Year of the Queen: The Making of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert - The Musical (12 page)

Jess banishes me as he puts on his final touches and I take my seat for the first part of the evening’s entertainment. The house lights dim and Jess barrels onto the stage as a brassy and commanding woman. She calls the room to order and no one dares challenge her robust authority. It’s a bewildering transformation as Jess shows off his other self. She launches into a stand up routine and pulls the bride who assaulted me earlier up from the hen’s group onto the stage. This previously loud and obnoxious woman is now completely eclipsed by Jess, who rakes in the laughs at her expense. Even the bride’s timid attempts to get into the game act as fodder for Jess’s razor sharp joke fest. Once she’s finished with her, she sets the bride free and continues with the show. She introduces the first act. It’s a mime to
These Boots Are Made For Walking
, performed by a flaming red head. I’m blown away at how brilliantly she lip-synchs to the song. It’s as if she’s actually singing it. Then a virginal Swedish dame enters and mimes to a bizarre song about a girl on top of a snowy mountain somewhere, which of course descends into ribald crudity. It’s hilarious and it brings the house down. I didn’t realize drag was so funny.

Next, Amanda enters dramatically and begins to perform
I Will Survive
. It’s a version I’ve never heard before, sung like a torch song with no disco beat at all. Amanda performs it like she’s got a point to make. It’s intense, dramatic and very powerful. I think of Tony Sheldon. I wish he could see this. In the show, Bernadette has a speech about how important the technique is in getting the lip-synch just right. “The vibrato of the Adam’s apple, the quivering bottom lip.” Amanda is doing it all and she strikes me as being a real life version of Bernadette. Even as I’m thinking this, Lily taps me on the arm and says she thinks Amanda may have had her tits done.

After a grand bow, Amanda sweeps off and the house lights come up for intermission. The place has completely filled up. Jess mentioned before, that the show was quite a success but now I see that he was just being humble. The place is packed and rocking. The audience couldn’t be more diverse. There are tables of gay men, gay women, hens nights, a group of seemingly straight women and a smattering of young drags. Amanda arrives and I tell her I thought she was great. She takes the compliment flippantly through a cloud of cigarette smoke.

I get a full beer for the second half of the show, which is
The Sound of Music
. Drag nuns enter and mime to
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria
. It’s hilarious, crude and choreographed so cleverly that it makes the tiny stage somehow seem enormous. Beforehand, Jess had made no attempt to talk the show up at all, but it’s very well put together and Lily and I piss ourselves laughing at it. The crowd roars all the way through. A lot of work has gone into it, and it’s very entertaining.

When interval comes I commit sacrilege by getting up to leave. Lily is stunned. I explain I’m leaving tomorrow for months and I want to spend at least some of my last night in Melbourne with my wife. I ask her to explain this to Jess and to send my thanks and congratulations. The air outside the pub smells like a crisp mountain breeze in comparison as I wander home processing what I’d just witnessed. It’s inspired me for rehearsals on Monday and I can’t wait to get cracking.

When I walk in the door at home, the smell of cooked goose is intense. I’m immediately salivating. Annie shares with me the image of Simon, the dinner guest, sent to retrieve the cooked goose from our oven and charged with the responsibility of traipsing back down the street on foot, balancing it on a silver platter through the night air. On Monday this forlorn waiter will turn into the master director before an eager cast. If only I had a photo to flash around.

I rush to the kitchen desperately hoping that there’s been an offering of a small piece of goose flesh. I scour the kitchen desperately, only to be disappointed. I’m shattered. You really know who your friends are.

Chapter 9

She’s leaving home, bye bye

If the phone rang to tell me the whole thing was a giant mistake and I didn’t have to go, I’d be seriously relieved. It’s Sunday and I’m just putting the finishing touches to my packing before I head to the airport for my flight to Sydney - and my semi-permanent life up there.

Perhaps subconsciously, I’ve packed lightly even though I know I’m going away for months. Annie’s taken the kids to a birthday party and I’m rattling around the house on my own with a desperate sinking feeling in my guts. I’ve never been apart from my kids for longer than a few days and the reality of leaving them is choking me up. I really, really don’t want to go.

Annie and I have come up with a plan A and a plan B for all this. Plan A is for me to commute every two weekends to see the boys, and we’ll just wait and see how long the show goes on for. If it runs to say, February, March maybe, even April, then hopefully we’ll all manage being apart and my fortnightly trips will be enough of a presence to satisfy everyone. Plan B is panic stations. If we’re not coping, she and the kids will just move up and to hell with everything. I’m truly blessed with a wife who, having been in the business herself, gets the drill. She’s happy to be absorbed into whatever plan works best at the time. I remind myself that thousands of divorced fathers only see their kids once a fortnight and
they
cope. Or do they? My dear friend Greg spent months apart from his kids last year. He tells me I’ll get through it. There’ll be dark, lonely times but it’s not as if I’m going off to war, for chrissake. I’m only an hour away.

I finish my packing with far too long to spare before the family gets back. I’m left alone to wander around the house with little to do but assess the wood pile and wonder if I’ve left enough split wood and kindling for Annie to manage the fire, or, to notice the flapping nature reed on the fence and wish that I’d secured it properly yesterday. In fact all the little jobs which are traditionally mine in this household swim through my mind, and I feel sick that they’re now going to fall to Annie to do.

The phone rings. It’s my Uncle Tony whom I haven’t spoken to in years, the guy who got me into the opera all those years ago. He’s called to wish me good luck for the show. Miraculously, or maybe just through personal experience he reads the tone in my voice and calls me on my reluctance to go. My misgivings flood out. I tell him I made a conscious decision not to tour since the kids were born because of exactly this reason. I want to see my kids grow up. There will always be another show. But what they and I miss out on by me being away is irreplaceable. They grow up so fast. Tony finds exactly the words to reassure me that things will be fine. He and his family got through it and so will I. This call couldn’t have been better timed. It’s as if it had been programmed by the producers to make sure I got to rehearsals on Monday morning. I thank Tony profusely and I reshape the way I see the rest of my day.

The family drops me and my bags to the airport. One by one I hug them goodbye, even though Ned, the little one has fallen asleep on the way and I miss out on any meaningful farewell from him. He will wake to find his dad has already gone. My heart breaks as I wave to them as they drive away. I take a deep breath and harden my heart to the bustling and impersonal expedience of the airport.

My accommodation at Coogee Beach is all that I hoped for. It’s in the hub of the shopping centre, minutes from the beach. As I pay the cabby and roll my enormous suit case across the street to the hotel, I’m already ticking boxes, like, there’s a good cafe, a handy supermarket, there’s a bank, a video shop…

After my royal greeting from the staff, I dump my bags in the room and assess the view of the beach from my balcony. I wander the apartment familiarizing myself with all the goodies.

After a time of just plumbing the bob I decide to launch into the job of getting myself set up for the immediate future, unpacking, getting food in, sorting my internet connection, checking bus routes and timetables to get to work, and exploring my new ‘hood. I’m on the phone to Annie every ten minutes and I have a burning desire to kiss my kids. As I wander around the streets I can already feel my focus closing in around me, as I prepare to immerse myself into rehearsals. The job in front of me is enormous. Although for the first time in six years I’m not beholden to children when I plan my every moment of the day, and I have a whole new city as my playground, I begin to check myself into a hotel of denial. Until the show is up and running I plan to do little else but work.

Chapter 10

Buddy Holly

Rehearsals week 1

The tiny club is packed. Every table is crammed with raucous punters guzzling pots of beer and cheap wine, and those who can’t find a table spill out into the foyer bar, their heads craning to see in. The dim spotlight struggles the short distance to the stage through a thick haze of cigarette smoke. Murmurs and private giggles play through the crowd as I stand on stage, mic in hand and call the audience to order.

“Okay, okay, here’s a joke… Why did Buddy Holly have pieces of metal in his feet running
this
way, (I lift my foot and demonstrate the direction of the metal; from heel to toe) when he fell out of the plane?”

The audience momentarily still, hangs with bated breath. I draw out the pause, milking the anticipation then launch rapid patter into the tag.

“Because he was falling fast, and his parachute wouldn’t open, and he was trying to grab at the air but there was nothing to catch hold of, and he was falling faster and faster, and he was going down, down, down and there was no one there to help him and the ground was coming closer and closer and everything was going quicker and quicker, and the parachute was still not opening and…
splutch!!!!!”

I look down forlornly at the imagined tragic mess of the mangled Buddy Holly lying on the ground in front of me. Dramatic pause, and then the punch line:

“No one really knows.”

The crowd erupts into howls of laughter. It’s a veritable explosion of hilarity. They leap to their feet whooping and cheering and clapping and screaming. Standing victoriously on stage I try to resist the laughs, but I can’t help but be taken over by the whirlwind mood in the club and I start to giggle as well. My giggling turns to laughter and soon I’m doubled over. The world stops and there’s only the ringing of frantic laughter which echoes madly around the club, until slowly my doubling over begins to bring a warm current of sick from the depths of my stomach quickly upwards to my throat where I catch it and swallow against it. My mouth is watering profusely and I feel like I have a thick dead man’s tongue in my mouth. As I slowly wake through this hazy nausea, I’m still giggling at my triumph in the club and I rush through the hotel room for the toilet. As I throw up, it’s as if every part of my body is leaking. My nose runs, my eyes water and I’m throwing up God knows what. But I can’t stop laughing. Once I finish vomiting I struggle back to bed, the predawn stillness gently moving the curtains. I wash down another two Panadol in an attempt to quell the pulsating throb in my head, and to bring down my temperature to melting point. And at that very moment I resolve to tell the hilarious joke that I just dreamed to my new cast members, at the first day of rehearsals tomorrow.

This event played out over twenty years ago. Just like now, I’d arrived in Sydney the day before rehearsals started for a show called
Lennon, The Music, The Legend
in which I was playing John Lennon. Ironically, even bizarrely, this was years before I actually played Buddy Holly. I’d arrived back from Bali only days before with a chronic bout of Bali-Belly. It had completely knocked me for a six and, having been prescribed the wrong antibiotics to treat it, I’d got worse and worse in the lead up to starting rehearsals for the show. I’d limped onto the plane, determined to make it to day one and checked into a small dingy hotel at the ‘Cross’, where I collapsed for the night. When I arrived at rehearsals the following day, I was weak, unresponsive and barely functioning. I spent the morning session watching the excited cast chatting and laughing, as they bonded their way through the first scenes. I could do little but watch through heavy lids from the sidelines. By lunchtime I’d decided that they all must think me the most boring person they’d ever met, so when we assembled on the grassy slope in the park across the street for our first tea break, I decided it was the perfect time to tell them the joke that I dreamed the previous night. Everyone was in mid conversation when I boldly piped up. Suddenly, the strange pale skinny guy who hadn’t said a word all morning was offering to tell a joke. They turned to me politely from their conversations. I was so totally convinced that this joke was hilarious that I was certain it would be the perfect icebreaker.

Before I even began, the memory of how funny it had been in my dream began to hit me and I started to chuckle.

“Why did Buddy Holly have pieces of metal in his feet running
this
way when he fell out of the plane?” I asked and then launched into telling the rest of the joke. But I found it so funny that I kept interrupting myself with peals of laughter. I could hardly speak I was laughing so much. I paused to get it under control and they all waited patiently for me. Once I’d straightened up I continued with the joke, but there was still a tremor of a giggle in my voice. When I finally delivered the punch line: “Nobody really knows,” I erupted, flopping helplessly onto the grass pissing myself laughing. Not a single expression changed on anyone’s face. I looked up through my mirth to see a collection of stony, pitying faces, blinking silently at me. I found this even funnier and it just served to feed my pathetic laughter. Then the stage manager arrived to call us all back from the break. Without a word, the entire group stood as one and walked back across the road. I was almost too weak with laughing to get up off the grass. One kind member of the group saw this and she returned to help me. She leant over me, looked deep into my eyes and with a sympathetic smile asked; “Jeremy, do you take a lot of drugs?”