When Country Town Becomes Funky Town

So last night was a special kind of night because HRS, the funky youthworker who lives with us, offered to babysit Tricky while C and I went Out.

To a place where there would be live music. And wine. And jolly little tables to sit around, bearing platters of olives and small electric candles which were oddly effective.

At first I thought I wouldn’t go because frankly I was tired and it all seemed a bit of a fuss, having to get changed out of the same pair of jeans and blundstone boots I’ve been wearing all week.

Another group of filmmakers have come to stay with us. They’re a couple and they’re very environmentally conscious and have brought their own caravan to sleep in which runs on yakfat or some other form of non polluting home made fuel. It’s parked in our backyard and it reminds me of the caravan my grandparents used to tootle about the Central Coast.

I have very fond childhood memories surrounding that caravan, including the time the local Christian group came into the caravan park and rounded up all the kids who were there for the school holidays and made all the boys hold onto one rope and all the girls hold onto another rope as they went round and round the park.

My (then) littlest sister, whose name is Toni, and who had short hair and was wearing jeans at the time, was put onto the boys’ rope and neither I nor my second sister AJ noticed. Poor Toni was trapped on the boys’ rope all morning until finally we saw her being led away, crying bitterly, with all the other boys to whittle sticks or light fires or do something equally manly. AJ and I had been concentrating very hard on making brooches out of magazine cuttings and plaster of paris in plastic spoons.

Anyway the thing is that the Caravan Filmmakers who are living in our backyard have a child as well, a very sweet three year old little girl. And last night HRS very kindly offered to babysit her too and so the CFs decided they would also go to see the show and drink wine and eat olives too.

And so we went and it was a fun old time indeed.

The venue was new and tres groovy and utterly foreign to the general ambience of Country Town, being more suited to a dingy corner of Melbourne or Sydney. Also, I can’t remember the last time I saw live music and although they were mostly covers, they were covers of 80's love songs like Bizarre Love Triangle and Throw Your Arms Around Me which made me feel a great wave of youthful nostalgia and also made me pick up the little table candle and wave it solemnly in the air during the choruses. However that may have been the several glasses of wine I drank which also made me feel youthfully nostalgic because I also can’t remember the last time I drank more than two glasses of wine in an evening.

“We must get up and dance”, I muttered fiercely to C at one point.
“Ah…no, we must not,” C muttered back. I pouted and thought about our many nights out together in the past, the drinking, the dancing, the hijinks in the toilets (ahem). In the cold hard light of day though, I’m quite relieved.

I actually did wear the same jeans I wore all week, but in the spirit of going out I also wore my new coat and beret, my sparkly earrings and a pair of black zip up boots I bought in an op-shop last week for six bucks.

If only I knew how much I would enjoy myself, the youthful nostalgia and the waving electric candles in the air, I would have made a bit more effort.

Clean jeans perhaps, or just maybe a plaster of paris brooch in the shape of a spoon.