24 May 2006

Driving Miss Daisy... up the wall 

It’s a well-known fact in my household that Daddy Dearest has his own very special neuroses when it comes to the family car and it’s probably best when he’s in the driver’s seat to just sit extremely still, look straight ahead and try not to breathe too loudly lest the sound distracts him unnecessarily from his very important task. And it’s also probably best to simply nod and make soothing noises when a random dickhead in a sports car does something stupid like cutting in half a metre in front of us and DD starts muttering about buying a Mack truck with headlights taller than every other car on the road and THEN we’ll see who’s game enough to try cutting in like that again, huh? HUH? (Yes, Daddy. There, there. You’re absolutely right.) And never are these quirks of his brought home more embarrassingly than when we’re giving a friend a lift home and he refuses to play any music except for Soviet-era Russian folk songs or that talkback radio station where all the presenters are mouth breathers. (PLEASE, Daddy, would it KILL you to put something remotely NORMAL on the air? Apparently literally so, according to you-guessed-who, hypothesising that pop music will make him go insane and ram the car into a tree.) But if you thought DD behind the wheel was bad, you never would’ve imagined that DD in the passenger seat could be worse…

In contrast to DD’s well-established driving habits, Mother Dearest has had her licence for years now (alas, she can only drive an automatic – oh, the STIGMA of not being able to handle a manual…) but it’s been ages since she’s done any actual driving because she’s lazy and takes public transport to work anyway. So DD has decided it shall be his mission to get her back into tip-top driving shape so MD can be the one ferrying me to all my extracurriculars for a change. Consequently, MD has become the official driving person on our semi-weekly trip to the city library to borrow weirdo foreign language DVDs and old issues of British Vogue – with DD giving instructions from the seat beside her, of course. I had the misfortune of bad judgement to decide to accompany them on one such journey not far into MD’s revived driving career. And oooh boy was it not pretty. Not pretty by a very VERY long shot.

Lesson One: Backing Out of the Garage. This was, without doubt, one of the most excruciating experiences I have endured inside a (barely) moving vehicle, and made for an extremely inauspicious start to our expedition. MD, who can barely see over the top of the steering wheel (hopeless spatial abilities and a four-wheel-drive doesn’t help, either), took a full twenty minutes of faltering bunny hops to manoeuvre the car into the general direction of the street. It was the embodiment of the one step forward, two steps back routine, narrowly missing the bike rack here, stopping ten centimetres short of a full-on collision with the opposite wall of the garage there. Whoops, don’t forget the ping-pong table. Whoops, there goes THAT headlight. OH MY GOD NOT THE NEIGHBOUR’S BACK FENCE.

Lesson Two: Turning the Corner at Five-Way Intersections. DD’s (immensely helpful) instructions to Mother Dearest go something like this:
“Okay… now! Go go go go! Turn the wheel! YES, the steering wheel! Keep turning, keep turning NO NO NO! You’re turning too much! Ease it off now, ease it off, ease it off! Not so fast, not so fast… MY GOD, WOMAN, SLOW DOWN!”

Now if that’s not enough to induce a nervous breakdown, I don’t know what is.

Lesson Three: How to Deal When the Siren Goes Off. So we’re moving on the highway in a tense and jumpy silence when suddenly from somewhere on the road behind us comes the unmistakable wail of a fire-engine siren. DD starts mumbling under his breath and MD, trying to keep track of all four directions at once, grows increasingly panicky, which she attempts to make up for by taking her foot off the pedal so we end up crawling down the road at about 5k an hour. Meanwhile, the siren’s getting closer and closer and every other car around us has turned into the parking lane at the left to let the fire engine through, and pretty soon it’s just the three of us pottering along on the road and the fire truck pressed against our bumper with the driver leaning on the horn. DD’s yelling incoherently, and MD’s utterly confused. And I’m sitting as low in my seat as possible, pretending I don’t know the driver nor how the hell I ended up in the car, until eventually Mother Dearest regains control of her senses and moves aside so that the good firemen can go past. You would not believe the range of dirty looks we got from the other drivers as soon as normal traffic resumed – a kill-me-now moment truly like no other.

Lesson Four: Parallel Parking. Nothing strikes fear in the hearts of novice motorists, or raises the blood pressure of the owners of the cars they’re driving, more than early attempts at parallel parking. DD sets it out in black and white – get the car at the right angle, turn the tires forty-five degrees, reverse, forward, reverse again and you’re there. Simple geometry, right? Not on your life. Once we’d secured a parking space (a harder task than you would think, as MD drives like she’s walking so by the time we reach what was an empty space it’s already been taken by someone moving at a normal speed), it takes a long and painful process to get the car in without causing anyone grievous bodily harm.

MD backs up half a metre. “Way too close, you’ll never get it in like that,” says her helpful passenger. She tries again, at a slightly larger angle. “I said, wider.” “I am going wider!” “Not wide enough!” MD takes it at an even larger angle. “Now that’s too wide.” Another three attempts until she’s found the exact angle to meet DD’s finicky criteria. Just as she’s concentrating on the back wheel outside the driver’s side window, a sudden outburst from you-guessed-who: “The passenger mirror! For god’s sake, pay attention to the passenger mirror!” “I can’t see that far.” They stare at each other. After the lapse of several seconds, MD shrugs and continues to back into the parking space with her head out the window.

Eventually MD does manage to park the car, and no one breathes a louder sigh of relief than yours truly. But as soon as MD unbuckles her seatbelt, DD finds something else to complain about – this time, the fact that MD has to adjust the driver’s seat back to get out of the car because she needs to push it all the way forward just to reach the pedal when she drives. One day you won’t push the seat forward properly and it’ll spring back when you’re driving, he argues, and you won’t be able to reach the brakes. It’s too hard to get out of the car when the seat’s pushed all the way to the front, she counters. So deal, he says, you’re not frail and elderly, you’ll be fine. But it’s too difficult, she says, and I don’t want to!

I lose patience and leave the two of them in there, still bickering over the ridiculously petty question of whether MD should push her seat back to get out of the car, and go into the library alone. They emerge, fifteen minutes later, ominously quiet and well behaved. I have never figured out who won the argument. Somehow, I just don’t think it makes that much of a difference in the scheme of things.

Remind me NEVER to take driving lessons from my father.

10 May 2006

Yes, I know, it’s been a while since my last proper update but I’ve been oh so dreadfully busy trying to stay on top of things that there simply hasn’t been the time, dahlings, to keep track of it all. And it’s now two and a half weeks until exams and it feels as though I’ve learnt nothing at all the entire year and by god, everything’s happening as if I’m the drunk on the morning after, stumbling around telling other people not to move so fast.

So what’s new? I’m in the cast of the school play, as I knew I would be (because arrogance is sooo becoming in drama types, NOT) and rehearsals have just kicked into full gear – opening night on Thursday and so far it’s going swimmingly – swimming in unremembered lines that is, and missed cues and costume dramas and makeup that you wouldn’t want to encounter in the back of a dark alleyway. (Well okay, it’s actually not as disastrous as I’m making it out to be.) “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” – one of the more perverted Shakespeares, which is going to be interesting. I love the play, but alack, alack, the dearth of female characters is rather lamentable. No Titania or Helena for me, the majority of the girls are fairies but hey, at least we’ve got parts at all. The set is absolutely amazing, though – they’ve got 3-metre white pillars and a life-sized bridge, and an actual tree on stage because our brother school is so freaking rich that they use five-dollar notes instead of toilet paper in their bathrooms.

Costumes! Our costume director found a whole stack of brand-new bridesmaids’ outfits in a horrendous shade of berry pink at the op shop for something like three bucks each, and at first we were absolutely mortified by the colour, cut and horrible fit, but then she dyed them bullet grey and we got to hack it up with scissors real good. (REAL good.) I don’t know how many hours I spent stabbing myself in the fingers with little fiddly needles trying to sew leaves onto my skirt, but now I have an awesome fairy costume at the end of it so I’m not complaining. Hair and makeup on the other hand… every single precious hair on my poor mistreated head is teased and back-combed beyond recognition and they use garden wire and a whole bottle of hairspray between the six of us in one night to keep it all in a giant matted fuzzball hovering somewhere above our heads. To top it off, we have bright green eye shadow purposely running down our faces so the overall effect is that we’ve stuck a fork in the power socket and died. Lovely. Every time I turn a corner and run into someone they scream and shrink back into the wall so it’s kinda not the most flattering of looks, and kinda isn’t much of a kicker for our self-esteems. (Yeah. Maaaaybe just kinda.)

(I’ve gotten so used to all of it by now that I’ve almost forgotten that I have it on. After rehearsal last night, I walked to the supermarket with my full stage makeup and electric hair because I couldn’t be stuffed taking it all off, and I received the whole gamut of strange looks and horrified double-takes and I could not for the life of me figure out what it was about me until I got home and looked in the mirror and had a heart attack. Interestingly though, the checkout chick hardly batted an eye as I paid for my bread and fetta – they must get so used to seeing absolute freaks pass through all the time that it’s seriously passé.)

The boys, though… they are the funniest bunch of weirdos I’ve ever had the pleasure to know. One licks his Pringles before he puts them in his mouth. Another has developed a bizarre attachment to a blister on his right hand. I ask you, is that normal?! Or am I the one who’s the freak around here? The other day the whole lot of them rocked up to rehearsal in full bagpipes-and-ye-bonnie-wee-lass Scottish regalia after some school event or similar. And yet another proceeded to do cartwheels across the stage. In a kilt. Which was more than I EVER needed to know about men in kilts. I’ll let you figure out the answer to THAT question.

The male fairies are something else. Our Oberon (king of the fairies – SNORT, poor guy gets so much flack for that) is awfully, awfully good-looking, as all Oberons should be, and has the hottest line in the entire play – “Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania,” oh my gosh I’m still getting over how hot that line is – and is topless for the whole of his stage time and if I was in the audience I would just about fall off my seat. As is Puck, who is seriously built (and on the first rehearsal checked me out with the most obvious once-over like you WOULDN’T BELIEVE – okay, so I was wearing a skirt that came down to midthigh at the time, but it was 30 degrees outside and he didn’t have to be THAT obvious about it, did he?), and was previously blond (BLOND! I drool) but now has purple hair because he washed out the black hair dye too early. And they’re both wearing tight leather pants and have Cleopatra-heavy eyeliner and face paint snake and barbed wire motifs running up their arms, which make them look like very very angry fairies indeed. Probably just to look more masculine in order to offset the inherent campness of being male fairies. But even the fairy thing doesn’t detract from the hotness thing – God help me if I get too drunk at the after-party – I shan’t be held responsible for my actions…

So all this week I’m not going to get any homework done, and by the time I’m fully recovered it will be one and a half weeks before exam time and I shall prepare to bid farewell to any vestiges of sanity still remaining. But, fingers crossed, it will be an awesome play if I manage not to completely embarrass myself by doing something totally idiotic in my first scene like trip over the stairs and land flat on my face. Can’t wait.

Wish me luck.

1 May 2006

Parting word of wisdom: 

A Chinese restaurant is one where Christmas lights playing "Jingle Bells" on speed are still hanging up in May.


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