safety conditions and the hair-raising ways the men working on the bridge met their deaths. There were no safety line in the 1930s - a man who slipped and fell was drilled vertically into the mud, and pulled out with his clothes all ripped and shredded up about his ears.
            It's an important story,but even the most aggrieved and burning union man must have looked up at that bridge and seen something great - not in spite of the manner in which it was built, but because of it. A measure of the achievement of man, built one rivet at a time.
          Under the bridge, we climbed back up the hill into the Rocks again. The air shivered and we heard a horn.  The sound was so loud that the bridge and the hill blurred and furred and our sight grew thin and stretched around the edges. We turned back toward the water and saw a whole city block sailing past us. An absolutely massive cruise ship was sliding under the bridge and blocking out the sun. On the decks, people waved and shouted, their mouths moving soundlessly under the weight of the great sound. We waved and shouted and screamed back at them and exhilarated, we galloped up the hill and stood on a wall to watch the ship glide out past the Opera House on its way out of the harbor.
            When it was out of sight, we walked back down the hill and out along the Quay to the Opera House, and I got rather cross.
Who can't love the opera house? Light airy shells, swoopy curves - conceived and built architectural ages before the advent of computer-generated swoopy things, and done with the discipline and rigor that comes from the need to pull against the limits of traditional construction methods and calculate all the engineering yourself - no software or space age material shortcuts.
            What I loathe hate and abhor is the ghastly mid-century-brutalist plinth it sits on.
I mean, look at it:

I mean, Seriously.

This horrible pebble-brushed mountain is one of those misguided mid-century experiments in urban engineering, designed in a fashion so ghastly that you wonder if some future meta-architects were reaching back into a particular impressionable period of history to find out how swiftly you can divide and depopulate a cityscape.  Perhaps for a futuristic undergraduate seminar in Post-Apocalyptica.
            It's a fact that the bright shells can house only a fraction of the Opera House complex, but there's no straightforward plot from there to this - burying them out of sight under a gravel-washed nightmare.  Even the grand portico for arriving swishily in expensive cars on first nights is a dark and dingy underpass squashed underneath the horrible staircase.
            That staircase - purity of architectural line, my bottom. It's mid-century poverty of spirit. Sterilization kills more than germs.

 We climbed the stairs (me harrumphing and hephalumping all the way to the top) and found pretty seashells lying on a rather bare and uninteresting shore.

We went inside to look for the ticket office, and were directed down into the bowels of what looked like the locker-room and men's-toilets level of an Italian municipal bus terminal.
           And I got cross again.
            Raw concrete is a valid and rewarding medium of architectural expression, but there is a huge and aesthetically significant difference between raw concrete as a choice and "We haven’t got anything left in the budget so let's snake the electrical wires over the bare form-work and pretend we meant to do it like that. If we blow out a few light bulbs, no-one will even notice."
            "I love it when you fulminate like that." Mr Tabubil said breathily, and swooned across a rack of postcards.
          Harrumph.

We bought tickets to the evening's performance of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, and went to find dinner. We didn't have very much time before the performance, so we wandered further into the bowels and popped out at a little bistro down at the waterline. We ate our dinner on the least interesting waterfront promenade in history, but nobody in Sydney had a better view for watching the sun set over the city.
They couldn’t find a way to mess with that.

Cosi

On Friday night, Mr Tabubil and I went to the theater.
            We have a very good theater here in our little town - it mostly does cinema, but one of its two theaters was built for live performance, rigged with a roll-away screen to accommodate the afternoon showings of Transformers and The A-Team.  On Wednesday afternoon I stopped by to pick up tickets for the ballet Don Quixote, which is coming to us in August (ours is the live-theater for the region, and when touring companies come through the state - we get them!)             Theater productions don’t exactly advertise in this town - we don't watch much TV, and the Australian Ballet would have come and gone without us being any the wise if we hadn't gone to the theater to watch Toy Story. There've been no fliers, no posters, nothing on the community boards outside the bakery and sports shop - not one single solitary squib.  The ballet was advertised all over the theater lobby, but that sort of advertising presence doesn't go very far in a venue that runs on Shrek sequels and Twilight Marathons.             While we waited for our popcorn I saw that an equally-unheralded production of the play Cosi is was coming to town - on that Friday night, and on spec I asked if there were any tickets still available.
            Yes, yes there were.  There were not only only lots of tickets available, as of the day before the performance they were being offered up in a "buy one, get one free" deal.  I asked, semi-optimistically, if they had two seats together about half way up and near the middle - I got two seats exactly half way to the top - and two seats over from the very center.  Can't complain, I guess.

On Friday I went to a pub lunch with the other staff members of the high school and floated the news that there was a rather good play coming to town - and that nobody seemed to be going.
            "That's awful!" Someone said.  "If nobody goes, the companies will stop coming- and that would be a tragedy!"
            "So why don't you all come?"  I suggested.  "Two tickets for the price of one - you can't beat that for a Friday night's entertainment!"
There was much vague sound of agreement - oh, yes, absolutely, my word what a very good deal -             
            "But," said the same woman who was so worried about scaring off the touring companies  "I will be at home on the sofa watching the football."
            "Oh."  I said.  "Is there a big game on?"
            She gave me a look of I-can't-believe-this-woman-but-I-shall-be sweet.  "No-o, but that's what we do on Friday nights here."
            "I've got a ticket" said the lady next to me, very firmly, and she raised her chin and gave me a nod.   "I'll see you there!"
            And we would.  So there.  And we would have fun.  More acting to go round.             The lovely thing about a small town is that you can leave for the theater ten minutes before the curtain goes up and still have time for a promenade around the lobby before the show.  We were expecting a pretty thin show, but the turnout was, for this pair of city-people, painful.  It's a nice theater - a small, but well-proportioned stage and good seats for 500, and that great big auditorium was almost empty.  Less than eighty people in the audience.  Worse, with the exception of two UniSA students in the front row and an eight-year-old girl brought along by her grandma, we were the youngest in the audience by at least thirty years.  Call it culture shock, but we were stunned.  In the places we come from, an audience for a show is mostly, well - us.  Young people all over the place.             It was a good show, too.  The cast was very young, and mostly very good, and we all laughed extra hard, to make up for all the echoing empty seats.  It must be tough playing to a house like that.  There was one line in particular, delivered to the audience - something on the theme of the futility of offering art to the masses.
            "Something we try and bring to you people!" (or something like that.)
            The actor seemed to enjoy delivering that one. A pugnacity of chin, a pinch to the nose, his arms flung out that little bit extra wide, and his eyes raking across every single one of us.