early years

Kindy. There’s going to be a concert and they want me to dress up in a boy’s trousers. Holding them out for me to step into. I don’t like the idea at all. I hope they won’t put him in my dress. No memory of this performance. Either it didn’t happen or I blanked it out.

Sunday School. A competition. Mum sends me for lessons with a man who plays piano. I have chosen to sing ‘On the good ship Lollypop’. I love Shirley Temple.

I don’t get the whole concept of rehearsal. I’m quite young. I guess I think learning the words is as prepared as you can expect to get. I think he was telling me to sing loud. We were always told to be quiet at home. The concert day comes and I sing the song. A redhaired girl called Rosemary sings an old fashioned song called Beautiful Dreamer. I watch her pursed lips and am uncharitably reminded of a goldfish. It seems to me that the whole song is composed of ‘oo’ sounds. She wins. I hadn't visualized winning but I somehow feel shock. I get a chocolate frog as a consolation prize. I strip off the foil slowly and carefully and I bite its head off.

Mum sends me to ‘Misses Joy and Nell’s School of Ballet’ in a wooden hall (the Camp Hill School of Arts) in a dusty, glare-y suburb of Brisbane. The ‘barre’ is the back of church-pew-like benches arranged along the edge of the hall. No mirrors. No dance floor. In the breaks we pick matchsticks out of the dust-filled cracks between the wooden flooring. 
We wear white tunics with nude pink elastic belts. And the shoes with the impossibly slim soles.

First show. I am surprised that I shall be dressed in brown bib and brace trousers to be a gardener. I see other girls are in tutus! At least I am a gardener who has curled hair and a light smear of mum’s lipstick, although that doesn’t seem to make a great deal of sense to me. Similarly perplexed by the lack of water in my watering can. We perform in the cavernous Festival Hall (think empty warehouse with a stage and folding chairs) in Elizabeth Street. My father says ‘That’s my daughter, the only one in step.’ Perhaps because my father rarely acknowledged me, I thought this might be praise. I failed to understand this was a joke until decades later.

Later years saw me in a blue sky-fairy tutu (with an unsatisfyingly small amount of sequins) and the following year in green satin bodice and pink tulle skirt as an apple blossom fairy. Now we’re getting somewhere, I thought.

All these performances passed in a glare of nerves, spatial disorientation and lighting as bright as the Australian sun.

Primary School. I once staged a kind of sketch. It involved various people entering a shop. Happily untutored in Drama at this stage I was not aware enough to know or worry, but as I remember it, I now know that every aspect of it failed.

A few years later, in a different school even deeper into suburbia, we were asked to turn a short story into a puppet play. We were shown how to use a folded-over paperbag as a puppet. I think the story was Brer Rabbit. I enjoyed and was fatigued by the typing out of the parts eliminating the ‘said’ bits and the quotation marks. I formed a small group and ours was the only one performed in front of the class. Not because it was the best, but because I was the only person who thought we had been required to see it through to the logical conclusion. I am sure the result was underwhelming indifferent. Inert paperbags with poor drawings on them over hands and heads down on the carbon copies my mother had tirelessly typed.

This must have whet my appetite, though, and with two friends we prepared and performed a dance piece before the class. It was about a fairy coronation with the blue sky fairy tutu being recycled, a tiara belonging to my Grandma being brought in on an appliqued pillow and, I think, music by Tchaikovsky. I made a prolonged exit because we had set the props in the sports store room next to the classroom. The other poor girls were left in bras bas for ages. I had further failed to prepare by leaving the tiara in my school bag for safety and so the coronation finally happened in mime. A real pillow holding an invisible crown. Also, we had changed a bit of ‘choreography’ at the last moment. One girl still put her arms up and in the heat of the moment I grabbed her nearest arm and levered it down. A moment when I learnt key lessons concerning rehearsal, performance, setting props and self-control.

Bit later. I now had friends in the flower of puberty (I was still stick thin and shaped like a Skipper doll) and the next performance was to their choice of pop song. A Charleston-inspired tune (costumes to match) called ‘No Trespassing’. No comment.