Story for performance #871
webcast from Sydney at 07:29PM, 08 Nov 07

thought one:
I never really liked Stevie Nicks. I always thought she relied on her appearance rather than any real musical talent for her success. Elizabeth Skull’s excellent article in last weekend’s supplement did nothing to alter my opinion. It is a sad comment on our times when a mature woman feels the need to slavishly follow society’s trend to indulgent materialism and its worship of youthful (and fleeting!) good looks!

thought two:
One day a man in Sydney was watering his garden and another man came up to him and said, ‘You can’t do that. There’s a drought on!’
‘No,’ said the first man, ‘I can. This is recycled water.’
‘Bullshit!’ said the second man. ‘There’s water spraying out of your water meter. That means it’s coming from the mains water supply!’
‘My mother’s inside having a shower you idiot,’ said the first man.
‘Fucking shit!’ said the second man. ‘I’m sick of how you waste water!’ With that he grabbed the first man’s hose out of his hands and flung it into the driveway. Then he lunged at the man’s throat, wrestling him to the ground. Together they fought across the wet lawn grunting and pummelling each other. The second man was big and strong. The first man was slight and sickly. The second man got the first man’s head in his hands and began to beat it against the driveway. He beat it and beat it until the first man lay completely still.

thought three:
This generation’s bubble-wrapped kids are surely missing out on fundamental human experiences that encourage curiosity and resilience! I am horrified by the tales of over-protective parents driving their kids around, arranging ‘play-dates’, and booking up every spare minute of after-school hours with music, ballet, tutoring and sports. Whatever happened to climbing a tree? Riding your bike down to the shops? Daydreaming in the back-yard?

thought four:
Once there was a lady who lived in the far western suburbs of Melbourne with her family of cats. She had a dial-up internet connection, so she could shop and do her banking online. She survived on a very small sickness benefit from the Government so it was just as well that her needs and those of her cats, were few. Once this lady had been an active member of the community. She had participated in Latin dancing at the local community centre and had volunteered to tutor refugees in English. She even had a plot in the community garden. However, gradually, over a long period, she had developed a terrible disability. She had become allergic to moral thought. Yes. She became physiologically sensitive to currents of thinking that encouraged PROPER behaviour, and a BRIGHT FUTURE FOR OUR CHILDREN. In proximity to these she broke out in terrible, blistering sores. Similar to herpes, these sores favoured mucous membranes for their painful, blazingly itchy, eruptions. The poor lady. She had to work hard to protect herself from letters in newspapers and from community circulars. Once she was incapacitated for weeks and put on a cortisone drip when the local council announced its ‘Get to Know Your Neighbour Day’.

thought five:
This morning on the news again a young boy in Finland has taken a gun to school and murdered a group of his fellow students, as well as his school principal. Once more we are shocked to see ghastly mock-heroic pictures of this slight young man brandishing a pistol, in an action-hero pose, posted on You-Tube! On the other hand, when these images are the everyday backdrop of our times, covering every available screen surface, why are we even surprised?

thought six:
It’s great to see someone else cares about use of the English language. I always read Elizabeth Skull’s contributions to your magazine for her colourful turn of phrase which is always, perfectly, grammatically correct (I always check! Call me a pedant, I’m proud to be).

thought seven:
One day a man was let out of prison after serving a term for assault: intending serious bodily harm. He had had, as they say, ‘a lot of time to think things through’ and had come up with what he thought was a very good plan to re-enter the community. This was his plan: against the twelve-step program that they made him study in prison, and which had made him break out in spots, he resolved to connect, not with forces greater and grander than himself, but instead with forces very much smaller. Indeed he resolved to connect himself with the smallest, most incidental units of force he could find. Particularly he identified insects, noxious weeds and cats as practical possibilities. So it was, on the morning of his departure from the prison, he refused the offer of a taxi and chose instead to walk away, following a melange of ant tracks, strings of blackberry and morning glory, lumps of cat shit and fur caught in fencing wire, until eventually, he found himself at the ramshackle fence of a falling down house. Peering over the back fence he startled a lady, more accurately a rustling pile of rags and cats, who was fussing over a mess of termite-ravaged wood in the yard. ‘Oh Christ!’ she cried out, ‘You haven’t come from the Uniting Church?’ She looked so horrified that he laughed. ‘Oh no lady,’ he shook his head, ‘I most certainly have not. In fact I have just come from jail and am seeking to attach myself to a world of weeds, vermin and stinking cats.’ ‘Is this a joke?’ the lady cried, her face twisting in a mix of embarrassment and fury. ‘No, no!’ he assured her, eyebrows arched in insistence, ‘absolutely fair dinkum’. She regarded him quietly, as tabbies rubbed around her legs and flopped over on their backs in the sun. She looked into his eyes.

thought eight:
There’s no place for arrogance in a football club! I won’t be renewing my membership with the West Coast Eagles in 2008!

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Margaret Trail.