Ahhhh, I’m exhausted. It’s been one of those really busy social days. After a late night at the theatre, I woke at about eleven o’clock this morning and had to make my way almost straight away to meet. Our plan was to go to the Food & Wine Fair in Hyde Park and then head off to the Sydney Theatre Company Open Day.
It’s been a few years since I’ve been to the Food & Wine Fair. I stopped going when it became too crowded. But since they’ve managed to spread everything out a bit further around the park, it’s now much more pleasant. It was still near impossible to find somewhere to sit down, but much better than it used to be.
“Shall we have a glass of wine to go with it?”, Colin asked as we purchased some food, a yummy crab salad from Jimmy Liks. “Well it is for charity”, I replied with a smile. I’ve never been to Jimmy Liks before, but on the basis of the salad, I’m gonna head off their sometime soon. Very nice.
And then we wandered through town across to Hickson Road for the first-ever Sydney Theatre Company Open Day. It was really terrific to go behind the scenes. “I can’t believe how much space there is”, I said to Colin at one point, as wandered through those areas you never get to see ordinarily. And at each point we visited, we were impressed with just how friendly the staff were, genuinely showing an interest in having loads of people walk through what is normally their behind-the-scenes workplace.
We sat in for parts of two workshops. The first was a “Writers Workshop” which featured the incredibly talented Tommy Murphy who explained at one point he uses Google Alerts to keep up to date with what people are saying about his work. (Hi Tommy, I think your work is terrific!!). The second featured Andrew Upton and Cate Blanchett amongst others talking about the role and future of Sydney Theatre Company. They emphasised a new inclusiveness about the company, which I was really pleased to hear about.
Late in the afternoon I wandered home for a brief lie down and some make-up experimentation. The Other Andrew (in constume) had invited me to a Halloween Party with some friends of his. So I experimented for a while combining a bit of black and blue eye makeup to see if I could really come up with a genuine looking black-eye.
The whole concept for the outfit was that I was “The Wicked Witch Of The Western Suburbs”, though I ended up more looking like a “client” in the social-work sense of the word.
On the way there I popped in to my local pub to ask the bloke behind the bar how realistic my black-eye looked. “Pretty good”, he said, “…about two or three days old. No longer puffy, but it still looks like you’ve been in a fight”. Excellent.
The party was also excellent. Lots of people dressed in some great topical outfits. There was a “Joe Six-Pack”, and a Sarah Palin (complete with devil-like tail) and disturbingly convincing Amy Winehouse. And amongst the many people attending was MH who I chatted to briefly who came as a “Woman In Black”.
Overall, a fantastic Saturday.
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