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Friday, March 24, 2006

Heard It on the Wireless

In Sydney. No one has uttered "g'day" yet. No koalas have been spotted. No one has instigated a game of Knifey Spoony yet.

We're staying directly between Kings Cross, which the natives abbreviate as "KingsX," and Darlinghurst, the hipster-gay-dressy bessy district. There's lots to do, and most of it is within walking distance of our little hotel cubicle.

By bedtime yesterday, we had seen a prison colony museum, trekked all the way to the Opera House -- and no, it doesn't resemble anything in particular up close, either -- and even caught a show there -- the Kranksy Sisters, this trio of musically inclined spinsters from the fictional Aussie town of Isk. They reinterpret pop songs they've heard on their radio. It's like if Allen and Grier and the Kulp-Mohan-Kulps were reconstituted as backwoods comediennes. I met one of them afterwards. She looked like Stephnie "No That's Not a Typo" Weir. She signed the CD I bought and was oddly deliberate about explaining that her last name was Kransky, which was odd since I had already had bought the tickets for a show that had her last name in the title. I liked her, though, and I'd like to think that she liked me.

The most remarkable thing happened in the lobby after the show, however. Weeks ago, KrisDina and I had this marathon dinner at the harbor and these loud-voiced, confused-seeming, senior Brooklynites approached us to ask us how we liked our dinner. The woman, louder of the two, seemed keen on telling us how her lamb "just fell off the bone." (She did not, tragically, say it was like "buttah.") These were the kind of tourists I usually dread, though they were kind of cute in their old, befuddled Americanness. So who do I see wandering around the lobby of the Opera House theater after the Kransky Sisters show but this same old lady. She was muttering "Where's my husband?" over and over again and she seemed to be mentally ill in a minor way. I can't believe she would have gone to see the same show as us, much less understood it. Still, it's nice to see a familiar face.

Nightlife here is good, in that it exists. (In New Zealand, it didn't, for the most part.) Dina tells me that these computers buzz out any words one might deem inappropriate, so let me tell you that the various party districts are rife with two types of people, alternately, depending on where you are. One of these people types sounds like "destitute." The other sounds like "undressed-ite." The words they sound like also kind of describe them. Needless to say, we got drunk.

[ lisa, watch your camera ]

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