Christmas Frights

Barely 50 metres from where I write this there sits primly a house that nightly draws from the National Grid an amount of power many will consider morally and pragmatically reprehensible. It’s drawing power from the National Grid is exceeded only by its drawing power for a bored local populace (this is Christchurch, after all) attracted to this latest evocation of imported American tradition—the external electrification and decoration of the residential home. Rhinestone Cowboy meets Liberace meets Universal Homes. The people who perpetrate this upon us are undoubtedly good people. Not only do they enter into the Christmas spirit with gay abandon (and some may well be), they generously share it with the rest of us. But there is a dark side to this light display. I am told that it is getting an increasingly competitive art form with homes on streets and even entire streets vying aggressively with each other for the most ornate—read facile—displays. There are dark mutterings of huge expenditures, and even competing displays being damaged or stolen. Jealousy and envy are making their insidious ways up these light-saturated paths. I personally cannot attest to any of this: my refusal to enter this arena, either as a competitor or as a spectator, is abject. My sole contribution to Christmas display I intend to be my traditional display of pique that my wife won’t let me play Snoopy’s Christmas. My sole foray into Christmas spirit will be copious quantities of single-malt scotch. I am singularly ill equipped therefore to provide a balanced viewpoint on this issue. But that hasn’t stopped Fryday before. So let me say that whilst these homes undoubtedly provide much pleasure to entire families who ooh and arr over them to the extent that there is a mess next morning on the footpaths, and the intent of the people who pay and display them is commendable, we nevertheless have here an example of something just a little bit silly. Something else imported from the country that also gave us Halloween and George W. Bush. It’s here to stay. I’m just not sure it's our way. Merry Christmas.

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A Virtuous Woman

I have had the virtue (for virtue it is) over the last week of looking at life from a female perspective, I have learned some great truths, previously denied me as a man. I have learned that bras chaff and pantyhose is superior to stockings. I have resisted the temptation to step out in public unless my make-up is just right, and even then I check it in the mirror at every opportunity. I find myself hunting for idle chit-chat and, when I find it, entirely forgetting that I should be somewhere else. Men surprise me in that the things they feel are important--the economy, the global crisis, Black Caps coaching and Pamela Anderson--are far from important, though Pamela Anderson has a certain latent appeal still. In fact, I find men quite laughable in their self-generated and self-promoted superiority and pomposity. However, I do find John Key curiously attractive. Being a woman is nothing like I thought it would be. It's better. I am given to the thought that I can do anything. I am woman! I could be prime minister. I could be New Zealand's first feminine prime minister. The world is my oyster. Governed by my oyster. And to the world I say suck on that.

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Dear God XI: The Son & the father

Dear God,

Y’know God, the best and earliest advice I ever heard was from my Daddy not long after my blessed birth when I heard him say to my Mamma, “Well, y’know Babs, ain’t nobody that’s perfect.”

I have long lived by that, my hole presidency has lived by that. There ain’t nobody that’s perfect—not Condolezza, not Dick, not Don, not even Laura (though if Laura would just do that other little thing she probably would be) and, I have to say, because nobody else I know will, not even I am perfect.

But you? What was it? When was it.? Was it after that 550th bottle of Jack that something or someone came to me and said, “Bud, you is going nowhere in life, and you has got to come to God ‘cause He is going to take you to a better life and to the presidency, and so shall it be good and perfect. And so it was that the Man did come to the presidency…

And then to Iraq.

Now, I am not accusing you or anything, you understand. I don’t know whether it was you God or my Daddy that told me to go into Iraq. Frankly, I often got you two mixed up when I was listening and not paying too much attention. I know this, it wasn’t Homer Simpson, ‘cause I asked him. And it wasn’t in the Bible, ‘cause nowhere in there does it say that I should go forth and kick the shit out of Saddam.

But someone told me, and then left me to take the blame. Let’s this be our little secret—I blame you. But I’m not going to go out there and say our boys in Iraq are dieing because they are doing God’s work. No sirree. That would be cowardly, that would be indecisive, that would be sacrilege, that could be a problem when we eventually meet. Besides, it is incumbent on me as the incumbent to be strong in the face of adversity, show leadership, accept the accountability and…find someone else to blame.

Now I want you to give some thought to that God. I want you to then come to me tonight after the Simpsons and before Laura and tell me whose to blame for us being in Iraq. I don’t want no God-given solutions on how to get out of there—‘cause I am going to leave that to the new guy coming in. But I do want you to tell me who is going to take the fall on this, so that when History looks back at me and my presidency he will say, “it wasn’t perfect, but he was a good man a righteous man, a man of vision, a man of the people, a man insightful, intelligence, who strode the world like Homer and changed it for the better. That’s what I want. So you need to come up with someone else to blame for Iraq. I don’t care who: Don, Colin, Laura, anybody.

Have you got it God? Give me a legacy. Find someone else to blame. But not Dick. Not the vice president. Never Dick.

Never let it ever be said, oh God, that, I George W. Bush was ruled by my Dick.

I’ll leave it to you.

G.

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Fairy Tale

Apparently, nobody loves a fairy when she's forty. Equally apparently, this now appears to be a generally held belief, despite the fact that there is no significant scientific evidence to support the conclusion. Indeed the initial conclusion was reached and then imperviously engraved by something as insubstantive as a music hall staple of the 30s written by Arthur Le Clerq and sung lustily by Tessie O'Shea. Fairies since of advanced age have suffered for it.
As indeed am I. For such am I.
I am in rehearsals for the year-end pantomime. I have never done a pantomime before but I have to say that I am thoroughly enjoying the experience. In this production, Cinderella, I play no fewer than three female roles, among them the fairy godmother, in which capacity I sing that song. I am instructed to mince, to fawn, to exhibit my feminine side and to leave at the stage door any vestige of self-respect I may still have. The last is no problem: I have none.
A more experienced practitioner in such matters tells me that the way to play such roles is to do so with confidence and not worry about how big a fool you are making of yourself as you skip gaily around the stage in a tutu bemoaning the fact that your wand has suddenly developed a droop. He is right of course. But my riposte, offered as a true method actor, was "But what is the essence of the character here. What is the inner-self? What of me do I bring to this character?" His answer was:
"You play three female characters, right?"
"Yes."
"Don't even go there."
Nevertheless, playing three female characters, particularly the fairy, is making a subtle change in me. Whether it is drawing out my feminine side I don't know. But last night, through circumstances way beyond her control, my wife was stranded in town. As a consequence, I spent a night alone: alone, restless and missing her.
Oh shit!
I think I'll go out and kick a rugby ball.

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