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I have a confession to make: I really like Christmas carols.
As a musician, and especially as a church musician, traditionally I’m supposed to hate them. They’re really old and the same ones get dragged out every year, and no matter how creative you get with them, there’s really no way to do them except in the traditional style; almost every attempt to update them, jazz them or rock them ends up destroying them. Like most people, carols drive me around the twist when they start coming out in shopping centres in October, because those are usually the versions that have been killed by one of the aforementioned attempts to modernise them.
But I still have a soft spot for a good hearty rendition of the old favourites. I've written before about how inherently powerful they are and I still stand by that.
I think some of the reason is that I’m a pianist. The ones who really hate carols are usually guitarists who spend the whole time complaining about how many chord changes there are in old style carols. This has always struck me as kind of wussy. Honestly, if you’re going to insist on playing an instrument that is all about chords, surely the ones with lots of chords are going to be the most fun, if possibly a little more difficult than playing normal church music, which tends to have no more than four chords, in a predictable repetitive pattern. Here’s looking at you, Hills.
Meanwhile, this Christmas has gone a little strangely. Normally it’s a time when I’m run off my feet getting from one carols service to the next for a full fortnight. This year due to Earnest I got as close as Christmas Eve without playing or even hearing a single one. I missed out on Darwin carols by candlelight and accidently slept through the Melbourne one that they always put on TV. I usually like that one, except most of my memories are of trying to listen to the music while my mother and sister, after a glass or so of wine, have arguments about whether the singer’s dress is showing more or less leg than is appropriate for this time of year, and how much weight she might have put on or lost since the last time she appeared on Australian TV, which was probably in Sea Patrol.
Actually, probably not. I don’t think that’s on Channel Nine. Come to think of it, I don’t know if it’s on at all anymore.
I don’t watch much television.
The point is, I didn’t really get a chance for a big nostalgic sing along this year, and although I’m prepared to accept that I have only myself to blame for that, I found myself feeling more than a little hard done by as I read Facebook accounts of the massive carols services being put on by my old church in Kirribilli. That thing has only gotten bigger since I left. It’s out of control I tell you.
My big chance finally came on Christmas morning. All the guitarists had gone on holidays, or fled in wussy fear of multiple chord harmonies. I was just me, Samantha, a drummer and a singer. This was going to be awesome. I conducted an online poll to find the most popular carols (yes, it was on my Facebook wall. Shut up), picked the least obscure verses and came up with whatever harmonies I damn well wanted. A Christmas miracle!
Unfortunately the cliché of Christmas being the only well attended service for the year doesn’t seem to hold true in pentecostal churches. The twice-a-year mob all seem to go to the bigger congregations in town, and all our regulars were on holidays, sick or frantically running around trying to organise a nativity play which was supposed to be put on by people who were on holidays or sick. By the time you took all the kids out and put them in the nativity play, the congregation had about a dozen people at most. But that was alright, we still sang with joy and gusto. We didn’t exactly lift the roof. We didn’t exactly know all the words. But we had fun, and we got the service through in under forty minutes, which left just enough time to go home, open presents, finish getting lunch ready and start writing Christmas blog posts. Or whatever.
Merry Christmas!
Garry with 2 Rs
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Sorry, sorry. I know I promised you all a heart-warming Christmas edition. I’ll still do that next week sometime, but in the meantime here’s a piece about death.
I went to the funeral of an old family friend yesterday. I say old the sense of the friendship, not in terms of the person; Rita was taken before her time by cancer and was far too young. It goes without saying that her death was tragic, but I have to say that her funeral was absolutely magnificent. It was held in the auditorium at Darwin Uniting, which was packed to the doors; standing room only.
Rita came from the local Fijian community, and so of course the Fijians came in strong numbers to pay their respects. Rita was also strongly involved with literacy training in remote aboriginal communities, so there was a big turn out from the local indigenous community as well, as well as all the people of various ethnicities from Darwin Uniting Church. In the midst of myriad government programs, schemes and interventions that don’t work, it was powerful to see that all that is required to bring the different communities together is one life of absolutely passionate service. Sure, it’s a shame that it takes the death of a wonderful person to bring the groups together, but it’s also a powerful picture of how a person’s life and legacy can go on affecting people long after they’ve passed away.
The most moving moment of the service came when they carried the coffin out of the church, accompanied simultaneously by indigenous tap sticks and a full Fijian choir, plus a bunch of goofy white people, standing by awkwardly not knowing where to look. Kind of a cross cultural cross section of the way we all handle death.
If I can move half as many people half as much when my time comes, I’ll consider it a life well lived.
Garry with 2 Rs
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A few posts back I wrote about how thrilled I was about landing the role of Algernon in a local production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Well, we opened last night to great reviews and I’m still extremely happy to be involved, particularly with such an awesome role. But I have to say, ever since I got back from holidays and plunged head first into production week (with a resounding splat, I might add) I’ve been battling the rather disconcerting feeling that, as much as I’m enjoying being Algernon, Algernon seems, in a strange way, to enjoy being me.
The most enjoyable part of the whole play for me is the chance to poke a bit of (thoroughly deserved) fun at the aristocracy and the upper class culture. Algernon’s persona as we’ve come to develop him over the last few months is glaringly ostentatious, absurdly dandyful (shut up, yes it is) and poncy to the point of being overtly camp.
Put more simply, Algernon is English.
I, on the other hand, am Australian and take pride in the fact. It’s one of the few categorisations or labels that I will allow to be applied to me without any objection. So the startling tendency for Algernon’s ridiculous affectations to hang around on my person long after we’ve taken the final bow is causing me an intermediate amount of cultural distress. I don’t have the broadest of Australian accents to begin with, but I’ve taken great care over the years to cultivate the few Strine diphthongs I do use to the ultimate level of inner ear rupturing nasalisation.
Nowadays, thanks to my spending every waking hour either at work or at Earnest, not only do I sound more pompous than Mark Nicholas interviewing the Duke of Edinburgh, I’ve managed to develop a slight labialisation of my rhotics, despite the fact that not even Algernon has that particular speech impediment anymore. We got rid of it about a week and a half ago because it sounded ridiculous. And now I’m doing it.
Earlier this week at a staff meeting I was inviting my co-workers along to see the play when I got this gem from one of the senior managers:
“I was just saying that you’re perfectly suited to the role (take that sopranos). You just look like you would fit right in in Victorian England”.
What. The. Hell?
For one thing, we wear a uniform at work, and it’s about as far from Victorian as you could get without being downright unprofessional. For another, it is a well established fact that if I were a product of any historical era, it would be the Spanish Civil War. Or possibly the Early Cretaceous Period. I certainly don’t belong in England. I have the documents to prove it. Mind you, this was from the same manager who has described me in my performance review as “shy,” “methodical” and “too compassionate,” none of which remotely apply to me. That last one doesn’t even make sense.
The point is I’m a little disturbed by my inability to shake Algernon off when I’m not being him. I’m not a method actor by any stretch of the imagination and I’ve never had this sort of character invasion before. I didn’t start bossing people around or standing around being ceremonial and useless (well…) while I was playing King Hildebrand. It probably has something to do with the fact that a single, twenty-something year old mischievous cynic has a little more common ground with me than a fifty something year old monarch from a Gilbert and Sullivan Operetta in the first place, but I’d love to be able to convince myself that it has something to do with becoming a better actor.
Either way, there were still no messages from fans, agents or pretty girls’ mothers on my phone this morning. But at least no-one in my family got engaged this time. Make of that what you will.
Gawwy with 2 Ws
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We had our office Christmas party last weekend. For reasons I don’t fully understand, this year we decided to break with our tradition of taking a harbour cruise for the Christmas party (which has always been fantastic) and to hire an open topped double decker bus to take us on a pub crawl around the city.
I had originally intended to write a blistering exposé on my impressions of the party bus, but to be honest it wasn’t remarkable enough to warrant more than a paragraph or so. We visited a few bars, had some drinks and finished up at Monsoon’s in the city. My distaste for Monsoon’s is well known, so I didn’t stay long. Besides, it was what happened after I left the party that makes for the better story.
I walked out of the pub at about ten o’clock and started thinking about the best way to get home. The night bus service wasn’t going to run until one o’clock and a taxi was going to cost me forty dollars or so. Right at that moment, before I’d even had a chance to walk more than half a block, a white car came around the corner, ran out of petrol half way through the intersection and coasted to a stop about a metre in front of me. A friend from church jumped out and said
“Garry! Thank goodness. I need your help”.
I happily agreed to walk with her down to the service station and fill up a jerry can with diesel, and in exchange she very kindly offered me a lift home. She also asked if I minded stopping by the school where she worked so she could pick up some work she needed to finish up over the weekend. While we were there, she also picked up her bass guitar and offered to help with the worship band on Sunday morning.
And then I found ten dollars.
Okay, so it’s not a really interesting story after all. But after finishing up with Earnest last weekend, I’ve really been enjoying having a week where I haven’t done anything that required too much thinking. It’s been good, but unfortunately it doesn’t lend itself to staggeringly interesting blog posts. Shut up. I’ll write a Christmas post next week. That’ll be nice.
Garry with 2 Rs
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Victory comes in many different guises. Sometimes it looks like a champion swimmer looking back at the clock to discover she’s broken the world record. Other times it looks like the wily old grandmaster staring across the board and pushing his rook up to the eighth rank to announce ‘checkmate’. Very occasionally it looks like an Iranian penguin standing in a room full of second hand trombones while being showered in marshmallows by legions of adoring taxation officers.
Even more rarely than that, it looks like a man hiring a flash tuxedo, suiting up and standing at the end of an aisle to turn slightly to the side and… watch someone else get married.
Last weekend saw the all-important penultimate episode in the ongoing saga of the “who gets married to whom and when” game that has been the subject of countless poems, epic ballads and at least three movie adaptations (ok… two rather hastily typed blog posts, both of them by me). The crucial second to last wedding that would decide who would be the victor and who would take the consolation prize of getting married.
And so it was that I suited up and took my place in the bridal party for the best seat in the house from which to watch the second to last contestant take his vows and concede his claim to the title of last man standing.
It couldn’t have been a more perfect day. It was an outdoor wedding on the outskirts of Perth. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and although the sunny summer day was a little warm for the locals, especially those in black suit jackets, as the only representative of the great city of Darwin in attendance I was in my element. While everyone else was looking hot and bothered, I was just looking hot.
It was a charming ceremony; two songs, a homily, a vow or two and it was all over bar the photos which were by far the most painful part of the whole affair. I can’t speak for what the bride and groom might have been expecting, but I had always thought the final victory might have passed with just a little more ceremony. Nothing that would upstage the happy couple of course; just a simple trumpet blast or perhaps a nice tasteful explosion from a howitzer cannon. But no, we were just a little bit preoccupied with celebrating the wedding at hand, and I suppose I can live with that.
After all, I have been assured that the magnitude of celebratory fanfare that will accompany my own wedding, should such an event ever transpire, will be enough to knock the solar system off its… whatever solar systems sit on. And that’s quite enough responsibility to be carrying around for now, thank you very much.
Make of that what you will.
Garry with 2 Rs