Elly Varrenti

First published 30 July 2024 The Guardian

Everyone had a crush on Janet – she was a remarkable stage presence, though it was her roles in Prisoner and Neighbours that made her famous

There was a scene in the Melbourne Theatre Company’s 1986 production of Tom & Viv – about the life of TS Eliot and his wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot – where Vivienne, played by Janet Andrewartha, stood on stage clasping the strings of a bunch of balloons. Broken by years spent in a psychiatric institution, Vivienne remains resolute, and hopeful too, somehow. When Janet released the balloons to the sky, it felt as if the audience were all holding their breath, like a single organism.

I’d seen Janet on stage before, but this scene sealed the deal: she was capable of magic. The late playwright Michael Gurr once described the experience of watching Janet in one of his plays as “stopping time”. But it was her work on Prisoner that made her a rising star in the early 80s and her years on Neighbours made her a proverbial household name. Like a lot of those actors, particularly the older ones, she was so skilled that she could make even the soapiest of lines sing true.

Janet was my friend of 40 years. Tributes are flowing and social media is flooded with heartfelt expressions of praise and condolences, an urgent need to express how much she meant to us all. I’ve spoken to lots of her friends and theatre comrades since she died so unexpectedly last week, within three months of her cancer diagnosis. The same words – masterful, musical, funny, clever, beautiful, classy and gifted – keep on coming up.

Everyone had a crush on Janet. I had a crush on Janet, before I even met her. Her reputation loomed large at the National Theatre drama school when I started there in 1982, from where she’d graduated three years earlier. How did she manage to appear so self-possessed and confident without any demonstrable vanity or visible annoying neuroses? And she was kind too. Charming. Whip smart. A marvellous mentor to young actors. Of course, she wasn’t great at everything – she wasn’t that great a dancer.

Janet and her two younger siblings, Kerry and Peter, grew up in inner Melbourne. Her talent was recognised early. She got all the leads in the school musicals. She was a political animal; we talked politics as much as we did theatre. She was often sending some article or other urging me to “please read and respond when you get the chance”.

There was always a passion project on the back burner she wanted to produce. I worked with her on a project about domestic violence for schools. She worked tirelessly, relentlessly even. I couldn’t keep up. “El, it’s always hard but we have to keep going, we’ll all be dead soon,” she’d say.

She was working on a screenplay up until recently that was set between Ireland and Australia, about Irish girls who were forced to relinquish their children in the 1950s. She asked me to edit it for her. “I know it’s hard to tell a friend if their work stinks,” she said – but it didn’t stink. Far from it.

To have experienced Janet’s work in a Gurr or a Rayson, a Murray-Smith or a Miller, a Shakespeare or a Brecht, meant you could forget you knew her well in real life, that you’d recently had too many whiskeys together whilst sharing stories about ageing parents or boasting or moaning about your adult kids. She was a bloody brilliant mother to Sarah and Eloise.

On one of my birthdays, she didn’t send a bunch of Australian natives as usual but a classy wooden-handled umbrella. The accompanying card read: “I hear your street is under water.” I live in regional Victoria and there’d been floods that year.

Thirty plays. Three films. Sixteen television shows. Two acting awards. What’s in a number? Seventy-two years of life, that’s what.

Janet and I had a texting shorthand that we used increasingly by way of letting the other know we were thinking of them but were too crazy, busy or lazy to call. It did the job.

Janet: LOVE

Me: LOVE

First published on Mamamia – 22 December 2023

Thirteen years ago, my sister died. She was forty-three and left behind a fifteen-month-old son. Such an odd expression: ‘left behind’. Sounds like she may have simply left her bag at home or forgotten to pick up a scarf she may have taken off over lunch and draped across the back of a chair in a café.  

I can barely write about this. I shan’t talk about how she died. Forgive me. Forgive her. I used to write about her and her son and about my mother, our mother, more easily once. Not easily, it has never been easy, but only months after it happened, when my sister died, and the world changed forever, I could write about it a bit. I dare not look back at that writing because I was as they say, and I am not sure it is always true, writing from the wound, not the scar. 

But I want to write about it today. If at times the writing of the events of my life have been overly crafted, curated, sculptured as artefact then so be it; such is the contract the memoirist enters into with her audience: What I am telling you is true. It is what I know to be true. Trust me. And if I have misremembered things at times or if my story’s omissions and collapses of scene or character come across as dishonesties, then so be it.  

My nephew, now fourteen years old, has been reared by his grandmother since his own mother died. My mother is now nearly ninety-two. She has been extraordinary in her care for her dead daughter’s child. Extraordinary. Their relationship, its sacred intimacy and interdependence, is unusual, moving. 

But it is time. It is time surely, for me to take it on, to take over the rearing of my sister’s child, because it is the right and the good, the only thing to do. Dare I say the dutiful thing to do.

I adore him. Of course, I do. I adored my sister even though I am angry with her too sometimes. Her son is very emotionally intelligent, quirky and a tad overanxious for a child his age. 

He has been reared by a special sort of second-wave feminist. A woman politically switched on and opinionated, practical and resourceful, a former educator, union representative, and member and spokesperson of the Italian Communist Party during the early 50s. She has made my nephew, how can I put this? Weirdly, worldly. 

He is though now wanting to break out, to pull away and separate from his dominant caregiver, as is healthy. But that Mum is beginning to deteriorate cognitively, her memory lapsing and waning, her efficacy as his carer… Listen to me, I sound like a social worker. What I am trying to say is that Mum is no longer up to looking after him. She is almost ninety-two for God’s sake. Enough already! But she cannot and will not let go. And nor will he. 

Elly and her mum. Image: Supplied.

They used to play chess and cards together. Walk in our local botanical gardens together. Watch ABC telly at night together. Eat together. They talked, had actual conversations. This no longer happens. He used to rely on her but these days the tables are turning. 

I am scared. Yes, I am scared and at times resentful that at sixty-three years of age and having already reared a son on my own I must now take this on. I am a carer for three people in my family. Is this who I am now? Is this all I can be? Am I able to live with this future? Do I have a choice?

How can I be a mother again? How can I possibly be trusted to take on this beautiful and increasingly rebellious boy when my own mental and physical health has taken such a beating of late.

I have been an anxious and over-vigilant mother. Sure. At times. I have been, yes, a bloody helicopter at times. I have learned more about living with neurodiversity than you can poke a stick at. I have published about all of this for years. I wrote and performed autobiographical columns on ABC Radio for years about all of this. I have made art of my life since my son was born and my son’s father left us when our son was five months old. 

My son is living back home with me in regional Victoria after two years in the city. He left after he finished year 12 and during the second year of the pandemic and lived through all six of Victoria’s lockdowns. It was a nightmare scenario for him and for the couple of mates he lived with. But I shan’t write of this again as I have already done so and with his permission. It was the first time I had written about him since he told me to stop doing so when he was the age my nephew is now.  

When I spoke with my son recently about his cousin coming to live with us soon, he said: 

“Yes, he has to Mum! It’s time Mum. And no offence Mum because I know you’ve done your best and everything, but you are a bit overprotective and over the top sometimes.”

My son is warning me that I must be more laid back with my nephew than I was with him. 

He is trying to articulate as briefly and sensitively as possible how claustrophobic it can be growing up with me. Growing up a single child with a single mum. How my being so depressed after his father left affected him, affects him still. I know I know. Sorry. I am sorry!

So how can I be a mother again? How can I do my best for my sister’s son now? What would she want? Would she want me to have him now? Yes, she would, I think.

Perhaps a part of my mother’s unwillingness to let him go is because she fears that the grief at the loss of her daughter will resurface, be unbearable. Perhaps she is right. Once you lose a child nothing is ever as bad again and everything is worth holding on to.

My mother became a mother again at nearly eighty years old and she did a damn fine job of it. Up until now. So surely at only sixty-three I can now take the baton and do a damn fine job of it too. Surely.

Elly Varrenti is a writer, broadcaster, actor and teacher based in the central Victorian regional town of Castlemaine.

Last year when I took my family to Community Christmas Day Lunch at the local town hall, they were a bit miffed given Christmas had been at mine for years.

I’d been volunteering at our local radio station and amidst all the community announcements, council updates and gig guides, the Christmas Day Community Lunch kept on coming up urging listeners to book early so as not to miss out. Really? I mean it sounded great and everything but surely our big old Victorian Gold Rush style town hall could accommodate everyone just rolling up on the day. The Community House was also offering free transport for those who needed it. You had to book early for that too.

I’d been to a few of the Community House’s weekly lunches when I’d first moved from Melbourne to the central Victorian town of Castlemaine thirteen years ago with my 9-year-old son but was still struggling with the transition. Surely there was no need to completely surrender my former identity in the city for something else, for something I didn’t understand yet or even really want in the first place. But I knew I couldn’t go on hiding from the present, so I’d determined to make more of an effort to immerse myself in community life. And those community lunches were splendid. All sorts would turn up. I’d made up some idea in my head that these people were not my kind of people, that we would have nothing in common. I was wrong. I liked that no one knew the old me. I even started to take friends visiting from Melbourne to Community Day Lunch as if I was introducing them to my community now.

Those weekly lunches became so popular that Castlemaine Community House decided to extend the idea to the Christmas Day Community Lunch at the town hall and so last year I took my ninety-year-old mum, my teenage nephew, and my reluctant twenty-year-old son along for the adventure. And it was funny and generous and a bit strange. The crowd was huge. Some people were all dressed up and others looked like they’d just walked in off the street to see what all the fuss was about. The food was great, the boys ended up playing with a scruffy old dog who’d come along with the old lady from down the road, and we all stood in line for the free banquet. Well, Mum didn’t stand in any line. When I’d search the crowd to check in with her every so often with a wave and a ‘I’m just getting us something to eat kind of a gesture’ she was always too busy talking to a stranger to notice.

The vast town hall was all decked out. It was noisy​ and colourful and chaotic and there were people ​from all kinds of families​ and situations. There was live Christmassy music up on the stage and whenever someone would grab the stand-up mic to announce something or other, the sound system was so rubbish, it was impossible to make out what they were saying. But it didn’t matter. We saw people we knew and others who remembered Mum but whom she couldn’t remember anymore​. But it didn’t matter. The focus of our day was ​all outward, not inward. We were ​just 4 people out of 150 and it felt good. Not sad at all. A bit strange but not sad.

Ever since my sister died 13 years ago, Christmas day, any kind of festivity really, has been tough. Every year with the day looming, a day my sister always loved, I’d become nervous and try to act lighter for the kids and for Mum. We would all try and act as unbroken as we could even though my sister’s leaving us behind has shattered us beyond repair.

There are a few blokes in our small town living on the street or in the gardens. My nephew tells me that he and his mates ‘got him some blankets and food and stuff the other night’. He wants me to bring him to Christmas day lunch. A few others in town, women mainly, are living in tents near the caravan park. The other day on a walk in the gold diggings National Park I stumbled upon a semi-permanent living arrangement nestled amongst the bush. It’s rough terrain, rocky and it gets brutally hot in summer. There are hardly any rentals in town anymore but plenty of Airbnb’s. It’s a common story these days of course.

They reckon that this year’s Community House Christmas Day lunch will be the biggest yet.

I​’ve just booked again​. This time Mum asked me to. She forgets most things these days but that funny, open-hearted Christmas Day last year is not one of them.

For the past 40 days and 40 nights I’ve been teaching in our Victorian regional town’s only state secondary school. It has been hard. Very hard. Or for want of a more interesting word than hard, as I might have told my English students, it has been eye – opening. (Or is that 2 words?) I might then go on to tell them to cut the word ‘very’ because if in doubt kill your adjectives first because they’re usually redundant, and the reader’s usually more than happy to see them go.

In Sacred Scripture, the number 40 signifies new life, new growth, transformation, a change from one great task to another great task. In our new post pandemic, post truth, post ‘respect for the authority of knowledge, experience and verifiable qualifications’ world, nothing is sacred. Well, nothing inside the school classroom that is. But it’s true that working as a secondary school teacher again for the first time in many years has been ‘a great task’ for me, yes, and one that I admit to having not completed all that well. I tried hard. Very hard. But today with reports written, boxes ticked, exams marked, I just feel sad. Very sad. And very tired.

After surviving, no, enduring, no navigating with the thinly disguised terror of an old pro sailor still trying valiantly to look like she’s in control but finds herself all at sea, her ship heading fast for the rocks with twenty young passengers on board, all rowdily oblivious to any impending disaster, I tried my best, my very best to teach my passengers. I tried my best to be a good teacher to these passengers, none of whom I’d met up until the first day of term 4. All having already developed relationships with their ‘real’ teacher and most of them demonstrably unimpressed, if not downright hostile to this latest ‘sub’ (substitute teacher) who’d admitted to them first up that she was looking forward to learning from each other because having not taught in a secondary school for ages she was sure that whilst she could teach them what she’d learnt in the intervening years, she was sure that she too had much to learn from them. Mostly such an unorthodox admission of vulnerability was met with a mixture of amusement and disinterest. Occasionally someone would Google me – they were always on their screens – and read out a WIKI entry or something or other I’d done or written or appeared in or whatever, and for a moment, a tiny moment, a handful of these kids would erupt with questions:

Were you on television Miss? How come you’re doing this shit job now Miss? What a come down Miss? Nah, you know I’m only joking Miss?

 Are you married Miss? Can I go to the toilet Miss?’

It wasn’t all bad. Not at all. I did learn a lot from these students because they were largely lovely. Sure, they were teenagers out of control, out of Lockdown and out of their comfort zones but amidst the chaos of the usual mental health and academic delay issues, the behavioural and self-regulation issues, the self-evident day-to-day under resourcing, there were moments where these teenagers shone brightly and beautifully and when I felt a connection.

Like, apparently Romeo is a ‘simp. Simp is slang for a person (typically a man) who is desperate for the attention and affection of someone else (typically a woman). Excellent. I got a way in. They can teach me new words. Like Shakespeare did.

‘So, are you saying then…’, I ask the Year 10 English lad who’d offered up his analysis, ‘… that Romeo is a simp for crushing on Rosaline at the beginning of the play when she’s clearly not into him?’

‘Ha-ha, Miss. Yeah, he’s a simp at first and then he’s like a total hypocrite cause he falls in love at first sight with Juliet as soon as he sees at the ball and that.’

And yes, they persist in teaching Romeo and Juliet at Year 10 English level even though it ends in a teenage double suicide. I’m not into cancelling literature but in this case, I reckon it’s tone-deaf teaching this text to 16-year-olds in our current climate.

A Year 7 Maths student declared fiercely, ‘I’m going on strike cause my needs aren’t being met.’

I can’t teach Maths, but I could maybe teach him something about industrial relations, enterprise agreements and the right to strike.

‘Great. Okay’, I said. ‘So, before you go on strike, let’s try negotiating. What do you want?’

‘What? Nah. Want? I just want out of this class.’

I met the so-called ‘pick me girls. This is a sub-culture of Year 9’ers who sport long thick eyelashes, mega baggy PE tracksuit pants, hair long and bouncy – sort of Taylor Swift but way less energetic. The purple-haired self-identifying non-binary girls hate them and visa versa. There were more sub-cultures currently operating in this sprawling all-inclusive secondary school than you could poke a stick at. It was illuminating. It was confusing.

And then there were the other teachers, the well-being and teacher support staff; all extraordinary. All pushed to their limits. All working their arses off. All at near-breaking point. All wanting the best for their students but also hating what it was doing to their own corroding sense of self, their wellbeing, their self-efficacy. I admired them and I often felt inadequate. More like a spy than a teacher. An outsider.  They were helpful, supportive but ultimately, I was on my own. They didn’t have enough time to do their own job let alone show me how to do mine.

I did develop a tentative but solid relationship with a girl who was always reading and who even managed to read her latest whilst sauntering from one class to the next. How she remained so separate, so calm, I wanted some of that. Every week a new book and every week something I’d read or wanted to read. She was one of those old-fashioned kinds of girls who are sort of misfits at high school, but you know are going to be okay. Yep. She was going to be okay.

This is Not Really a Piece About Barbie

– July 2023

I was born in 1960. Mattel released Barbie in 1959. My father gave me my first Barbie in 1967. My mother read Friedan, Steinem, and Greer in the 1970’s and gave away all twenty-six of my Barbies in 1972. She attended the International Women’s Day rally in Melbourne in 1975 and took me with her.

In 1961 Mattel released Ken, which was also the year the Berlin Wall went up, although I doubt that Ken and Barbie cared two hoots about the Eastern Bloc. They were after all perfect products of western world capitalism; young, attractive and white; the aspiration of a new breed of female tween consumer. The Wall wasof interest to my father though, still an ardent communist in the 60s, even though so many others, like my mother, had left the Party in 1956, after Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s purges and the Soviet Union invaded Hungary.

When my father used to visit me and my baby sister on his parental access days in the late 60s and early 70s, I’d wait for him on those Saturday mornings, with a mix of excitement and anxiety. My dad was coming to see me and sometimes with a new Barbie! But when he and Mum were together it felt bad, and I couldn’t wait for him to take me out and into his world. For those few precious hours, he wanted me. Perhaps those Barbies were proxies for love, a way to appease his guilt for leaving his two kids. Perhaps he just didn’t know what else to do with me. A still-young divorced Italian man with two girl children and an ex-wife whom he was still obsessed with and who had thrown him out that final time in 1967 after having married him twice.

‘Elizabeth Taylor married Richard Burton twice too, you know,’ Mum says. ‘I was stupid to go back to him, but people were all telling me I should give him another chance. So, I did. And look how that ended. Sorry.’

Women in the 60s tended not to leave their husbands. This was the days before no-fault divorce, introduced in 1975 in Australia and when you needed to prove that one party was ‘at-fault’ for the breakdown of a marriage.  The days before the supporting mothers’ benefit, introduced in 1973. There was little structural or community support available for single mothers and victims of what today we’d call ‘coercive control’.

My father eventually left the city to live in the country over 3 hours away. He married again, and my little sister and I only saw him on the school holidays after that.

Mum pursued a career as a schoolteacher even though she’d loved her time as a young writer and translator on an Italian Communist rag in Sydney after she’d divorced Dad that first time and before her children were born. As a schoolteacher she could work full-time and keep the same hours as us kids. Dad didn’t do alimony or child support for long. I saw him tear up a 50-dollar note and throw it at Mum once. She went it alone after that. I blamed her for Dad not being around but what did I know. I too spent  some time in an abusive marriage but couldn’t leave because I didn’t want my son to come from a broken family like I had. So, my husband did the leaving when our son was 5 months old.

Before Mum had chucked out all my Barbies I’d guarded my substantial collection from my sister, but she couldn’t have been less impressed with my dumb long-legged, tiny-waisted, plastic dolls with their luscious ponytails and exquisitely miniature brightly coloured clothes and accessories. Those tiny high heeled red plastic shoes. That black and white striped one-piece strapless bathing suit. The fur pill box hat. That full skirted evening gown with its close-fitting waist. The perfectly formed little square clutch bag. That tailored skirt. The suit with short boxy jacket and oversized buttons. That pair of gold wedge sandals. The knee-high white plastic boots!

In case you have been, as they say, living under a rock, Barbie the movie is released this month and its pre-publicity has eclipsed the forthcoming referendum, the death of rock legend Tina Turner, and well, no, it hasn’t quite managed to side-line the Robodebt findings but then nothing has yet. Apparently, Barbie is funny, looks fabulous and is feminist-y but not so much as to scare the horses. I’ll go see it. On my own.

That Barbie has endured for half a century is impressive. But even though Mattel created a new campaign in 2015 titled You Can Be Anything to encourage young girls to be ambitious and to aim for the top, plenty of research has found that young girls who were given the original Barbie like I was in the 60s have lower self-esteem and more body image issues than girls who didn’t get given them. So, it’s Dad’s andBarbie’s fault that I’ve had an eating disorder for most of my adult life! 

I was in a collectables store recently with my boyfriend and there she was – all 11.5 inches of her standing tall amidst a collection of otherwise lame vintage toys. I felt a surge of desire. I longed to hold her again. But she was encased in a plastic box like a small coffin. My boyfriend wanted to buy her for me, but the price tag was crazy and come on, I mean, don’t be silly, she’s just a doll. So we moved on to the vintage men’s shirts.

My father died last year. I’m sixty-three this year. Barbie is sixty-four.

Will you still need me/ will you still feed me/When I’m sixty-four?

Yes. Yes, I will.

First published in ‘The Guardian’, 29 January 2023

I wrote my first love letter in 1973. I was thirteen years old. First year of high school. His name was Trevor. I wrote it very neatly in blue biro on a piece of lined foolscap paper, folded it up into a small square and sent it to him during class.

‘Dear Trevor,

I like you very much too. Since Wednesday you showed you loved me, but then on Friday (just because I threw a stone and didn’t mean to hurt you) you started telling everyone you hated me, grinning nown again and me not knowing what it means. I’m writing this letter to ask you to love me again.

Elly xx’

Trevor read my letter, turned the paper over, briskly wrote his response in pencil and sent it back to me.

‘Dear Elly,

I think I will love you again, the stone did hurt. Please tell me why you threw this stone at me, if you tell me why I will love you again.

Trevor xoxo’

Thanks to Trev having been so conservative with his paper usage, today I have testament to both his and my correspondence and it effectively set the template for my future romantic life: He professes his love upfront. I respond tentatively at first and then lay my guts on the line. I over-think what he may or may not be feeling. I apologise for provoking a response. I anticipate rejection and judgement. And then I round it off with what my father used to call, ‘emotional begging’. My father also told me that I was more likely to get run over by a bus than meet someone after I turned fifty.

I went on to write a few more love letters in my time. Some during those early giddy days of mutual limerence. Others after I had been dumped – what lengthy impassioned arguments for the defence those were! The power-relationship between dumper and dumpee always works the same way, irrespective of whatever history leads up to the final break. In 1984 I received a love letter, or rather a love postcard, every day for a month. They were like daily clues to a cryptic crossword from someone who only ever identified as ‘Love from the Toucan Club’. When they stopped, I’d felt a little sad.

Is a love letter still a love letter if the recipient doesn’t know who it’s from? What about if the letter is never sent to its intended recipient and remains like a journal or diary entry? I was a dedicated diarist for years but stopped when I went public, so to speak, and started to publish my memoir pieces on the radio and in books twenty-years ago and only a few months after my son was born. Lots of those early pieces were about him.

Susan Sontag said that it’s ‘Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one’s private, secret thoughts. In the journal I do not express myself more openly than I could to any person: I create myself.’

Perhaps we have the chance to create ourselves anew every time we fall in love like every time we travel to another country?

My boyfriend and I met a few months before Victoria declared a State of Emergency. We were both on the cusp of turning sixty and only nine days apart. Astrology: bah humbug! He read my palm: woo-woo but weirdly sexy. I’d promised myself and anyone who cared that I would never ever be in another relationship. My last one, though short, had crippled me. I was done. But then he went up north. In his van. To ‘chase the waves’. A surfer: who would have thought? When the NSW boarder closed, he got stuck and wrote me love letters. Not much else to do on your own in a van once the sun goes down and you’re living off the grid and out of range during a pandemic. Sometimes he’d call if there was a signal and read his letters to me over the phone. I liked his voice. We exchanged lots of stories. Falling in love is a necessary and divine sort of a fiction filled with denial and a fair bit of self-deception, especially at the beginning. Eventually my Odyssean surfie returned.

So unaccustomed was I to being in a relationship with someone securely attached, I kept on looking over my shoulder for red flags I’d missed or on the lookout for early signs of withdrawal or rejection. Why was this relationship working? How could it be so easeful and without drama? I mean, he’s so securely attached he gave me carte blanche to write this piece! ‘Tell them you keep on trying to dump me, but I won’t let you.’ Mostly, anxiously attached people like me get together with others anxiously attached or avoidants. It’s hard to accept that anyone will hang around once one’s imperfections puncture the fantasy. It’s all very well for Esther Perel to reassure us that ‘a good relationship is the ability to see its flaws and still hold it in high regard,’ but could I find the wisdom at sixty to resist re-enacting my prior relationships and to simply allow the light to shine onto the folly of my neuroses. What if we fall in love hoping we won’t find in another what we know is in ourselves – all the ugly, embarrassing, dumb, shameful bits – how is it possible to keep on loving when they start to exhibit those bits too?

He and I had met briefly in our mid-twenties working at a youth drop-in centre. I remember he was handsome, rangy and remote. He remembers the day we took a bunch of recalcitrant teenagers rock climbing I’d worn a long black dress that made it hard for me to get up into the bus let alone climb a rock. Thirty-five years later we met again at a mutual friend’s party. I had heard his wife had died. They were together a very long time. I have never been in a relationship with a widower. There’s often an ex or two shadowing any new relationship but this was different, delicate, a new sort of balancing act. We talk about her. It’s important to continue to talk about those we have loved and lost, to acknowledge they shall always be a part of who we are. That he and I have both been so close-up to death and dying is not a necessary compatibility, but it is a good one. He tried internet dating for a bit and says that dating for the first time in thirty years and since his wife died was like enduring a series of job interviews. ‘It’s like we were measuring each other up like products. You know, evaluate, consume, discard, replace. Capitalism’s got a lot to answer for.’

We don’t live together. Apparently, an increasing number of people who get together later in life are choosing a relationship known as LAT (living apart together). I live in the country, and he lives in the city.

My parents separated when I was seven – after marrying each other twice! – but Dad was still full of relationship advice right up until a few months before he died and met my boyfriend for the first time. ‘I like this one,’ he announced loud enough for the whole aged-care joint to hear. ‘He’s a real man. Be careful you don’t get fat, or he’ll leave you.’

What do love letters look like today? Has everyone’s access to the spurious democratic forms of self-presentation and confession on social media rendered the truly personal and private redundant, weird even? A young friend of mine tells me that no one she knows really writes love letters like what I’m talking about but that ‘even if it’s a text or a DM or whatever, it’s still a love letter, I guess, and you know it when you see it.’

I’m not sure what happened to Trev and me in 1973. We were thirteen so probably not much.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/29/dear-future-self-youre-never-too-old-for-love-or-love-letters

 

 

 

First published in ‘The Guardian’ Sept 24, 2022

I was in the original series of Heartbreak High in 1994. I was dead by the end of season one but there’s nothing like knowing exactly when and how, and why you’re going to die, to make the experience of living just that more precious. The early season’s story arch drawn from the original film, Heartbreak Kid, was about a motherless young male student who falls in love with an older woman, his teacher, although by the time the film became the series and the whole teacher-student relationship was ditched they still went with the son (Alex Dimitriades) who loses his mother, as a point of dramatic departure. And after I died Peta Toppano was poised to join the series as the glamorous housekeeper who arrives soon after my death to look after my kids and my widowed husband (Nico Lathouris) whom she falls in love with I think. I’m not sure. I couldn’t bear to watch. Clearly, I’ve not yet worked through my usurpation.

Lathouris, a second generation Greek and I, a second-generation Italian were like so many of the cast the children and grandchildren of migrants. The ethnic diversity of this show is now well-documented and that it set a precedent in Australian TV series-land cutting through the dominance of all the other Anglo white – bread shows made it a standout. The show’s gritty harder-edged verité aesthetic and subject matter were fresh too. It looked and sounded more ‘real’ than the other stuff on offer for younger viewers. In the 90s Heartbreak High was appointment viewing like Countdown was for me when I was a teenager.

I aced my audition for the show. As a young actor of ethnic bonafides starting out in the late 80s and early 90s, and with the burgeoning success of the Wogs out of Work phenomenon, I was being invited to audition for any part requiring ‘someone ethnic’. I had the flu on the day of the audition and was so dosed up on whatever it was they used to put in those tablets back then, I read the part with such febrile conviction it was one of those rare times in the life of an as-yet un heart-broken actor’s life when I just knew I’d nailed the role of the Greek mother of the then eighteen-year-old Dimitriades. My ‘condition’ on the day also meant I provided a non-specifically Southern European inflected voice that was so husky I sounded like something from the Godfather. The producers might have been a little disappointed when I turned up to our first rehearsal in Maroubra Sydney a few weeks later sans the huskiness and looking a bit more fresh-faced than I had in the audition. I was only thirty-three years-old after all and so once I got to costume and makeup, just how to make me ‘read’ that bit older was the thing. The solution: baggy clothes, hair always in a tight high bun and face unadorned. All this would serve to age me up a bit. And oh yeah, I was an actor so, um, I could actually, you know, act like I was the mother of two, and the wife of an older man.

Last week my thirteen-year-old nephew’s barber asked me for my autograph. What? Heartbreak High’s recent reboot means that a new audience is going back and watching the original 7-part series, also on Netflix. This’ll sound disingenuous but I felt a bit weird. I mean I loved being a small part of the early days of that show, but I looked a real fright that day with my nephew and he was demonstrably unimpressed. ‘Were you on television? How embarrassing.’

Heartbreak High was the most interesting and positive acting experience I ever had on television. I’d done small parts and guest appearances in a few things before then and although always incommensurately grateful for a gig, any gig, had never really enjoyed or fully engaged in the world of TV acting. As a late – 80s drama school graduate I was a snob about television, let alone commercials (as if!) and anyway I looked too fat on television and was not prepared to starve myself in preparation for every audition. In between teaching (my mother had convinced me to get the proverbial second string to my bow because wanting to act was all well and good, but I needed real job qualifications), I did a lot of ABC Radio drama (back in the days when ABC Radio National still had a thriving drama department) and worked in the theatre on new Australian plays.

After the barber shop moment, I went home and watched the first few eps of HBH again for the first time in years and was struck, firstly, by how young I was – that’s always a shock for some reason – but mostly by how good the thing still looks and sounds and how strikingly energetic and fluent it is. The makers of this show had a strong vision, and the integrity of that vision is evident in the show’s overall coherence and attention to detail. This is because of a number of reasons, some more tangible than others because trying to understand why a piece of art just works is not always easy but it was in part due to the show’s less orthodox approach to casting and to the rehearsal process – which was more Mike Lee (extensive improvisation and rehearsal and script development) than Neighbours (little rehearsal, fast turn -around) that distinguished the original Heartbreak High.

Niko Lathouris, as well as playing my husband, was the show’s dramaturge and acting coach. Most of the young actors were relatively inexperienced, some had never been in front of a camera before. When we were not required on set Lathouris had us in the rehearsal room improvising, playing, exploring themes and scenes, spending time immersing ourselves in the world of the series. Lathouris conducted these sessions with rigour and care and the cast were treated as an ensemble, this extended rehearsal time, highly unusual in television, bonded us as group. Those young actors learned how to ‘be’ rather than to ‘act’; to listen rather than to recite, to affect ‘realness’ in the service of story.

The worst thing about revisiting this show was watching my own funeral. The keening and the crying. The bent out of shape grief of my husband. My little girl’s clasping disbelief. My sister’s horror. My son (only a couple of years younger than my real-life son today) with his grown-up denial and anger fuelled grief. In 1994 I hadn’t lost too many people yet. Maybe I would have acted dying better if I’d known then what I know now about the whole death and dying business.

It was fun to relocate to Sydney from Melbourne for a few months in the summer of ’94. I got used to being picked up every morning at 6AM and on the way stopping to collect an invariably sleepy grumpy young Dimitriades who already had the reserve and self-assuredness of a star in the making. I stayed with an oddly, defensive young married couple whilst in Sydney, who no doubt thought it a good idea at the time to house a visiting actor but had quickly soured to the concept. But that’s another story.

I watched the first three episodes of the new Heartbreak High straight after I watched the old one. I reckon HBH Mark 2 is funnier than Mark 1. This is neither a good nor a bad thing. This new series is good. The acting, writing and direction are strong and assured and the production values are slick and satisfying. The first one did funny too, but managed to be serious without being earnest, genuine and self-aware without being ironic – the province of a post social media generation and a popular culture that is unavoidably in conversation today with shows like, Sex Education, Shameless, Glee and Never Have I Ever. All self-referential, socially switched on, irreverent and smart. Also, the writing is good and young actors are just getting better and better. Sure, twenty years ago the teenagers in Heartbreak High were also agonising about sex and relationships, the pressures of parents and peer groups, but there was also more emphasis on the class and structural disadvantage at the heart of the earlier series. Teachers in the early days at Hartley High talked about needing new computers and underfunding and engaged in realistic staffroom argy bargy. Today’s Hartley High is cleaner and brighter, and it is identity politics rather than class politics being played out.

Fun fact, or maybe a depressing one depending on how much royal coverage you uncritically consumed last week: In 1994, Should Australia become a republic? was the topic for Hartley High’s first foray into the posh Anglo private school world of debating. Hartley won the debate of course.

Saturday 24th September 2022 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/24/i-died-in-the-original-heartbreak-high-now-with-the-netflix-reboot-people-are-asking-for-my-autograph-in-barber-shops

Parenting a young-adult child and manoeuvring the latest version of the dependence – independence push-pull paradigm is hard enough, but during a pandemic it’s even harder. It’s the toughest parenting I’ve ever had to perform and that’s saying something.

I was a first-time mother at 42 too scared to leave hospital after my son’s birth and who, when his father left a few months later, descended into a sort of parenting paralysis for over a year. Then I started to write about my son and me. Writing helped. But it was my mother’s parenting me, and her grandparenting my son, that helped the most.

My son left home in a blur a week after getting his year 12 results in 2020. In a nifty inversion of the pandemic fuelled relocation from city to country phenomenon, he fled to the city from our country town 2 hours away. It’s a cliché, but it was a shock. To me and to him. I knew about the empty nest syndrome – not a clinical diagnosis apparently but a syndrome – “in which parents experience feelings of sadness and loss when a child leaves home”, but my child’s departurehit me for a six. The Mayo Clinic adds that, “You might also worry about your children’s safety and whether they’ll be able to take care of themselves.”

“Mum! Stop calling and texting me all the time! It’s stressing me out.”

Stressing him out? He’s only ever in touch when there’s a crisis and those can range from: “Is that black hoodie still at your house?” (Your house? That hurts), to: “Do I have ambulance cover?”

I wake up most mornings awash in images of my son in strife that run like a whirring, spooling Super 8 film in my mind’s eye all that day.

I find excuses to contact him, knowing that mostly he’ll either ignore these thinly disguised as practical questions requiring immediate action texts, or respond monosyllabically like an ex-boyfriend.

For years the ABC Radio National audience listened to my son grow up from toddler to teenager via autobiographical monologues I presented for Life Matters. But then he asked me not to write about him anymore because it was “sooo embarrassing” and so I stopped. After my sister died, I wrote a few pieces of grief-fuelled manic-memoir but stopped that too. Now my son has given me permission to write about him again. When I say permission … “I don’t care. We’ve got different surnames anyway. Do I have any black trousers at your place?”

My son deferred his place at uni last year. He and so many other Gen Zs have since spent another year in and out of lockdown and hospitality work in shared houses, siege-surviving on everything from Uber Eats, to drugs delivered straight to your door, thanks very much, via encrypted text messaging. He has just moved into his third share house in 18 months. I help him pack up one place and we borrow the van and move him into his next joint. On a wing and a prayer and a swift scrub of the latest kitchen sink and does he need another mattress? A dining-cum coffee table? Does he even sleep or dine, let alone drink coffee?

My 89-year-old mother has spent the pandemic at home with my late-sister’s 12-year-old son, remote learning (hah!). She is holding on to her grandson, to her own life, to me, to my son, for grim death. Once you lose a child, nothing is ever as bad, but everything is worth holding on to. She has reared my nephew since he was a baby.

I lost my casual academic job at university at the top of the pandemic and now wrestle with a PhD (What for? Who cares? As if.) and a new-ish relationship. I never thought I’d do romantic love again. Who would have thought?He and I started just before lockdown #1 and he became my “intimate partner” before we were even that intimate. I just wish I wasn’t so preoccupied with my son all the time.

We used to talk, my son and me. I’d tell him stories at night well into his teens. We’d go for walks, and he’d disclose all sorts of things. Sometimes he’d even hold my hand.

Today I watch him lurch from day to day from child to adult. And I watch him fall over. Once very badly. He nearly died. I nearly died watching him nearly die. His body is 6’3’ long and slim and sporting a tattoo of something he tells me I would not understand. His face is beautiful. These days his eyes show me little. He has a goatee thing going on and his hair is Kurt Cobain.

When I was his age, on the cusp of 20, I was in an out of love. I was living in and out of home. I was dropping in and out of university. I worked as a waitress, was always broke, and every shift at every café was an open letter to the Me-Too movement. I dreamed of becoming a famous actress.

Zoomers like my son have had it uniquely tough during this once in a lifetime pandemic-style precariousness. What are my son’s dreams I wonder?

“Uni starts when? What subjects you doing? (Like I don’t know already.)

“I forget. The timetable online is so confusing I gave up.”

“Don’t give up. New people. New things. It’s face-to-face on campus now.”

” Mum, stop! Oh no, Shit.”

“What? What’s wrong!”

“Now my keyboard’s stuffed. Have I still got that old one back at your house?”

Wednesday 2nd March 2022 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/02/as-my-son-navigates-the-new-independence-of-being-a-young-adult-i-enter-another-chapter-of-parenthood

A SON. A FIRST JOB. THE PARENTS PITCH IN. ELLY VARRENTI EXPLAINS.

MY 13-YEAR-OLD son has just got his first job. While I applaud his initiative, I suspect that accompanying him three days per week after school to haul bags of catalogues up and down the streets of our town in the half-dark does not actually count as a ‘real’ job with any ‘proper’ responsibility attached.

Delivering junk mail under the cloak of sundown is not my idea of a good career move either. Already, a few mates have spotted me surreptitiously stuffing the luridly coloured items into the too- small slots. And while we have a good laugh at my expense, I hurriedly inform them that my son is doing the other side of the street and that it’s really his job, not mine.

“See? There he is, over there in the parker and beanie dragging that trailer- buggy contraption his father made him for the job. Look! It’s even got lights front and back.”

Is it even legal to employ a 13-year- old in this country? Yes it is, as long as he has his parents’ approval and the employer has procured some special permit. But nothing in the contract I saw mentions my son. Instead, it reads as if his own father is the employee.

Is this exploitation, or is it fine that our son does half the work and his father and I do the other half? Because there
is no way he can sort, collate, lug and deliver 300 fat-arsed catalogues on his own within the three-to-four hour time frame the employer reckons is possible.

This week I am delivering junk mail. Last week, I sang in our local pub for beer money and danced with a man wearing an eye-patch and a cowboy hat. This is life as an over-educated, under- employed, middle-aged woman living
in a large regional town 90 minutes out of a major city. Then again, I’ve had more jobs and more career changes than Walter Mitty, except that mine were real, so I guess I can weather this latest one.

As I scale our town’s hilly streets, using my mobile-phone torch to check for any No Junk Mail signs, I think about how to use the experience as material for a story, because otherwise I would just feel pissed off. Those hilly streets are often unmade roads. You try clambering up one of them with two canvas shopping bags full of freshly folded landfill.

My own first job was at 16, waitressing in a pizza bar during Year 11 (or Form 5, as it was called in the late 1970s). I used to get felt up by the blokes making the pizzas. Other blokes, customers, would patmeonthebumasIheadedtothe kitchen or slip crumpled notes into the front pocket of my little white apron. One of the notes said, Hi beautiful! Give me a call ’cause I wanna make you happy. He must have been at least 40.

I left that job for two reasons. First, I needed to study for exams. Second, one of the pizzamakers drove me home after work and put his hand down my shirt and called me a pretty little tease when I pushed it away.

After exhaustive anecdotal research I have concluded that women around my age were usually sexually harassed at their first jobs in the 1970s and that most men, in their first jobs, were usually sacked for accidentally setting fire to the fish’n’chip oil or for telling an employer to go jump. Younger women

I spoke to have similarly funny or exploitative stories to tell about their first jobs, but there is less mention of any sexual harassment.

Back in the day, kids did lots of tough jobs and started younger than they do today. Is this because we are just more careful with, and respectful of, kids now? Or is my tramping about with my son and his hundreds of catalogues after school just helicopter parenting in full flight?

My son’s father and I have not lived together for over 10 years, but this latest development in our son’s life has had us kind of hanging out together

in an almost-companionable way. My ex-husband sorts, I fold, our son packs. Just like a traditional little nuclear family – Mum and Dad helping their only son navigate his first job.

Our son looks baffled. Either because it’s one of the rare moments he has seen his biological parents in the same room cooperating like a Sesame Street sketch or, maybe, because he can’t believe his first job is so boring.

“As soon as I save enough money for a new computer I’m quitting. Okay? Mum? Dad?… Okay?”

» Elly Varrenti is a columnist for the Australian Education Union and is teaching writing at the University of Melbourne.

 

Going back into a secondary school classroom after almost ten years in the TAFE and University sectors has been a bit of a shock to the system – theirs and mine.

When I landed my first two-week-full-time CRT job at a comparatively cushy secondary school a few weeks ago I wasn’t cocky exactly but I was feeling pretty relaxed about it all.

I mean, I’ve taught everything from dance to Derrida, to students from six to sixty. I’d just slide right back into that classroom of twenty-three kids all wearing regulation uniforms, their heads stuck in their bloody ipads – sorry, their educational learning tools – and all of them probably as keen on being there as a mistress at her lover’s wife’s birthday party.

But I’d forgotten the routine and rules, the noise and extras, the yard duty and the running up and down stairs between rooms and buildings to get from one class or staff meeting or assembly to the next.

Period 1 of my first day back is a Year 8 Drama class. Suddenly I feel too old for all of this. But fourteen-year-olds don’t appear to have changed that much. The boys are still either clowning about making excuses for body contact or quietly awaiting instruction. The girls are still either guarded and self-conscious or asking loads of questions. All of us are a bit scared.

The arts, sciences, humanities, physical education, drama, dance, art, languages and maths should all have equal and central contributions to make to a student’s education.

But despite years of dedicated reputation-building, exemplary teaching practice and pedagogical research, and governments who love to play the culture card when it suits them –Drama is, let’s face it – until VCE level anyhow – still often seen as the slack subject, time-out and unstructured vocationally irrelevant fooling around.

Maybe since I’ve been outside the mainstream secondary classroom Drama is no longer the poor, flamboyant and slightly embarrassing cousin to all those other ‘real’ and serious subjects.

I stand in front of my Year 8 class. They look at me. I look at them.

So what you got for us, they seem to be saying. This better be fun.

I want to tell them about a totally awesome 10-minute TED talk by this inspiring English educator called Ted Robinson. In it he says how by the time we all get to the age of these kids that lots of us have had our imaginations sucked out of us by the education system and that creativity is as important as literacy.

But these kids are on the cusp of cool so instead I automatically indicate to form a circle and watch as one girl goes to hold the hands of those either side of her and then thinks better of it. I watch one of the boys yank off his jumper, stuff it up his shirt and do a funny fat man walk. Everyone laughs.

Excellent. This lot is still young enough to catch in time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back in the early 90s I landed my first TAFE job teaching Certificate 3 Childcare students something called Personal Development.

Up until that point I’d taught Drama and English in a couple of secondary schools, Creative Writing at a neighbourhood house, and during one particularly hot Melbourne summer I’d played endless acting games with a band of ratbag teenage boys at a YMCA somewhere out in the western suburbs. Oh and once I conducted a workshop called Acting for TV when by this stage I’d only had two real television jobs playing ‘the jealous friend’ and ‘the Italian girl’ respectively. I guess three years at Drama School had taught me to fake it, if nothing else.

But what was Personal Development exactly?

So there I was one mean-cold Melbourne evening in 1992 looking for Building 3, Level 4, Room 424 and wondering what the heck I had been thinking. There had never been any kind of job interview. A friend of a friend had recommended me for the job and I’d say yes to anything in those days, such was the chutzpah of my early life as a peripatetic freelancer.

Once I finally located my latest place of work for the next eleven weeks, there was no one around to hand me a course reader or to give me a card for the photocopy machine. I had no desk and no coffee mug. I had arrived in stealth, yet another sessional ghost quietly navigating yet another teaching institution and trusting that someone knew I was there and that someone else might even pay me for my trouble at some point.

This was back in the old days when you could teach TAFE without the now requisite TAE qualification and a PhD in Administrivia majoring in Box Ticking and Performance Outcomes. This was when teachers called students, students not clients.

Room 424 was full of sewing machines and long wooden benches. I wasn’t sure where to sit so I stood and waited for my new students to arrive, with the rumble of the occasional tram out on the street below for company

I’d been teaching since I was twenty, in between acting and waitressing jobs and only finally got my Dip Ed because Mum made me.

‘Get real Elly! You wont survive as an actress so you’d better have a second string your bow.’

My parents were both teachers and my father had also been a very active member of the VSTA during the now-famous Maribyrnong strikes in the 70s. The apple doesn’t fall far from etc.

My students finally arrived and they were nine young women, all nervous and self-conscious. Over the ensuing eleven weeks we talked, wrote and role-played about work and relationships, families and friends, depression and anxiety, food and books and I reckon I learned more about personal development than they did.

We all promised to keep in touch but didn’t. I never got back any of the books I loaned them and I have no idea if any of these delightfully open-hearted and funny young women ever become child-care workers.

Teaching at TAFE forced me out of my comfort zone and into the uncomfortable world of all-things, grotesque and hilariously implausible.

After seven years of teaching creative writing at TAFE I became a reluctant expert on zombies. Even though my young students were encouraged to read literature other than genre fiction it remained hard, initially, to get them to write about anything beyond the speculative, surreal or plain scary.

During workshop after workshop – this is where students get to read their writing and then receive ‘constructive’ feedback from class colleagues and bemused tutor – I was presented with a smorgasbord of foreign delicacies such as: sexually ravenous vampires; perambulatory zombies with a penchant for small children; alien monsters posing as benevolent maternal figures and lesbian cyborgs with anger issues.

My Certificate 4 students were a magnificent and motley crew of the young, the adult and the not so young. From kids straight out of Year 12 or VCAL, to mothers wanting to return to the work force and needing to retrain – these forty-something women often served as surrogate mothers to the more spiritually wayward younger students, and were people for whom being a writer had been a dream kept on hold for years – to elderly gentlemen and gentlewomen whose initial know-it-all-ness belied a poignant fear of failure.

But by the end of semester the sixty-five year old grandfather and former IT consultant’s hard-earned resistance had transformed into a newfound pride in the discovery that 1. He could write. And 2. That being in class again after forty years was a beautiful thing.

I just looked up the definition of motley crew and apparently ‘Archetypical instances of the “motley crew” overcoming adversity are commonly found in fantasy and science fiction.’ Perfect.

The 19-year-olds made up the bulk of a class, with the middle-aged women (and occasionally men) and the hexagenarians in the minority. And ever since those supremely dumb funding cuts to TAFE and the attendant rise in fees, mature age enrolments have dropped considerably.

Needless to say I was not the only one in for a fast track course in lesbian cyborg short fiction, the other ‘olds’ amongst us were similarly flummoxed while we continued to do our grown-up best to respond helpfully to the latest 1200 words of blood, sex and chaotically constructed nihilism.

‘Well you have created a strong sense of tension in your story and the central vampire protagonist is vividly described.’

‘Awesome. Thanks.’

‘Although I don’t really understand why her eyes change colour or why she needs to eat her lover’s liver?’

It’s tough to create an alternative world in fewer than 2000 words but these young students who’d survived on a high fat diet of fantasy and futurism since they were twelve, did come to learn how to write and read outside their comfort zones.    And I did too. Did you know that the word zombies first appeared in a 1929 novel, the year the stock market crashed and the Great Depression started?

In the last twelve months my son has changed. A year ago he would grab my hand faux-casual-like and tell me stuff unbidden. Fifty-two weeks ago he answered my questions with a complete sentence. Today on the brink of thirteen he regards me as an embarrassment and tells me to stop talking so loudly in the street. Currently carousing with Oedipus my son is trying to kill me off.

Occasionally he will look directly at me like when I ask if he has lost his PE uniform again or if he has the change from the two pairs of psychedelic skate socks he just bought.

Other times we play this little game where he chases me around the house and when he catches me – and he always does –maneuvers me to the ground and looks into my eyes and says,

‘Gotcha Mum!’

What does he see I wonder?

His nose is like a man’s nose now and the expression in his green eyes is new- amused, flirtatious, defiant.

He slumps past me in the hallway examining the lines in the floorboards. He trudges towards the train station, his heavy school bag slung across his almost-manly shoulders. His head is in a book. His focus is on a screen. He stares at his body side on in a mirror. He is chatting online to friends. When he sleeps he is longer than the bed now and when he mumbles goodnight from under the covers, he presses his body up against the wall like he is trying to merge with its stony coolness.

These days I am an embarrassment. My top is too low and my hair is too frizzy. My lips are too red and what’s for dinner. He is becoming a man, that’s for sure.

I am going to do some teaching at his school next term and he tells me: ‘Mum, don’t be too strict or too friendly. Just be normal, okay.’

If he hears me singing along with Bob Dylan he asks me not to, so I lower my voice and whisper-sing: she aches just like a woman but she breaks just like a little girl.

‘I wish I had a brother,’ he laments, when I drag him home from his best friend’s house after an entire weekend living in someone else’s bigger, noisier and ‘funner’ family.

‘I wish I could live there,’ he says, staring out of the passenger seat window.

‘Well you can’t, I say. ‘You already have a home. And by the way, the only way you will ever have a brother is if I get involved with some man who’s got kids.’

‘So why can’t you then?’ he says, making faces in the side mirror now. ‘How come Dad’s got someone and you don’t?’

My almost 13-year-old son wants me to do online dating but I tell him that I tried it once and hated it.

‘It’s horrible. It’s not real.’

‘Nothing’s real’, he says. He is not being philosophical or clever; he is just of that generation who experience the world virtually, so it’s no big deal.

My son is right of course. I mean he is right in wanting his mother to find another man apart from him. He is right in trying, however ambivalently, to kill me off, figuratively speaking, because lately my maternal presence is just too big for him. I am needy and he knows it. He loves me but he hates me too. He wants me available but invisible. He needs me reliable, loving but shtum. He likes me to keep my distance but to acknowledge his every want.

Maybe these days what he needs is different to what I think he needs. The best times are when he is doing his thing and I am doing mine but we are under the same roof and only calling distance apart.

‘You want a smoothie?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What are you doing? You need some help? You know I used to teach Year 7 English.’

‘No, I’m fine Mum.’

‘What are you reading this term?

‘I don’t know.’

Last try. ‘I hope you’re not playing computer games?’

‘I’m doing English revision.’

Revision? I didn’t know how to revise until I was twenty-eight and in my third go at university. The grammar of my son’s and my relationship has changed. I use questions and imperatives while he employs monosyllables and closed statements.

I am trying to teach him to ask other people about what they do and how their day’s been because it’s polite and empathetic.

‘I’m marking stories.’ I call.

Nothing.

‘You want to read one a first year student has written about zombies?’

‘Yeah, okay.’ He comes out of his room and I meet him halfway at the entrance to our kitchen. I have been working at the kitchen table. I have a study and a desk but it’s friendlier in the kitchen.

I am standing in front of him now. He is almost a head taller than I am and for a flicker of a moment I see him at forty.

‘So where’s the story?’ he asks. ‘Are they vampires or zombies, you get them mixed up remember?’

‘Vampires. I think.’

He reads the first page, grins and then hands it back to me.

‘It’s not that bad. You just don’t get it,’ he says. ‘We got any of that good bread, not the one with all the seeds?’

He recently got dual Australian-German citizenship so now he’s got another identity I can’t know. He scares me a bit. He is so other. He has become an exotic blonde with whom I cannot speak and for whom I can never do or be enough.

‘Hey Mum!’ he calls from his room.

‘Yes.’

‘Come here.’

‘What is it?’ I am at his door. He’s got his iPad in one hand and a sheet of questions in the other. He’s still on the English revision.

‘What’s character development?’ he asks.

I sit down next to him. Now this is something I can help him with.

Seriously Funny

Elly Varrenti

 

I was twenty-five years old and navigating my first year out of drama school convinced that a passion for bad boy actors, espresso coffee and Stephen Sondheim augured well for a successful career in showbiz. I would be seriously famous by the time I was thirty, and if I wasn’t I’d pack it in. I wasn’t and I didn’t.

During my three years at drama school I joined a four-hander all-girl cabaret act called June Fowler & the Fowlettes. Our show was a chaotic mix of slapstick, free-range monologues and Dadaist dialogue.

I played a busty refugee from Cold War Russia named Rosa. Heavily armed with serious delusions of talent – ‘You know, I was very skilled and very beautiful gymnast in Leningrad?’ – Rosa was keen to pursue a showbiz career in her new country no matter who she had to bribe in order to do it. ‘Is all okay, you know. In my country is called bla’t. Bla’t is – how you say? – is, like, I give you this and then you give me that. Okay?’ She wore an open fur coat exposing skin-tight workout gear while a Communist military cap sat precariously atop her massive beehive hairdo. Rosa delivered lines in thickly accented Russian-American English full of double entendres and malapropisms. It was all pretty stereotypical stuff. But then The Fowlettes were always more hit-and-miss comic anarchy, than cutting-edge political satire.

One day at a rehearsal someone brought along a Joan Rivers album; it was the first time I had ever heard of her. We were running through lines at the kitchen table in my small deco flat in St KiIda. It was her caustic wit, the stabbing delivery, her breathless candour and the diva-bravura that got me hooked. I loved right off her dirty-funny, sharp-tongued jokes that just kept on coming and had me gasping for air from laughing so hard.

Later, as we’d painted my flat’s walls white and the skirting boards black, we’d listened to Rivers and drank cask Riesling. The Riesling was awful, but Rivers was a revelation. I was tipsy from the plonk and faint from the paint, but I could tell that the way Rivers brandished words like scalpels was sheer brilliance.

It was 1985. Mental As Anything was top of the charts, Hawkey was PM, Maria Callas had made the cover of Time magazine, and I wore black leggings under floral op-shop cotton dresses and lipstick so red my mouth could stop traffic.

That first time I heard the diminutive revolutionary’s comic schtick I’d laughed my arse off. We all had. She might have been a republican but Joan Rivers was a total radical when it came to carving out a place for funny females in mainstream America. Until Rivers hit her straps in New York in the mid-1960s, high-profile female comic writer–performers who were not just funny but could also lampoon without fear or favour were a rare breed. That day when The Fowlettes were meant to be rehearsing in my flat in St Kilda we’d all revelled in Rivers murdering sacred cows instead.

Actually rehearsal is far too grand a description for what we did back then. What we did was more like anti-rehearsal, more like lots of laughing interrupted by cappuccinos and cakes from the Russian Jewish pastry shops in nearby Acland Street. Those creamy continental vanilla slices the size of house bricks still inhabit my dreams.

Joan Rivers’ parents were Russian–Jewish immigrants and she possessed that particular mix of resilience, black humour and work ethic so often evident in second-generation Holocaust survivors – particularly those who end up working in the arts.

But whereas Rivers was a disciplined and dedicated workaholic – her daughter said that her mother’s career was like having a sibling you had to compete with for attention – our approach to comedy work in those days was mostly lazy fun conducted in lounge rooms or church halls.

In 1985 The Last Laugh, a well-known comedy venue in inner-city Melbourne, had a try-out room upstairs called Le Joke and it’s where The Fowlettes performed for the first time outside the playpen-safety of drama school. As in so many anecdotes about fledgling careers, The Fowlettes’ showbiz launch was the classic baptism by fire.

Le Joke was dark, cramped, smoky and pulsing with energy. It also stank of wine-soaked carpet, and the stage was so small it was like performing on a beer crate.

Some nights we died. Once some drunken bloke heckled: ‘Get off the stage you fat bitches!’ We did. Another night we were so lost, our pianist decided to play a few of his own compositions – all four of them – until we finally managed to figure out what came next. Or perhaps one of us just made something up. I think I did. I think I started treating the stand-up mic like a penis and doing jokes about migrant girl head jobs.

Other nights, theatre’s alchemy of cunning and craft had the show work a treat. We even pleasantly surprised ourselves. What we lacked in preparation, we made up for with strong improvisation skills and the chutzpah of youth.

‘Comedy is such power,’ said Joan Rivers. There were shows when we too felt powerful. Like what we were doing mattered. That making people laugh was important. When there was a crisis in my personal life – and there usually was – The Fowlettes was an opportunity to turn personal drama into public entertainment.

When I broke up with my then-boyfriend on St Kilda beach one stinking hot day in the middle of a hailstorm, such ignominy eventually morphed into Rosa screeching obscenities at her boyfriend in Russian while her stilettos sank further into the sand and her hairdo became a droopy mess of bobby pins and soggy hairspray.

Joan Rivers’ recent death at eighty-one years of age got me watching hours of classic Rivers from her big break in the mid-1960s on the Johnny Carson show to her more recent self-invented fashionista persona on the achingly cruel-but-funny TV show Fashion Police. ‘I have not seen lips this green since Miss Piggy got out of the back seat of Kermit’s car.’

She was the first woman to host a late-night chat show on American television and one of the highest-earning comics of her generation.

Joan Rivers was as wicked as the Ab Fabbers and as no-holds-barred as Lenny Bruce – to whom she attributed the revelation that ‘personal truth can be the foundation of comedy, that outrageousness can be cleansing and healthy’.

Joan Rivers was as resilient as Tupperware.

Like so many performers, Rivers struggled with body hatred all of her life and continued to alter herself by way of surgical intervention up until her death. As a child she’d cottoned on pretty quick that she was witty and could make people laugh. She thought herself too ugly to attract notice any other way: ‘I was so ugly that they sent my picture to Ripley’s Believe It or Not and he sent it back and said, “I don’t believe it.”’

But it was all material for Rivers; nothing was untouchable. Not her body: ‘I wish I had a twin, so I could know what I’d look like without plastic surgery.’ Not the holocaust: ‘The last time a German looked [that] hot was when they were pushing Jews into the ovens,’ a gag for which she was later pilloried and responded to with by saying, ‘This is the way I remind people about the Holocaust. I do it through humor … my husband lost his entire family in the Holocaust.’

Not her daughter: ‘Don’t tell your kids you had an easy birth or they won’t respect you. For years I used to wake up my daughter and say, “Melissa, you ripped me to shreds. Now go back to sleep.”’ Not 9/11: ‘You laugh to get through it. I started thinking about jokes while I was walking uptown on 9/11.’

Not even her second husband’s suicide in the late 1980s was off limits: ‘My husband killed himself. And it was my fault. We were making love and I took the bag off my head.’

I’d heard about Rivers’ husband’s suicide and, although I remember thinking how awful it was, I’d also thought it amazing she’d converted personal tragedy to public schtick.

It wasn’t until after my sister took her own life over twenty years later that I finally got where Rivers was coming from back then; the way she had dealt with her grief through her work.

I started writing about my sister four months after her suicide. It was painful. Strange. Wrong. Treacherous. I had been writing confessional-style memoir for years, but nothing, nothing, was like writing about my dead sister and trying to turn it into a coherent narrative. Writing may be good therapy but it does not always make good art.

But I couldn’t write funny anymore. I couldn’t do jokes. So many subjects that had once been interesting to me became shallow and irrelevant. It wasn’t a conscious decision. It wasn’t like I thought now my sister’s dead there can be no more jokes. It wasn’t as if I decided that I now had to write only serious stuff.

For a long time after she died the closest I got to a laugh was watching her favourite comics – Sasha Baron Cohen, Ricky Gervais and Joanna Lumley – on DVDs she’d left behind. When I used to watch those DVDs, I felt close to her. But to write funny stuff about anything, let alone about her was impossible. Unthinkable.

Now, five years after my sister’s death, it’s just starting to feel possible to write light again. Finally, I can laugh without the guilt. Now I can write jokes without feeling unfaithful. At last there can be joy in places where before there was only the aching grotesque hollowness of grief.

My sister was funny. She was one of the funniest people I’ve ever known. Her personal boundaries might have been all over the shop, but her impressions of members of our family and my ex-boyfriends were comedy gold. But a great sense of humour and an acute eye for life’s absurdities are not always protection against depression or unrelenting disappointment.

When my sister died I was contributing regular monologues on ABC Radio National – I’d been doing them for six years. They were not always funny but they were irreverent and self-deprecating personal essays about everything from sex to parenting, romance to gardening. There were plenty of jokes, narrative-based gags, but jokes nonetheless.

After my sister took her own life I could no longer take the piss out of mine.

When Rivers’ husband, her daughter’s father, killed himself, Rivers said she’d been contemplating suicide herself until one of her dogs reminded her that ending it all was not an option. ‘I was all alone, my daughter wasn’t talking to me, my career was over … my dog came in and sat in my lap and that was the turning point in my life.’

Rivers was an actress playing the role of a comic. Like all writers who unashamedly mine our own lives and those of others for material, the end product – the stand-up routine, the book, the album or the radio essay – are all artifacts, versions of who we are. They are some of the truth of who we are, not the whole truth.

‘Part of my act is meant to shake you up. It looks like I’m being funny, but I’m reminding you of other things. Life is tough, darling. Life is hard. And we better laugh at everything; otherwise, we’re going down the tube.’

She’s right of course. The late great Joan Rivers was right.

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/perspective/elly-varrenti/3365636