The Seven Wonders of Preston

I was driving up Gower St the other day. I alternate between Gower and Murray, just to vary the trip to Jess’s school and back. 

At a red light, in a car facing ours, I see a mum with her three girls. I know her but I can never remember her name, or the names of her daughters. The girls all go to high school now. There are P plates on the car window. The eldest daughter is learning to drive. My kids have known these girls since primary school. They have run in sports carnivals together, laughed together, been in the same class, and perhaps even swapped a lunch box fruit strap for a packet of chips at some point in time.*
This family, like many others that we know, are in the traffic-filled grid system of the lives that we live. Because we live in Preston, which is essentially a hole surrounded by traffic and filled with good people, traffic is our constant companion.

We inhabit the north side of Bell St. Bell St is a huge busy road. If you close your eyes, you can almost make believe that the traffic noise is the roar of the ocean. The smell of petrol fumes spoils the illusion though.

The Blue Illusion on Bell

Bell St is also the place where you see people standing and sniffing the air: It’s coming, they say as they sniff. Yep it’s definitely coming.

Many Prestonians agree that any day soon, the whiff of soy chai lattes will cross the Bell St divide and descend on our neighbourhood, our property prices will rise and Preston will have finally joined hipstergeddon.

Suburbs are often defined by a symbol, a flag or a logo which is indicative of the kind of the suburb that you are in. Hobson’s bay has a yacht, Brighton (though I have not seen it) probably has a silhouette of an ash blonde lady with slightly pursed lips.

The symbol of Northcote – two suburbs south of us – has its suburban symbol on a flag and it is circles drawn again and again, almost child like. Clearly, a group of local government workers got together and, after much consideration, drew a series of circles, as if to say: We are all in this together, we are all in this together. Given the ratio of not-for-profit workers and lesbians in Northcote, a concentric circle is indeed a fitting symbol. It’s all very right on there with its plethora of vegie patches, backyard chooks and hand crafted clothes peg holders –  all defining that Northcotians are in all in it together.

The next suburb up is Thornbury. Thornbury has a flag emblazoned with pink candy stripes, like you find on the canopy of a big tent. They gave the good people of Thornbury this symbol for their suburb, as they probably all want to run away to join the circus, because they don’t live in Northcote.

Next up is Preston. Ah Preston, you sassy suburb you. The symbol for Preston is not one, not two, but three shopping trolleys. Why three? Because the good people of Preston are essentially greedy bastards. And why wouldn’t we be? We have ‘the Land’ – a temple of consumerism. We flock there, and genuflect when Myers has a sale. There’s also the Preston Market. I was at market just the other day. At the butcher, there was an A3 laminated photograph of a baby, and underneath it the words ‘It’s a boy’. Though it did look tender, I still didn’t like to ask how much it cost per kilo. And we have Aldi, of course. We go in there for apples, dishwashing liquid and tomatoes and we come out with extendable garden shears, ski poles and a collapsible garden shed.

Me, the kids and two of our neighbours kids, have over the years created a tourist guide to Preston. It is the contemporary version of the Seven Wonders of the World. Obviously Aldi, the Preston market and ‘the Land’ are high on the Wonder list. Also on the list, is the intersection of St Georges and Murray Rds, fondly known as the Bermuda Triangle. Though there have never been any fatalities there, people have been known to go missing whilst waiting for the lights to turn green. 

The swing at the Park on Wood St is also included in the Seven Wonders. We call the swing at the park The Face Swing, because it has a face on it. We know it was put there by council for the families that can not afford to go to Luna Park in St Kilda. Fun? I’ve seen kids come off that swing cross- eyed.

Hot Bargains, close to the corner of Murray and High, nestled between the Ugg boot shop and Noodle Kingdom is number six on the Seven Wonders list. This shop should have a registry for every occasion: weddings, christenings, batmizfas. Everything I tell you, everything, can be bought there. 

When your child says: ‘Mum I need a costume by tomorrow morning and I have to go dressed as a Zimbabwe native dancer with Rastafarian tendencies’ There is no need for angst. No need to pull out the under utilised sewing machine, or scream banshee like, cursing public education and all the demands that it puts onto families. No, no, need at all. A visit to Hot Bargains, which is walking distance and on the main bus and train transport routes, and opens seven days a week – will without doubt stock ta dazzling aray of Zimbabwean Native Dancer crossed with Rastafarian tendencies costumes, and as the kindly Hot Bargains lady places it into a the plastic bag she will of course ask: would you like an inflatable pink elephant with that? Hot Bargains allows the proud people of Preston to feel truly blessed.

Number 7 on the roll call is our home renovation. We watched, eyes agog as the builder put the architecturally designed drawings into place. Gee, we all said, it’s all a bit posh for Murray Rd, isn’t it? Obviously doing the renovation was a good idea, not least because it gave James and me something to talk about, but also it meant that we could now say yes we have a deck, please come over for a BBQ on the deck.

James and I would ring each other up at work during the day. Just to confer on how the build was progressing: 

With so many lights, including a floodlight on the deck area, do you think maybe it will cause a power drain in West Preston? 

The windows are going in later this afternoon. Apparently they make a swoosh noise when you open them.
The carpenter who is doing the cupboards agrees with me on the importance of a neutral colour palette in the laundry so, yes,  we are going with marsupial grey. 

Towards the end of the build I glanced out of a the widow, whilst wiping down my new enormous bench and I saw sparks flying. I rushed out. What is that? Did we really agree to that? What exactly does it do? The builder, a lovely guy called Adam, smiled sweetly at my wide-eyed wonder. 

Justine he said, that is a steel reveal. It doesn’t do anything. It just sits around the edge of the window and over time it will rust.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was completely incomprehensible, and yet I had signed off enthusiastically on every suggestion that the architect had made. A steel reveal? Sounded awesome, but in reality  it was a complete waste of time, money and sparkly-Flashdance-soldering-iron energy.

However, the steel reveal did earn us a place as one of the Seven Wonders of Preston. Friends came over for BBQ's, scratched their heads and, like us, had no idea what it was for. 

Over the years I had wandered through the suburbs of Darebin,wondered through Northcote, Preston and beyond, and had become a 40+ year old Radio National–quoting, red lipstick–wearing community worker, building capacity along the way and telling jokes at any number of not for profit AGMs.

Post steel reveal though, I no longer lay awake at night wondering about the plight of refugees, or the homeless. I now lay awake at night wondering if the steel can reveal more than a reveal can steal.

Spotted gum deck and steal reveal
A bit posh for Murray Road

Just for the variety I did a crazy thing yesterday, I took a detour down Beauchamp Street. I discovered that it’s a really quick way to get to Woolworths. There’s a new sushi bar open at Preston Woolworth's, it's a bit pricey and clearly the Peoples Republic of Preston weren’t ready for something as exclusive as a sushi bar in their supermarket, because the sushi fridge at 4:27pm was still very full of a variety of exotic looking sushi items.

As I placed my shopping on the conveyor belt, Carol the quite smiley check out chick seemed dubious about the new sushi venture and commented that the people who ran the sushi bar were taking Woolworth’s longstanding staff members’ car parking spots in the morning.

A bit harsh really, I thought because Carol and her friend June, who unlike Carol is grumpy to the point of being obnoxious, have been checkout chicks at the Preston Woolworths for a very long time and despite the grumpiness have probably earned their parking privileges. 

So there we were, me and Carol discussing the arrival of the new sushi bar, when the mum who’s name I can’t remember begins to unload her shopping onto the conveyor belt next to my shopping.

Me and the mum smile to each other and comment on how we always see each other there. Then I glance down. It’s probably really not ok to do that, peer downwards at someone’s shopping, but I did. And when I glanced down, I noticed that the mum who’s name I can never remember had bought some of the sushi. 

I smiled at her but was at the same time thinking of the parking plight of poor Carol and June and countless other longstanding  checkout chicks and I said:

Your daughter will need that sushi now she’s learning to drive.

As I headed out to the car park, contemplating whether to go up Murray or Beauchamp I thought to myself: Seven Wonders are just not enough to justify the wonder that is Preston.

*Chips and fruit straps are only occasionally placed in my children's lunch boxes.

Taste

The hit you get in the beginning gives you this high. It’s the kind of high where you can smell the flowers without having to put them under your nostrils, a fluid in-touch-with-yourself floaty high, cooler than a cucumber and smarter than a smartie (but only the orange ones).

The thing is once you’ve tasted it, you want it again and again. But when you get the taste again , it never quite seems the same. It’s cool, but not quite as cool as the first time. So you take a risk, you say something off-script, you riff with an idea that’s not in the plot line. 

It’s the mixture of words, knowing the order that they should go in, of holding yourself in a particular way, of knowing which inflection to use, of pausing, of waiting, and then waiting just a little bit more, then the delivery – the beautiful delivery – of a beautiful punch line. You come out the other end and wonder, can you do it all again? Can you take yourself somewhere else again, just by making people laugh?  

After a while you realise that it’s actually not just the hit that you want, it’s an understanding too, an understanding of why one word, rather than another word works, of why a pause is often better than a word, of how allowing the audience fill in the gap is sometimes better than saying the whole joke out loud:

She arrived with two lemons in her suitcase.

It’s true, it happened. The details though, the back story, doesn’t matter. The image of someone arriving with only two lemons in her suitcase shimmers with opportunity. Do I tell the whole story, or just say the line knowingly, letting the audience fill in the gaps? It always depends on what the material surrounding the line is. Sometimes the whole story needs to be told, other times the sentence is suspended, held there as an offering of what might have been, before and afterwards as a consequence of arriving with two lemons in her suitcase.

I’m five shows in. Themes appear again and again: the not for profit sector, local, state and federal government funding, the kitchen bench, motherhood, marriage.

I work and rework the material to make it fresh, funnier than the last time. I spin it drier than the last time, weeding out more and more words, making each one count. Sometimes it’s really hard to get to the delivery end of the joke, the set up seems to take an age. I want to give the audience permission to laugh, but they have to wait, they have to be given the warp and the weft of each word, they have to wait for me to build the picture, to set the scene. I tantalize them with these words:

I remember this day, because this was the day I sneezed a piece of carrot out of my nose.

Pause. A very long pause.

I was working in a fruit and vegetable shop at the time. I looked at her, the woman I sneezed the carrot onto and she looked at me and I said:

We’ll not charge you for that piece of carrot.

Other lines open up saying one thing:

 I got on a plane once –starving.

Finishing with something unexpected:

Because I had an eating disorder.

Comedy has to take you somewhere you don’t expect to go. The more I write, the further away from the starting point I want to go: 

for the hit, for the funny, for the pleasure of finding the word that is seemingly unrelated to another and bringing it right back around again and linking it, to create the alchemy that is creating a great joke.

In summing up

In my 30's I really wanted babies.
In my 40's I was desperate for a renovation.
Now I want only to be on TV - to validate my own existence. 

Coming Out

Despite the husband, the two kids, the three chickens, two fish, a dog and the cat who we all call the tabby shite, I have decided to come out of the closet.

I have been in the closet for over 40 years, shrugging mainly.

Coming out of the closet has meant though, that I have had to start schlepping everywhere; to the supermarket, to the library, to the south side. Who can get matzo on the north side?

And kvetching? Don’t get me started. Kvetching about the weather. Kvetching about the price of fish. Kvetching about the possums in the roof.

Sadie tells me Justine, no need to kvetch, just get the rabbi over. Last time they had possums in the roof at his house, he gave them all a batmizvah and they never came back.

Kvetching here, kvetching there. The other day I go to Glicks bakery café with my friends. They know me here, I say, sit, sit.

We order, we eat. The waiter comes over and asks Today Mrs. Sless, is anything alright?

Justine my friends and family say, you’ve got chutzpah doing comedy.

Chutzpah? I say Chutzpah?

And I tell them,I saw this little old lady on the tram to St Kilda the other day. She was clutching her chest and said to the young girl seated in front of her, If you knew what I have, you would give me your seat.



The girl got up and gave up her seat. Then the young girl takes her magazine and starts fanning herself.

The little old lady says to the young girl, "If you knew what I have, you would give me that  newspaper so I could cool off."

The girl gives her the magazine.



A bit of time goes by, then the old lady gets up and says to the tram driver, I want to get off right here.



The tram driver says she will have to wait until he gets to the next stop.



The old lady clutches her chest again and tells him, If you knew what I have, you'd let me off right now.

The tram driver stops suddenly and everyone on the tram lurches forward. The tram driver tells the little old lady that she can get off the tram right away.

As the little old lady steps off the tram, the tram driver asks her, Ma'am, I hope you don't mind my asking, but what is it you have?


The little old lady replies: Chutzpah!

Excuse me there are challah crumbs in my comedy

But why now? my friends ask, why are coming out of the closet now?

Closet shcmoset, I say.

Because now, I am tired of remaining silent. After all these years. People are always looking at me, all of them asking, are you Greek? Are you Italian? 

It’s time to put things straight.

Now after all this time I look at them and I ask them: This nose? This hair? This humour?Am I Greek? Am I Italian? Are you kidding me?

I’m Jewish already.

Australian Politics is a lot like English High Tea - there are 3 layers which is lovely, but it’s a bit much.

In the hallowed halls of local government the material for the Béchamel show just writes itself.

'Please finish the 86 tram before I die' an elderly lady wrote in.

Over heard in the office ' An ice cream van is being organized by the social club, we have to write a risk management plan '

There are 3 stressful things in life: death, divorce and a local government restructure.

In years to come I  suspect that I will be visited by hundreds of eager young community development workers looking for advice and I will tell them:

In my day the community wanted English teatime recipes, halal sausages and buses. Buses to take them places. In my day we took 481 people to the snow in buses, some of them had never even seen it before.

Then I will wake up and they are still there, desperate to shake my hand before they leave my Order of Australia and me. As they leave I put my hands under the automatic hand sanitizer waving and saying goodbye member of the community goodbye.

Béchamel is all singing all dancing and all knowing, particularly about Australian politics and it defines what politicians are:

A flash mob a term coined in 2003 to denote a group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual and sometimes seemingly pointless act for a brief time, then disperse.

I interrupt this blog for an important announcement.

Batman was walking down the street as I parked outside the Northsider Birthday bash venue.

I hadn’t been to Rubix Funhouse before, so I took it all in: the graffiti, the bar, the lighting, the very cold concrete floor and the eclectic crowd, complete with a month old baby and a collie dog.

I chatted to a few people in the crowd: a greens candidate, a lady who works for an online music company, an Irish lady, with the kind of accent I could listen too all night, I smiled at Batman and wondered if I too should have worn my knickers over my pants for the party. I also spoke with Joel, the Northsider editor in chief. Joel looked dapper in his bow tie, we spoke briefly, then I stood to one side, hogging the heat lamp.

I had worked on the set I was going to do for some weeks.  It would be a mix of Northern corridor humor, a joke aimed at the plethora of hairy faced young men strutting the streets of North Fitzoy. There would be plenty of jokes about my Northern suburban idiosyncratic ways: my non threatening footwear, because I work in the not for profit sector, my penchant for quoting Radio National and a joke about living in Preston: ‘Which is a hole surrounded by traffic and filled with good people.’

I’ve been doing comedy since 2006. The comedy catalyst was the birth of my second child, Jess. When I went into labour with Jess, my husband gave me a look that could only mean one thing: ‘I’m too pissed you’ll have to drive yourself to hospital.’

Since then I’ve done 8 Melbourne International Comedy Festival shows, gigs at book launches, conferences and have MC’d lots of local government and not for profit events. I blog about comedy and I’ll talk to anyone who will listen to me about the virtues of doing stand up: how it has liberated me, how it connects people, how it has saved my marriage and changed the way I see the world.

So I did my set for the Northsider Birthday bash. I knew that I hadn’t quite nailed the ending, I should have stopped at: Epping is the new docklands what with climate change and all. But I wasn’t quite on keel that night. Instead I finished the set with an old joke about audiences, bricks and renovations. 

Then the very understated Dane Certificate did his magic. I don’t know how, but he did and it was amazing. Joel and Marianne started to give their speeches, just as the call I had been waiting for finally came through.

It was my brother in law, my sister had just given birth to her first child, a girl.

I was so relieved. It had been a long journey, not just the birth, but the whole getting pregnant bit too.

Maybe I should have opened the set with: I’m one of seven sisters, from 5 different marriages and my sister is about to birth another girl.

I left Rubix crying with joy, I spoke to my sister briefly. ‘The birth, it’s just like a rave party yeh?

Full of e’s, episiotomy, epidural, exhausting.’ 

I drove home feeling elated, comedy can make me fell like that sometimes, so too, I was reminded that night, can birth. 

Béchamel - a great source of inspiration.

Globally we have reached peak oil.

But in local government, the rich seam of comedy gold 

will never run dry .

MICF 2011

I decide to collaborate with a mate, Fiona Clare for the 2011 MICF show.

Collaborating means lower costs, double the marketing  and only half a script to write.

We both have very different comedy styles. Fiona is full of whimsy and is a singer song writer, my delivery is dry and acerbic and I don’t sing or play anything. 

In deciding the format, the content and the show title, we acknowledge our different styles, but concede that Béchamel is a pretty name for a sauce, but a cruel name for a child.

The show is inclusive and accessible, it has a cry baby session and complimentary tickets are given to arts access members, the set is home made and crafty and the cure for head lice is simple yet startling.

The show opens with me standing Neanderthal like, shoulders hunched, I am stooped, my chin is pushed out and I say:

Underwhelmed, underpaid, undervalued.  Feeling like a victim.

Then I left the not for profit sector and took my first swipe card – into local government.

Since the birth of Jessica, the hovering in dark dingy comedy rooms, the trip to comedy perdition and back, I have kept writing, kept honing, kept watching other comics and slowly understood that the funniest material I can write is about the what I find funny, not what I think others will find funny. 

I learn over time that my delivery style is dry, the drier the better, the sparser the content, it is laden with irony, deep sarcasm and a smattering of self deprecation. 

I no longer angst over each word when I write now. Often it is the rhythm of a joke I am interested in, or an idea and how it links with another idea. I  perform knowing know how to start the joke and where it will finish, but the journey to get to the punchline is not always devised giving the material spontaneity and freshness.

The discipline of doing a MICF show every year becomes de rigueur. Before one show is finished another show is germinating. I write all year, keeping notebooks from all of the gigs I have done. Developing a new show every year is about challenging myself, making sure that I craft the comedy, hone a story, make a satisfying show and honor the creative process by writing the best jokes possible. It is also about creating a product, getting a good marketing image and committing 100% to the delivery. It helps  committing 100% because if you believe in the material and enjoy it , so to will the audience.  

For the béchamel show, the easy part of the writing  was the not for profit, local government material.  Each day at work, as a local government officer ,there was always a new rich vein of comedy gold opened up that just had to be mined. The material was tweaked and added to for each show, there really was no end to the humour within the hallowed halls of bureaucracy.

In béchamel I take my first swipe card into local government:

It is lovely in there, all bright and shiny. On my desk when I arrive, there is a pile of stationary: post it notes, high lighters, even on my telephone my name is on it, should I momentarily forget who I am:

Local government Justine Sless speaking.

I begin working in earnest. I have been employed to develop an intercultural centre. When I went for the interview I was asked to give my definition of interculturalism:

It’s Japenese, it’s people from Iran, from Iraq, from Italy, I intertwine my fingers to demonstrate the inter part of the word, I get the job.

My first day at local government I create a community engagement strategy. It’s all flow charts, arrows pointing in different directions and nice colors.

After a while, my wrist begins to ache a bit because there is no mouse pad. 

I ask Maria, the administration support worker , if I could possibly get a mouse pad. Maria hands me a book about the size of a yellow pages book.

Here Maria says, here use this.

I put my wrist on the book, it’s a bit uncomfortable but I reckon I can manage. I continue working. After a short period of time I sense that Maria is watching me.

Justine, she says, 

Yes

Justine that book I gave you.

Yes

That is the office stationary order book.

Oh I say, sorry ,I have just left the not for profit sector and we are used to just making do.

I leave local government and start working in education and this is what happens:

Janine comes into the office and Lisel goes up to her and says:

Janine under your white trousers we can all see your green underpants.

All that day Janine had to wear her long black jacket, so that we could not see her green underpants.

Just then the telephone rings and Valerie answers it.

Education Valerie speaking. Yes, yes oh yes, oh ok right then ok, fair enough ok then bye.

We all tap our computer key boards, avert our gaze and pretend like we weren’t listening.

Then Valerie tells us. Apparently her husband John had been to the Aldi supermarket to buy a travel hair dryer. When he gets there, all that is left is a lurid purple colored one, so he doesn’t buy it.

Oh Valerie, Oh mate I say I hope that hasn’t ruined your holiday.

Next week: 

Australian politics is a lot like English High Tea.

There are three layers ,which is lovely,  but it’s a bit much.