Kings and Queens of Halloween

Halloween combines a plethora of supernatural images and associations

Halloween has its origins in the festival of Samhain (pron. Sow – wane) celebrated by the Celts of ancient Britain and Ireland, at least 2000 years ago. November 1^st was, in that era,  in the northern hemisphere, considered the first day of the New Year and marked the onset of winter. It was the time of year when animals were brought in from pasture, crops were harvested and land tenures were renewed. During the Samhain festival it was believed that the boundary between the living and dead became blurred and the souls of the dead returned to visit their former homes. Fires were lit to frighten away evil spirits, and people sometimes donned disguises, usually draping themselves in animal skins, to avoid being recognised by ghosts. When the Romans conquered the Celts in the 1^st century CE, their festivities of Feralia, venerating dead ancestors, and of Pomona, the goddess of the harvest, were merged with Samhain. Later still in the 6^th century AD, Pope Gregory I harnessed the supernatural aspects of these pagan celebrations and superimposed them with Christian rites designating  November 1^st All saints Day and thereby making 31^st October All Hallows Day Evening, the night before saints were to be venerated. That name eventually morphed into ‘Halloween’. Dressing up in costumes as saints, angels and devils became part of Halloween from around AD 1000. (Sources: Encyclopedia Britannica & https://www.history.com/).

Promotional poster for the show featuring Jai Normes

Performing in drag for Halloween became part of Wagga Wagga culture in AD 2022 when local café/arts hub The Curious Rabbit hosted the first Hallow’d Queens event on 22^nd October that year. By 2023 it had become a firm tradition and Hallow'd Queens expanded to the Riverina Playhouse on the banks of the Murrumbidgee, the show emceed with subtle menace by local drag king Crash O’Byrn. The theme was spooky B&B accommodation with Crash as concierge inviting us to tour the nooks and crannies of an imaginary gothic building.  As we did so we encountered various drag performers enacting spooky scenarios. There was a shrill Janet chanelling Shelley Duval from The Shining and escaping her psychopathic pursuer to the tune of ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’, her hapless dummy child flailing about in her arms.  There was  Erica d’Hesperus, sporting  a serpentine dress of her own design referencing  Disney’s Ursula performing  ‘I’ll Put a Spell on You’ . There was an ’aesthetician’ (aka mad scientist), Jai Normés, mixing chemicals to the strains of ‘Weird Science’  then injecting his hapless victim with luminescent gayness formula to Dorian Electra‘s ‘My Agenda’. Imina Something introduced us to a salacious un-holy  nun with a craving to paint an audience member's portrait and enacted a knife wielding Chucky to ‘Devil Gate Drive’.  

Concierge at the satanic B&B, Jeffree

Jeffree delighted as always with the sheer vulgarity and machismo of his performance to ‘Psychokiller’ offering us a pleasing outline of his modest genitalia and enjoying a literal bloodbath.  Strewth performed both a histrionic version of ‘Phantom of the Opera’ with her puppet sidekick Crikey and Kylie Minogue’s ‘I Believe In You’ with reworked Halloween-style lyrics and some disturbing audience interaction.  Other highlights were Nefertiti’s blood-red lit writhing erotic routine to ‘Year Zero’ summoning Baphomet and Jeffree’s showcasing his feminine side to ‘Wuthering Heights’ delivered with more hysteria than even Ms Kate Bush could muster.

Top left: Imina Something as the painting nun and her hapless victim from the audience. Top right: Janet embodying victimhood. Bottom left: Sultry Queen Nefertiti. Bottom right: Strewth & Crikey

The show’s finale was an homage to Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Stuck In The Middle With You’ Reservoir Dogs torture scene charitably not approaching cinematic realism but still a wonderfully tasteless rendering of sadism and cannibalism.

The Playhouse’s dimensions and equipment gave the troupe greater scope for staging and lighting than they had last year and they took full advantage with some wonderfully atmospheric effects including a smoke machine and strobe lighting. The technical set up for each sequence was a bit sluggish but the audience of mainly hardcore fans and supporters didn’t seem to mind. Their attire made it clear they had whole heartedly embraced the evening’s themes with costumes that included drag chic of all types, an evil pixie and a Goth nursing mother!

The Hallow’d Queens promise to make this an annual event and it will be exciting to see what their combined creativity spawns in October 2024. In the meantime we have the Wollundry Drag Pageant to look forward to in March.

Disclaimer: Julia Erwin/Jai Normes is the author's offspring.

There's something great in the neighbourhood

Playwright Lally Katz wrote Neighbourhood Watch as a vehicle for Robyn Nevin;  the lead role of Ana, an ageing refugee from WW2 Hungary, has also been performed by Miriam Margolyes. In SoACT’s production, company veteran, Diana Lovett’s timing and characterisation skills propel this complex and rewarding drama, currently playing at The Basement Theatre, so effectively that I think her performance would stand alongside theirs comfortably. I would also venture that Diana invests Ana with a pathos and ‘everywoman’ quality that might be more difficult for her celebrity peers to achieve.  Her performance is a joy!

Diana is ably supported by a great ensemble cast, standouts being Elena Zacharia as Catherine and Charles Sykes as Ken, the twenty somethings grappling with love, health, friendship and career issues in suburban Australia  

Neighbourhood Watch is set in the year between Kevin Rudd’s election as Prime Minister and Barack Obama’s as US President - a time when its youngest characters dare to find cause for hope. The play depicts two seemingly mismatched neighbours who form a friendship that enables each to heal from past harsh experiences and re-learn trust.

Performed in the round, unusual for SoACT productions, clever use is made of actors' non performing time to assist with prop, set and costume movement.  Ana’s reminiscences of her past, vividly recounted to Catherine, are elegantly and evocatively realised, a tribute to Michael Mitchell’s pacy sensitive direction and to the work of the production team. Michael also ensures that the actors never favour any one bank of audience members (I tested this by changing seats at interval). Some interesting use of musical numbers enhances the narrative and the emotional texture of the play which ranges from broadly comic lines contrasting men who make quiche to those who favour their ‘sausages’ to poignant and frightening depictions of death, near death and injury. 

At over two hours in length, the writer/editor in me would have made a few cuts to the text, but that is a minor quibble as the story arc earns that duration with only a few scenes that might be considered extraneous.

If you’re a Wagga Wagga local I urge you to go and see Neighbourhood Watch for a really rich night at the theatre and to support some of your most talented and creative neighbours. Others may need to hold out for Gillian Armstrong's mooted film adaptation of the play.

Photo source: SoACT's Facebook page

Less is more work

Albury writer Robyne Young recently introduced a group of us to the idea of the ‘zero draft,’ the brain dump that precedes any attempt to craft a narrative or sequence your material. American poet Ellen Bass says that the best writing contains only the essential and recommends you first express the whole of your idea in all its detail then ‘weed out the inessential’. I realise that the prose pieces I’ve written often recount incidents in such detail that they may bore the reader, or as my spouse says, would only be of interest to someone who knows you (i.e. tell someone who cares).

It is easier to be economical in poetry. It is by nature succinct, impressionistic. But with a story to tell I am tempted to provide information about the weather, how I know the people involved, the names of places and types of vehicle etc. While I know less is more, making more less is hard work.

Ellen Bass source: https://lectures.org/event/ellen-bass/

I was ready to shelve 2,000 plus words of recent prose that fell into these traps when I encountered Bass’s advice. Then I had coffee with, Karen, who features in the anecdote and discussed it with her. Perhaps I could redeem the piece with weeding and capturing only what was notable about the experience we shared.

Karen was my companion for a 500 km trip to my cousin Beryl’s funeral. We both wanted to say goodbye, but also to put in a plea for her boxes of genealogical material. Beryl was my first cousin once removed, Karen is distantly related to Beryl’s late husband. We’d only met a couple of times before our road trip. It was nice to have a seasoned traveller as a companion. Karen has lived in five states. Her bumper sticker reads: ‘NICKINGOFFAGAIN’. 

Karen instigated most of our conversations en route. We skated from topic to topic: astrology (she is a Libra), political corruption (she believes some of the money disgraced MP Darryl Maguire got former NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian to ‘throw at’ Wagga remains unaccounted for) and history, family and social (European bees were introduced to Australia in 1822 because native bees did not produce enough honey). Her driving style is likewise fluid (she drove because I found out too late that her car is a manual which I can’t drive). A passenger’s perspective can be skewed, but it felt like we almost brushed against trucks to our left a few times and we definitely drubbed against the corrugations on the outer edge of the road. Karen gestured extravagantly as she spoke, sometimes leaving the gear stick and steering wheel briefly untouched then taking skilful corrective action when she had made her point.

100% accurate description of Libran characteristics  - sources: Karen and https://www.astrosage.com/zodiac/libra-woman.asp

Our destination was the Squid’s Ink Inn, on the shores of Lake Macquarie. On arrival the manager, a surly man in his 30s, assigned us our rooms stating that he had already charged both to Karen’s credit card. Karen deemed him ‘shonky’ as we had intended to pay for our accommodation separately and he should not have processed the payment at all until we arrived and checked in. I reimbursed Karen by paying for dinner in the motel restaurant. Sorted, we thought.

The next morning we strolled by the lake then set off at about 9.30 am for Beryl’s funeral which was scheduled for 11 am at Lake Macquarie Memorial Park. Google Maps showed it as being about twenty minutes away so we had ample time.  I pressed ‘start’ on Google Maps directions but we soon realised that we were looping back through the same roads. Karen exclaimed ‘we’ve driven past those same trees four or five times and they haven’t grown any’…

Then we saw tall whirls of smoke on the horizon and hit a diversion set up by emergency services. Time was getting tight. We lost the GPS signal and I re-entered our destination. In minutes we found ourselves on the motorway to Sydney and our trip time recalculated to over an hour. Turns out there is an almost identically named funeral facility on Sydney’s north shore. Karen remained calm and even tempered, but my vagus nerve was having none of it. Suddenly finding a loo was more urgent than honouring my cousin’s passing. A search for conveniences proved fruitless. We spied some secluded bushland where a council ute was parked on a gravel turning circle. Karen pulled in,  passed me a box of Kleenex and I legged it into the vegetation. Karen engaged the driver in conversation and obtained accurate directions to the Memorial Park.

We arrived about 40 minutes late and shuffled into a pew in the chapel behind the assembled friends and relatives just as the minister was concluding her remarks. I had never been to an interment. I was truly grateful that Beryl had opted for burial as it gave us a second chance to pay respects. We followed the coffin on its gurney down a gentle hill amongst rose bushes and immaculately trimmed hedges to the graveside. There we exchanged hugs and handshakes, memories and stories. Beryl’s granddaughter read Do Not Stand At My Grave and Weep. We all stood and wept.  Then we each collected a gerbera from the funeral director to place on the coffin before it was lowered into the grave and out of sight. The atmosphere at the wake was friendly. Karen and I had a chance to talk genealogy with various guests and secured a promise from the family that Beryl’s papers would find their way to Wagga.

View of Lake Macquarie from the Squid' Ink Inn (my photo)

Too weary to contemplate the long drive home, we booked another night at the Squid’s Ink Inn specifying that we wanted to be charged separately. When we drove up all the parking spaces were taken. The manager, with an unwarranted show of magnanimity (we were paying guests after all) let us park in the driveway of his onsite accommodation.  Karen reiterated to me that she distrusted him. The next morning he happily processed my room payment on my credit card and it was not until we returned home that Karen found he had also charged her for two more nights’ accommodation i.e. my room had been billed to both of us. It took a six month long campaign of dispute resolution for Karen to get the money re-credited. ‘Shonky’ indeed!

We were less chatty on the drive home. Back in Wagga I thanked Karen for chauffeuring, for keeping calm when we got lost and for having that box of Kleenex handy. If we contemplate nicking off again, I hope the reason isn’t a funeral, but our next adventure will be sorting through those boxes of family history records.