Fryday: It's all the Fashion.

Love is in the air.
I don’t really mind; it is after all only a minor pollutant. More an irritant, really,  that occurs mostly at this time of year, like hay fever. Unfortunately this year it coincided with a far greater seasonal irritant, Auckland’s annual “Fashion” Week.
Now, I have to readily acknowledge that I somehow missed my invitation to the event and like most of us consigned to below P in Auckland’s alphabetical social list my only exposure to the considerable over-exposure of this week’s fashion offerings was what I saw in the media. Am I resentful? Am I envious? No. Am I being completely truthful there? No.
I would  like at least to be acknowledged and promoted to the F list alongside Auckland’s lengthy list of failed public relation professionals, anybody who had or still has any form of relationship with Len Brown, and Auckland Transport executives. However, that was not to be.
But, I still feel the love.
I feel the love of young fashion designers, Hohepa Thompson and Mia Brennan who took the opportunity of a Fashion Week catwalk to publicly declare their love (or is it aroha?) for each other by Mr Thompson proposing marriage to Ms Brennan. I was once warned off making a similar public declaration, citing the possible embarrassment if the proposee refused. The warning was well-meant but without subsequent foundation. I was accepted, and so was Mr Thompson which is little surprise given that he and Ms Brennan have been living together for three years and have a seven-month daughter called Tallow.
Ms Brennan said yes and, according to the NZ Herald (cringe alert), the Fashion week audience went “aahhh”.
But what strikes me about this is that their love’s public expression and explosion for each other was one of only two moments of genuinely sincere, non-pretentious, non-patronising, believable and eminently practical events in the whole Fashion Week calendar.
The other was the launch and appearance of Confitex’s incontinence panties.
The young couple’s sincerity did not perhaps extend to their fashion offering. And here I quote from the NZ Herald coverage details about the loving couple’s creations: “Their Hangi Collection brought together her summer-friendly dress designs with an environmentally friendly dyeing method they cooked up together. Clothes are left to simmer in a hangi only to emerge with a sepia print effect. Any irregularities, including the odd scorch mark, are integral. ‘We were just talking about family and food and how it brings everyone together and the idea of country and cloth,’ said Brennan. That set them experimenting, with joint dye and design time sandwiched between Thompson's day job as a painter in the relaxed resort town.”
All very laudable. But really? “Family and Food?” “Country and Cloth?” “Cooked up in a hangi?”Now, who is going to wear that? Be honest.
But also be fair—it is highly unlikely that anything featured in Fashion Week is likely to seen beyond the catwalk. Nor, I think, is it intended to. Fashion Week is not there to have any practical purpose. Or indeed any purpose.
Except one.
Fashion Week like party political conferences and just about every other “conference” organised world-wide is there solely for one thing—for everybody to have a good-time. The only gatherings that aren’t, and both are unique to our dear dear New Zealand, are marae meetings and Green Party conferences.  Nobody expects to have a good time there.
But, unlike Fashion Week,  at least their hangis dish up something more edible and edifying than country and cloth.

It is all getting rather silly

Sometimes I hate myself.
This is one of those times.
This is one of those times when I give additional publicity to those whom I believe have already been given a surfeit of publicity. I say “been given” because at least one of those persons is blaming the media for unwanted attention, saying that she has done nothing that warrants it, that she is “hurt and saddened” by it and states, rather incongruously given the publicity about her, that we don’t know shit about her.
Well, Millie we do know shit about you, we have been fed shit about you and, yes, we have to agree that you have gone through a lot of that brown stuff.
The problem is we no longer give a s**t.
Many of us, I think, are sick and tired of hearing about Millie Elder-Holmes. And lest she lays claim, as she has, that it is not her fault, she has however played the distraught “widow” to the hilt and so frequently and theatrically, one is left to wonder whether it is more than a little contrived and whether Rosemary McLeod’s column, to which Millie has reacted so violently, is not more than a little accurate.
The second person I am sick of hearing of is Caitlyn/Bruce Jenner. Yes he/she has gone through a gender regeneration (not very successfully in my view, she still looks like a man in a dress) and she may well be one of those many sad people who were born and forced to live in the “wrong” sex. But to make the whole thing a media circus replete with publicists, Vanity Fair covers and a reality TV show is at the very least bordering on the boring.
And that is perhaps the problem with both Millie and Caitlyn/Bruce, they are boring.
In Caitlyn’s case we are now told that Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner may appear in the I am Cait reality show to boost its ratings. I doubt it will work. It may have escaped Kris’s attention but the programme itself is as boring as the proverbial bats**t and having someone, anyone, from the world’s most boring, past their use-by date, family the Kardashian Klan appear on the show is not going to help.
I think in time, and soon, the whole Jenner/Kardashian thing will go away. It is after all as unsustainable as an Ashley Madison romance.
Millie Elder-Holmes I am not so sure about.
Rosemary McLeod may well be right.
I don’t think we have heard the last of—and from—Millie Elder-Holmes yet.

The Day the Laughter Died

I read an article today that put forward the hypothesis that 70 is the new 50. As someone who is closer to 70 than 50 I should have derived some comfort from that, except the article alluded only to women and only to the fashions they wear. So, without any positive reinforcement or evidence to the contrary from the NZ Herald, I have no other option but to acknowledge and accept that I am old. And male.
And when you do get to my age your thoughts all too often rebel. Unbidden and oblivious to restraint they wander into uncharted and unwelcome territories such as mortality, and what might have been, what could have been, and what—perhaps—should have been.
The latter came to mind this week when I learned of the passing of an old friend—one whom I had not seen for many years, but did, still, in his passing leave me with memories of years that are among the best of which I am blest.
He and I were half of a quartet of comedy writers and performers called Klik—three men, one woman. For a time we were semi-professional both as performers and as writers. And, yes, we were very very funny. We could get laughs from most anything: from the shooting of the High Noon singer because the waiting sheriff got bored with the song, to the cloth cap, rampant unionist slave who buried Julius Caesar and was not prepared to lend his ears. And then there was the classic Eskimo for Dinner sketch in which an eskimo shared a dining table with an aristocratic couple and ended with the “coupling” of the wife and eskimo.
You had to be there.
And I was there, with this man, this woman, and my “mad, bad and dangerous to know” Irish mate who were collectively Klik and for a time we so, so clicked. We wrote at night and we wrote drunk—well, two of us anyway. We often performed the same way. We watched McPhail and Gadsby and knew for sure we were better. We watched Monty Python and were not so sure. We had a good time. We gave a good time, The scripts are yellowing behind me as I write this.
Today the Irishman is gone, long gone, and as of this week so is The Man.
The Woman told me. She lives, still. And teaches art.
And back then, had we thought about it, had we wanted it, had we been sober enough to reach out and grab it, we could have been, perhaps should have been, making you laugh still.
Now, it is only me who hears the laughter.
RIP Kevin.

As Cecil C. Sackrider Sees It: Mounting Mammon.

As my wife, Pastor Billie-Jo, and I were lying in bed last night praying and thinking as we often do of the second coming we were visited, as we often are, by Our Lord.
The message He brought was joyous and uplifting for it is foretold that we are to be saved—that God still loves America, forgives America and as an expression of his divine love and forgiveness, we are to once again have a Republican President.
The Lord saith to me, and through me, that our time of purgatory, so ordained when we turned our back on God, embraced homosexuality and other evil acts and elected a black President are at an end. The Lord saith to me, and through me, it is so ordained that there will be no more more Democratic Presidents, no more Black Presidents and—God be Praised—no women Presidents.
God is good. He so loveth His people. Republicans.
And here I say to you an important message, It is God’s will, God’s instruction, God’s anointing that the man who is to be our next President is Jeb Bush. It is so stated in The Bible: “There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush.” (Exodus 3:2) And that bush which shall once again set America afire will be John Ellis (Jeb) Bush. It is so written. But God warns us, lest any man in his blindness and far from the sight of God be tempted to the dark side of Donald Trump, the false Republican, know this for it is also written in The Bible: (Matthew 20:12)” Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves.” For Donald Trump is a succubus of Mammon. A money changer. A man who whose god is money and money is god. God be praised, there is no place in religion for money.  And so it is said by God. And so I say unto you, my friend, we must extirpate our great nation of the scourge of Trump. Assist us in this Our God’s work: send your gifting of $100 (tax deductible) to our Saving Christians Against Mammon (SCAM) fund to help us help the White house to once again be the home and haven of the True Faith and that Faith be through God’s anointed second son of George H.W. Bush, Jeb Bush.
As a special offer, for this week only, all of the blessed givers will each receive a Bampillow pillow personally embroidered with the Lord’s Prayer by Pastor Billie-Jo.

•    For a list of God’s Gifts, as delivered personally by God to Pastor Cecil C. Sackrider (handwriting verified), send a check or money order (minimum US$99.99) to the Cecil C. Sackrider Ministry 1069E West 35 Street Montgomery Alabama United States of America, Zip Code 666.  Checks should be made out to CASH (Congregation Against Satan’s Handiwork). All donations over US$50,000 go into the draw to win a personal phone call from Our Lord, as delivered by Pastor Sackrider.