My mid-life crisis

The other day a Corvette pulled up in the car-park outside the office where I work, and a man in his late fifties got out. One of my colleagues remarked that it must be a mid-life crisis car. I suppose that many true words are spoken in jest, and that person in the Corvette is going through the same emotional turmoils that I am.

I am soon to turn 56, and I have suddenly realised that things that I have dreamt about achieving are not going to happen. All my life I have had visions of being a professional singer and actor. I now see that I am not going to achieve those goals, and it depresses me.  I am now stuck in a job that I do not enjoy, with no apparent way out. Simply put, I have feel that I am ready to be put out to pasture. Unfortunately, I cannot afford to retire, so I will just have to stay where I am. I am not even able to change to another job, because it is almost impossible to find someone who is prepared to employ someone my age. It appears that I will have to remain in this rut until I am no longer able to work.

Mother Superior gets very cross with me when I get depressed. She can’t understand why I feel that I have not achieved anything. We have a very happy relationship, and have successfully raised three lovely children who, in turn have married good spouses. I have always had reasonably good jobs, and have done things that many other people have not, like travel overseas giving courses on new technology. I even managed to bring my family from South Africa to Australia to start a new life, and we have all settled well.

I suppose when she puts it that way, it is hard to argue – but why do I still feel unfulfilled? Is it possibly that all of us want to be someone special, be it in entertainment, politics or academic achievement. When we get to our fifties we realise that it is not going to happen, and there is no point in even dreaming about it. I realise now that I can forget about being the entertainer that I wanted to be, and just accept that I will be an ordinary person.

Of course, I should be grateful for what I have got. I am happily married, and we live in beautiful house at the coast. I also have a reasonably well paid job with a great company.

I also feel that time is running out.

Oh yes. I did buy a big car. I did help – but not a lot.

Amateur theatre, the orphan

The speaker in the dressing room suddenly comes to life. “Starters on stage” booms the stage-manager’s voice. A number of us stand up. There are a few last checks in the mirror before we head out into the passage-way and down the stairs to the stage. At  the foot of the stairs, the musical director is waiting to give us some last minute advice and assurances. She is very smartly dressed tonight for her important role as conductor.

I walk through the wings onto the stage. I still can’t get over how huge it is. I look up and see all the sets hanging far above me. At the moment the place is busy, with stage-hands moving scenery and making last minute changes. There is a lot of hammering and sawing going on. I know that we can make as much noise as we like because between us and the auditorium there is the main curtain and a steel fire-curtain.

We all take our places, and the stage-hands withdraw. “Quiet please. The fire curtain is going up” yells the stage manager. The stage goes silent, as we hear the hum of the electric motor lifting the massive steel fire curtain in front of the main curtain. As it goes up, we can hear the babble from the audience, and we wonder how many of them are out there, and how responsive they will be. There are also the odd sounds from the orchestra as they tune up their instruments. I shiver of excitement goes through me. I don’t have a very big part, but I am enjoying this immensely.

The audience beging to quieten, and I realise it is because the lights in the auditorium have started to dim. There is a short period of dead silence, and then the audience applauses because the conductor has appeared. We smile and look at each other. “I sounds like a good audience” I whisper to my fellow actors.

The orchestra springs to life as they play the overture. The stage is suddenly plunged into darkness as the music continues. The curtain goes up and we are dazzled by bright lights. We all look for the conductor’s baton and then break into song on cue. The audience applauds loudly as we leave the stage. Those that are due to go on again soon go to the green room at the side, while the rest of us return to our dressing room upstairs, and wait for the stage manager’s call for us to go back to the stage. We chatter excitedly about how good the audience is, and laugh about mistakes we have made.

I feel that I am in Heaven.

It has taken us a lot of hard work and frustrations getting here, and there were times during rehearsals that I felt like giving up – but now it is all worth it.  None of us have been paid a cent to do this, and it has taken an enormous amount of time and effort to get here, but we are all enthusiastically doing it. This is the magic of amateur theatre.

My childhood and adolescent years were spent in Springs, which was a large town. We did not have any professional theatre groups, so amateur theatre was very popular. We had a beautiful, well equipped theatre which almost always had some show on. There were many theatre groups, like the Springs Operatic Society, Teenage Theatre and the Springs Reps. In addition, the local schools and dance groups put on shows there.  The shows were well supported because audiences knew that they would be treated to quality live shows in comfortable surroundings, without having to go all the way to Johannesburg to see a professional show.

After a very long break, I have returned to amateur theatre. I am now living in Perth, Australia, and I still get a real high out of being involved in a performance. Unfortunately, things are very different to what I experienced in my younger days. Instead of a comfortable modern theatre, we have to make use of a community hall with a modular stage and some retro-fited curtains. There is no green room, dressing room or orchestra pit. The audiences have to endure sitting on hard plastic chairs and have obstructed views. The one plus is that, after the shows, the cast can mingle with the audience and receive the accolades they feel thay have deserved.

I belong to a theatre group called JETS, and have had parts in two of their shows, the most recent being a comedy called Busybody. Unfortunately, my South African accent precludes me from getting any major parts, so I have to be satisfied with smaller roles. Not only that, but there is an amazing amount of talent around, and auditions are hotly contested. My fellow Busybody cast members, especially those taking the larger parts, were absolutely fantastic. They were all so good! It is such a shame that they have to put up with such primitive conditions.

While I am all for promoting a healthy lifestyle, I do think sport gets too much support from the public purse – to the detriment of the Performing Arts. I think it is time that my city, Joondalup, provides its ratepayers with a decent Performing Arts Centre, so that the many talented performers who live here can get a chance  to entertain us properly.

The Good Food and Wine Festival

Every year, the Perth Convention Centre has the Good Food and Wine Festival. Muti Man and Gifted One have been going with their friends for some years. After their first visit, Muti Man could not stop extolling the virtues of this festival. It was as if he had discovered the promised land. He loves the event so much that he looks forward to it for months before the time. I suspect that he would rather miss his own child’s baptism rather than miss the Good Food and Wine Festival.

Anyway, after hearing how life changing this event is, I decided to see for myself, and I persuaded the Mother Superior to come with me. Muti Man was overjoyed.

Well, the great day arrived. On Muti Man’s advice, we decided to take the bus to the station rather than go by car. I wasn’t sure that I would be in a fit state to drive after this wonderful day. Muti Man and Gifted One drove to their friend, Getafix’s, house so that they, with others, could prepare themselves adequately for the treasures of the day. They were prepared to spend the night there.

Muppet and Biggles had also decided to experience the wonders of the festival with us, and had gone ahead on an earlier train.

As the train approached Perth, we got an SMS from Muti Man, asking where we were. It turned out that we were all on the same train. The excitement grew as we pulled into the Esplanade Station.

The festival comprised rows and rows of stalls representing wineries and breweries, with a small number of food providers. We picked up our complimentary wine glasses and made our way to the first aisle. For the moment, I felt I was in  the land of plenty. It was still reasonably early, so we could get to each stall and sample their lovely wines.  It was all very genteel – we could rinse out our glasses before each tasting, and the providers were quite generous. I could also try out my sophisticated wine tasting language, where I could discuss the nose, length and notes associated with each wine. The wines were fantastic, but there was no way that I was going to remember them. The idea was that you were meant to order cases of them, but there was so much to choose from, it would be very difficult to decide. The other problem was that there did not appear to be any spitting bowls, so we were obliged to swallow every taste. I did not mind that at all, but I did realise that if I continued as I was, I would be paralytic by the time I got to the end of the first aisle. It truly did appear to be the promised land.

Mother Superior wisely suggested that we have something to eat before we carried on with the wine and beer tastings. “No problem”, I thought. We will go to the stalls offering food tastings, and have our fill with the samples on offer. I soon discovered that the food providers were not nearly as generous as their wine and beer counterparts. Those that offered samples were quite mean, and there were huge crowds of people desperately trying to get items like infinitesimally small meatballs on sticks. For the moment, I thought I was in a third world refugee camp, with all those arms stretched out trying to grab a small morsel of free food. I found myself in a crowd of people hungrily watching a woman cooking tiny sausages in an electric frying pan. Nobody was going to give up their spot for the promised reward. We anxiously watched and waited, all hoping to partake when it was ready. As soon as the sausages were cooked and spiked with tooth-picks, hands reached from the starving masses to grab them. In two seconds, the bounty was gone. The unlucky ones had to wait for the next lot to be cooked some time later.

We realised that we would have to buy food if we were going to eat properly. There were two stalls selling food. The one that offered Brattwurst sausages had a queue that stretched the length of the exhibition hall. The other one offered gourmet meals – at a gourmet price. We opted for the latter, because we could not see us surviving the queue. The meal was tasty, but tiny. I could see why people decided to brave the queue for the Brattwurst sausages.

The exhibition hall was rapidly filling up with people, and the genteel wine tasting was no more. If you wanted to taste something you had to join the throng of people around a stall, and desparately stick your glass out in the hope that the person who was frantically pouring might give you a drop. No one bothered to rinse out their glasses, so you ended up with a smorgasbord of tastes. I felt like a beggar. Muti Man was in his element. He had taken on the primeval hunting urge. He had a gleam in his eyes as he thrust his glass through a crowd and emerged triumphantly with some precious liquid in it.

Our tickets included a celebrity chef presentation, so we joined about another 1,000 people in the auditorium to watch the event. The celebrities were some surly woman who owned a local restaurant, and a jovial Irish man from Brisbane whose claim to fame was that he had appeared on the television show, Ready steady cook. The surly woman grabbed some flour and began to knead into a dough while muttering something into her microphone. The Irishman obviously felt his job was to be a comedian, because he bravely tried to crack some rather old jokes. The woman did not appear to be amused. After kneading her dough she put it away somewhere and pulled out a cooked tart from one of the ovens. Everybody clapped politely. Now, it was the man’s turn. I think he took piece of salmon and fried it. To give him his due, he did try to educate us on  how to cook salmon. The camera man valiantly tried to show it to us by almost sticking the camera into the fish. The chef then shelved his work and also produced a beautifully cooked version. That was the end of the demonstration, and all 1,000 of us shuffled out wondering if we had learned anything.

Once more, we were back into the melee. Muti Man resumed his enthusiastic hunting. By this stage, I was getting really hungry, and we were grateful to find a stall handing out free samples without a huge crowd around it. We soon found out why. The samples were goat yogurt, and it tasted disgusting. The woman at the stall was delighted to have people actually tasting the stuff, so she proceeded to expound its virtues in great detail, while trying to offer more tastes. We all started looking at our watches and beat a hasty retreat.

I then decided to brave the queue for a Brattwurst sausage. It was a long wait, and we devoured our sausages hungrily.

The Mother Superior and I were getting tired of having to fight through the crowds, so we decided to head home. We left Muti Man and his friends dashing off to try some exotic beer. They still had a lot of fight left in them.

The festival could have been quite enjoyable if they had limited the crowds to about half that was there. All up, including train fare, it cost us about $60.00. Next year, I will use the money to buy a few bottles of nice wine and some fish and chips, and enjoy my festival at home – without the crowds. For my celebrity chef presentation, I can always watch Gordon Ramsey, who is a lot more entertaining.