Memory lane - some forgotten old words (c. 2013)

 

He was late. This wasn't unusual. He’d come directly from some high-end corporate birthday party entertainment gig. “Stop in the name of humanity,” they told him. Or maybe that was another gig. Anyway, he was late. So late that I’d assumed that there was no chance of him coming, and so hadn’t prepared a brief for him. He arrived literally moments before we walked onstage, too late to fully explain what we had planned to do. He joined the rest of us onstage anyway, flashed his arse at the audience, and stole the show.

 

In Brisbane, he was pricked in the arse with a pin by the producer moments before the audience entered. “Do you know what people want to see? They want to see you stand on a nail. They want something new. Enough pretending. They want something real.”

 

One summer, we wrote the first draft of one of our big shows whilst working together on La Traviata. 

 

In Sydney for the final gig at Cleveland St we smelt rotten eggs when we entered the building. Thinking that a sewer pipe had broken, he and I frantically scoured the theatre, trying to locate it before the audience arrived. The smell seemed strongest at about head height, a couple of metres away from the wall. Turns out it was the emergency power supply for the stair lights in the seating bank. Before he can stop me, I lunge for the switch, desperate to shut it down. It explodes. The metal plug flies between us, mere inches from our heads. It takes a chunk out of the wall. We are both deafened by the blast. The show goes on.

 

On the plane back from Perth he was green. Really really really green. He wasn’t the only one.

 

In Adelaide, in our serviced apartment, a rehearsal turned tense and a bit wild. An overhead light fitting was smashed in a moment of forced exuberance. He managed to convince the management that the light fitting spontaneously fell, and that it was a miracle that no one was hurt. No damage fee was billed to our account.

 

Later that trip, we spent all night drinking with a visiting English company. Walking home after 5am after being kicked out of the pub, we realise that we didn't have a key to the apartment. For some reason, he decided that it would be a good idea for us to scale the exterior wall of the complex, up to the third floor. I’m still unsure as to how this was accomplished without injury. 

 

I rarely see him now.