This dinner party is full of questions. None of them answered. And it’s been going on forever. I would have liked to have gone to bed hours ago. At least.

The question of Why? is sitting in the corner on it’s own, ignored by the other guests who seem to skirt around it like a barnyard dance step. The question of How-Many? is already totally plastered and sprawled, legs-akimbo, under the drinks table. The question of Are-You-Doing-It-Right? has been at my side and in my ear since the gathering began.

Every day they can be seen shuffling down the main street, arm in arm. The ladies! Two women who could be in their mid-eighties, but could also be one hundred. Always laughing and talking at top volume to each other. Yelling at each other over their inadequate hearing aids. Arm in arm.

A good friend of mine wrote to me last week about how he had finally reached a stage in his career where he feels accomplished. He has, to some extent at least, mastered his craft. Before I closed the email, I marveled for a moment at the awesomeness of being able to say that you’ve mastered your craft. As I returned to work on the images for this month’s column I thought, “yeah … same!”

As I cast a spectacled eye around the waiting crowd I saw that each little bundle of perfection was doing something. One was practicing pirouettes, one was playing violin, one was rehearsing acrobatic tumbles, one was singing … I felt a sturdy ball of dread lodge itself in my throat.

Sid knows stuff. All the important stuff anyway. Sid’s almost 4 now, and as far as I can see he’s […]

I like to think of myself as non-judgmental and open to new people. That’s how I like to imagine myself. I’m a people person. People are my thing. “After all” I think to myself, “I was the fat, spectacled kid of arts people” … as though this somehow implies a birthright to compassionate acceptance and understanding. Every now and then, however, I meet a person who so instantly sets my heckles up that I have to work unbelievably hard to be civil to them, for no apparent reason. When this happens, I find myself affronted by not only the person in question, but also by the fact that I am capable of feeling so instinctively, and yes, judgmentally, revolted. “How can I hate a person I don’t even know?”

She was an entrant in the 1965 Miss Australia Quest. She was Miss Central Northern Suburbs. She was clearly the most beautiful woman in the damn pageant, but no one liked dagoes back then. Italian was NOT in. Despite Sofia Loren. Despite the 19-year-old Italian-Barbarella who would one day be my mother. My mother’s beauty was always something I was proud of as a kid. Proud, in the depressingly defeated way, that only the overweight, spectacled child of a former Miss Central Northern Suburbs can be. I spent hours looking at her technicolour 1960s model-shots wondering how I had sprung from the same genetic well as her. Wondering what, exactly, my hippy-tastic mother had taken in 1970s that produced my “uniqueness”.

… “Intervallo” … It’s Italian for intermission. It’s also what www.georgiakeighery.com is having for the month of September. Back in […]

There was a time when I considered 12-hole Doc Martins, a hippy skirt, a Pearl Jam t-shirt, and an expression […]

This month I took on ten pin bowling. Invigorated by my recent undertaking to learn how to ride a bicycle, […]