vaudeville

My father eventually told me that he used his job as a singer sewing machine repairman and salesman as licence to drive about town most of the day. My dad always had jobs that didn’t require him to be sat at a desk.

He used to drive all over the sprawling hicktown that Brisbane was then. Usually by the least appealing roads, dusty, glare-y roads that avoided traffic but also avoided the river views, the nicer parks and beautiful trees. Sometimes he drove through the city and somehow or another he used to end up at the stage door of the Theatre Royal.

Maybe he came across a clutch of chorus girls having an outdoor fag break or some such. It could be said that my Dad was an idler. I can vouch for his powers as a monologist. Some found him boring and insensitive, others found him charming.

At some point he would take my mother to the actual shows. It became an institution, the mid-week night (I think it was a Tuesday or Wednesday show). My brother and I were either babysat or left with Grandma, that’s my father’s mother. Mum always described her as a woman dreaded for her violent temper, megalomania, and melodramatics, but ‘good to you kids’. And she was.

So there’s mum and dad at the Theatre Royal and then all the ‘kids’ (not us, the dancing girls in the chorus) would come round to our little wooden house for beer. Perhaps that was only once. I have a memory of this happy rowdy group in our kitchen and me being given a lemonade and a ginger biscuit and sitting outside on the long flight of gappy wooden steps that led down to the long thin back yard.

Late we got taken along as well. My memories of the Theatre Royal include some skit where a woman had put ping pong balls down her black tights – eerie.

I remember watching a man in a green light – Brian somebody, a good looking chap, playing the Bad Wolf in a Panto of Red Riding Hood. Probably a surge of scary music. Apparently I cried. Funny how the scary and the fun combine.

I remember watching the ‘Nudie Cuties’ or at least this is what my mother called them, in an Egyptian Tableau (unless my memory has fudged this with other imagery I’ve seen since). I remember spangles, possibly feathers, a curtain rising and a silence that struck me as respectful. The semi-naked girls had to stand stock-still so that it wasn’t salacious, but artistic.

I remember more clearly watching a woman called Sabrina singing a song, covered in glittery bracelets and flinging them off into the crowd. My brother, aged 8, caught one. I was jealous and confused that he had the sparkly thing - a girl’s thing. Once I was allowed to hold it in my hands it was suddenly a dull thing, perhaps because it came with no beaming congratulation on a parental face. I was never old or bright enough to figure these things out, often feeling left in the dark.

I remember the Horrie Dargie Quintet. Double bass, drum kit, and harmonica. Harmonicas. Of various sizes. And witty, razzed-up comic songs. One of them about ‘a little girl with blonde hair. Her name was Goldilocks, and on the door she knocked (bang bang bang bang bang  (harmonies) But no one was there….(cue walking bass) So she walked right in and had herself a time, ‘cos she didn’t care….’ Then they’d do the instrumental ‘Ritual Firedance’ with bigger and bigger harmonicas and one so big it hit the next man on the side of the head. Slapstick.

We saw them and had their record. I listened to this until I memorized the whole record –  I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles, The Autumn Leaves, The Three Bears, Jukebox Saturday Night, Big Noise Flew in From Winetka and Walking my Baby Back Home.