Books

Post #104 Sunday 25 November 2018 – Theatrical diversion

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Letters from America
These letters are my glamorous aunt’s posts on her adventures and her life and times as a
♦ mature Sydney escort ♦

Sunday 25 November 2018

I recently went to an interesting piece of “immersive” theatre called A Midnight Visit.  It was held in St Peters in a huge old empty furniture warehouse.  The drama was based on the stories and poems of Edgar Allen Poe.  We had to sign a waiver before entering.  We were each given a black surgical mask to wear while we stood around in the foyer.  There was an MC called The Undertaker who then selected people from the audience to enter the performance through different doorways.  We went into different rooms and spaces which were variously got up in detailed Gothic sets reminiscent of Poe themes.  The actors moved around in the spaces performing in among the audience.  There were music and dance performances woven into some of the story fragments.  Then there were features of the warehouse set which can only be described as playful – corridors and stairwells to climb through, mysterious rooms to explore.  One room was filled with CCTV screens “secretly” relaying what audience members were doing in other rooms.  Another room had a small sunken pool filled with soft pink balls and a sign saying No Jumping, and of course people did.  At one stage there was a regal seeming actor strolling around, who would seat himself strategically and beckon a member of the audience to come over.  He would then have an extended private conversation with that person.   He beckoned me at one stage and asked me, whispering, what was I afraid of.  It took me ages to decide but finally I said “uncertainty”.  He said Oh no, you don’t need to be afraid of uncertainty, you need to be afraid of people who text and drive! Lol.

It was clever in parts, apparently developed from a similar immersive theatrical adventure which has been showing for years in an extended season in New York called Sleep No More (based on Macbeth).  A Midnight Visit was ambitious and intriguing.  I could happily have stayed on exploring for another hour.  There are some great photos included in the link here to the review in the magazine Time Out.

xx MG

https://www.timeout.com/sydney/theatre/a-midnight-visit-review

https://amidnightvisit.com/about-the-experience/

 

Post #68 Sunday 7 January 2018 – Rejuvenation grout and the New Year

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Letters from America
These letters are my glamorous aunt’s posts on her adventures and her life and times as a
♦ mature Sydney escort ♦

Sunday 7 January 2018

It’s the New Year and I don’t do resolutions so much as I find myself somehow embarking on various new projects, generally a bit domestic.  This New Year it seems to be Rejuvenation Grout.

Well I have bought the product and I am hoping it will transform the tired tiles of the bathroom into something a bit more, hmmm luminous may be :-), or just a bit whiter would be ok.

It’s been a nice start to the year otherwise.  I had a lovely unexpected visitor on Saturday afternoon.  I don’t often get magpies up on the 12th floor so it was a treat to hear that melodic gargling sort of song so close by.

I drove back from the country on Saturday and listened to the radio on the way – as a lot of you know, I love the radio.  On this trip the ABC was rebroadcasting a feed from the US National Public Radio (NPR) and I had a couple of treats.  One was a show on bluegrass which was an excuse for me to rummage around for favourite modern blues music when I got home.  Here is a link to a performer composer I really like and who is a great blues hero for souls who live rough.  It’s Chris Whitley with his melancholy guitar:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fI8ISl7xpg4

The other interesting program I caught was the end of was an interview with the columnist Michael Wolff who has just published Fire and Fury – a book on Donal Trump’s more or less accidental ascendancy and the pathology of his White House reign so far.  Perhaps I’ll make it to Abbey’s later in the week to see if I can pick up a copy, it is from all reports, an alarming and worthwhile read.

So, the year seems to have started quietly but hopefully, in your glamorous aunt’s happy domain

Wishing all the best to all of us for the coming year

MG xx

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Post #66 Sunday 17 December 2017 – The Little Prince, complex love and the rose

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Letters from America
These letters are my glamorous aunt’s posts on her adventures and her life and times as a
♦ mature Sydney escort ♦

Sunday 17 December 2017

I have just come home from my December visit to Canberra, just in time to send out this week’s Letter from America.

It was a great visit.  The weather was pure Canberra summer, all hard blue sky although we had a huge thunder storm in the middle of the second night.  I had an unexpected pleasure from the profusely flowering roses planted right under the balcony of the hotel room.  With the intense heat during the day and the long afternoon, by early evening the scent of the roses coming up  into the room was very strong – a lovely evocative perfume which took me by surprise.  Here is a photo taken by me looking down over the balcony straight onto one of the culprits:

This beautiful flower reminded me of an unforgettable book that is treated as a children’s book (which plainly it is not), Antoine Saint Exupery’s The Little Prince.

Here is a link to Chapter 8 of the book which concerns the Little Prince’s relationship with the rose.  It is a tale of complex love and painful awakening to the meaning of things.  I highly recommend looking at it and the author’s charming drawings.  The chapter is quite short perhaps 300 words, and, as I said before, unforgettable.

http://papermine.com/pub/2005#article/34735

“The fact is that I did not know how to understand anything! I ought to have judged by deeds and not by words. She cast her fragrance and her radiance over me. I ought never to have run away from her . . . I ought to have guessed all the affection that lay behind her poor little stratagems. Flowers are so inconsistent! But I was too young to know how to love her . . .”

 

Your glamorous aunt MG
xx
never complacent in love

Post #62 Thursday 23 November 2017 – bodega cats

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  Letters from America
These letters are my glamorous aunt’s posts on her adventures and her life and times as a
♦ mature Sydney escort ♦

Thursday 23 November 2017

Social media can teach you things.  For instance I have learned from a Twitter account called @bodegacats that there are such things as bodega cats. For the uninitiated, in parts of the US the corner store is known as a bodega.  These corner stores frequently have resident cats.   Hence bodega cats.

These cats seem to be a pretty common feature, a bit like cellar dogs in Australia.  Some might remember a nice little book published a few years back recording a vineyard tour by each dog resident at the vineyard visited, with suitable portraits of the hounds in their domains.  I checked just now and the book was called Wine Dogs and they even have their own website winedogs.com

So the Twitter account posts only pictures of cats in corner stores, doing cat style things lying around in among the shelves, on the register and so on.  It’s quite endearing.  And now I have my own offering from a little corner store at the Paddington end of Darlinghurst.

Here is the corner store, somewhat run down:

When I crossed the road coming up to the store I glanced up and thought hmmm someone’s dropped their jumper on the steps.

But it wasn’t a jumper at all 🙂

from your glamorous aunt  MG
xx
noticing the small things

Post #58 Friday 3 November 2017 – Kaz Cooke

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  Letters from America
These letters are my glamorous aunt’s posts on her adventures and her life and times as a
♦ mature Sydney escort ♦

Friday 3 November 2017

Another wonderful book gift from Michael Clever Website (I have code names for all of you lol), by a favourite author cartoonist Kaz Cooke, whom I haven’t thought of and whose work I haven’t seen about, for many years

After a very successful career in Australia Kaz Cooke has apparently moved to the US and is enjoying similar success there.

I can’t resist posting the few cartoons I could find online, just to give you the flavour of the exploits of her cartoon heroine Hermoine:

And a Casablanca cartoon, just for cultural completeness:

Your glamorous aunt
enjoying a moment of nostalgic humour

MG xx

Post #39 Sunday 25 June 2017 – Some (late) observations on Rugby

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Letters from America
These letters are my glamorous aunt’s posts on her adventures and her life and times as a
♦ mature Sydney escort ♦

Sunday 25  June 2017 – my apologies I should have posted this letter about 5 days ago

I have met three different people in the course of this escort work who were rugby players, well, rugby players in the recent past.  One was an Irish man, one English and the other was from New Zealand.  So this post is a little tribute and backstory  for them.

There was a time in my history when I did know a little bit of rugby current affairs and for my sins, I sat in the freezing cold at the Canberra Stadium to see the Brumbies play.  It was so cold ice was forming on empty spectator seats.  But it was a beautiful stadium.

I had a favourite player:  Stephen Larkham aka Bernie.

And I was there (in my lounge room watching the live broadcast), for that spectacular drop goal in the World Cup in 1999.  There was a lot of very skilled playing.  Larkham was a pleasure to watch, not only was he fast and skilled but he played a real game, with a plan and the capacity to adapt to on field drama and energy as it played out from one moment to the next.
So here’s the footage of the drop goal:

I came across a clever thing.    It’s from the autobiographical book by the poet Robert Graves,

Goodbye to All That.
Graves describes his private school education and life as a young man including the four years active service he saw in the first World War where  he rose to be Captain by the age of 20.   Everything in this book is delivered with exceptional understatement, keenest observation of self and others, and dry humour.   It’s a style of noticing and reporting that I find dazzling, it never ceases to please.  The passage I have reproduced describes some of Graves’ experiences of rugby when he  returned to civilian life living  in the village of Islip.

 

 

 

So here is the account of the former glories of village rugby which was given to Graves in about 1920.  The old man telling this story would have been speaking of rugby as it was played in the village of Islip in about the 1840s.

“Her was a grand game” indeed. 🙂

MG xx
Your glamorous aunt
and sometime rugby spectator