karaoke, punk, guns n' drugs

it's been over a week since my last entry. does it feel like i'm about to confess something? i've actually been recovering from the biggest come down ever after the anzac day long weekend. and it wasn't drug induced. well only a little bit. it was much more hard core... it was fun induced.

starting on the wednesday (yeah... i did work on thurs but weekend celebrations always start one day before they're supposed to... that's how you fit all the fun in) i'd been on a 5-day funfest... and now it's time to blog (or blag) all about it:

DAY 1 (WEDS) - EXTREME KARAOKE WITH MUM



i have discovered the best way (well... the only way) to connect with my mum.

it involves alcohol (a sneaky hip flask of gin is required), a dark karaoke bar and extreme skinhead/sharpie dance moves. me, mum, dad and my auntie ventured to the laundry in fitzroy for extreme karaoke (as well as a bunch of my favourite peeps... many of whom came along just to meet mum). this night had been planned for months. a trip to the city is a big deal for my folks. my dad and my auntie had even taken the following day of work because we all knew it was gonna be big. and it was.

mum brought the gin. i showed her the extensive list of songs (she was disappointed the rolling stones' track 'starfucker' wasn't on there). we picked stacks. zeppelin, gunners, madonna, sabbath, B52s... assigning our names and fake names against them on the list so the karaoke MC wouldn't get sick of us... well actually we knew the karaoke MC would get sick of us which is why we wrote down fake names.

dad (who doesn't drink) sat quietly and happily on the couch near the stage minding our bags and concealing mum's bottle of gin whenever bar staff were near... while mum and i bolted to the stage whenever the next song came up. and if it wasn't our song... we'd grab auntie nin and dance like skinheads with our knees knocking and fists clenched in true sharpie style (regardless of what era the song was from).

FYI... this has been something we've always done (mum taught me the moves for my first primary school disco)... like at christmas night, family reunions, nan's birthday... it doesn't matter... if there's dancing involved... we do it this way.

the highlight of my night (aside from watching mum totally lose herself in sabbath's 'paranoid') was our duet rendition of madonna's 'hanky panky' (as in... 'nothin like a good spanky'... at which point mum would spank my arse like they do in the music video). while i find it hard to relate to my mum over dinner or in any 'normal' situation... i am completely comfortable and proud to be drunk on stage with her singing and acting out a song that is probably inappropriate for a mother and daughter to perform together... suck it up;)

FYI... next extreme karaoke date is june 11. put that in your diary madge:



DAY 2 (THURS) - PUNK BANDS WITH CANNON

while i intended to have a quiet night... a text from cannon wonderful soon changed that. cannon was gonna check out a band at the tote so that was a good enough reason to leave the apartment and hang out with a good egg. and cannon is freaky cool (like... the last time i saw her was at rollerderby training when she fell and re-opened a chunky scab on her knee... so there was a fair bit of blood but she was cool and skated off.... then she comes back after a lap of the concrete and there's blood all over her face... and i'm like 'what the fuck?'... and i worked out she'd applied war paint using the blood from her knee).

i didn't know what bands were playing that night but turns out they were a bunch of old school punk and psychobilly bands (like 6 for 6 bucks or something) that cannon knew from way back. anyways, so the crowd was dirty and the real frickin deal (as in no blink 182 fans) and i thought they were fighting but really they were just dancing... and cannon fought/danced with her house mate and they tipped beer all over each other and then regretted the fact that they'd committed beer crime and reckoned they should've tipped it in each others mouths instead. i felt middle class.

DAYS 3-4 (FRI-SAT) - AK 47's FARM (LESBIAN DISNEYLAND)



so the next morning i felt totally knackered. it was the anzac day holiday but i got up pretty early cos it was time to head to lesbian disneyland. this meant a 4-hour drive to NSW en route to THE farm owned by none other than the enigmatic AK 47.

after 4 wicked hours of iPod magic i arrived at an RSL in the middle of nowhere and met up with licker-royalty and a pot of blonde (which is so not tough but is light on the carbs and tastes nice). from here we followed AK 47 down a thousand sandy, dirt roads (where i almost lost control because my blue mistubishi mirage couldn't handle the terrain at the speed we were traveling).

the next two days were pure fantasy but totally real. think quadbikes... no helmets... 60kms across paddocks filled with hundreds of cows and one sheep who thought it was a cow.

think firing bullets into the sky... only to have the gun spark unexpectedly (which is when AK 47 takes it off you and says it's time for the next activity).

think chainsawing down tall dead trees singlehandedly (after some instruction from the farm folk) like a lumberjack to get wood to make the biggest bonfire you've ever seen in your life.

think yabbying (not so extreme but good fun in a hunter/gatherer sense and very nice to eat i found out).

think numerous drunk, stoned attempts at jumping a boob-height metal fence without actually having to climb over it... and it DIDN'T even end in tears.

FYI... other things that were awesome but not extreme included making chocolate pudding (which involved wearing an apron), scrabble (which was killer cos i won thanks to a 50-point bonus for using all my 7 letters in 'RESTARTS'... the plural is slightly lame i will admit) and learning how to hold live yabbies (which actually was extreme because i shat myself whenever their nippers moved).

and just before leaving lesbian disneyland we made a plan to hold the coolest ever lesbian music festival there sometime down the track... and your ticket would let you ride the motorbikes but not use the chainsaws cos AK 47 reckons that'd be too dangerous.

DAY 5 (SUN) - JULIETTE "OFF CHOPS" LEWIS AND THE LICKS



this is an authentic camera phone pic. just so you know.

so i got back to melbs on the sunday night and after washing the farm off headed to the prince to see the one and only juliette lewis and her band the licks... with nit. to be honest, nit and i had never heard her music before but we were both massive fans of juliette from her role in natural born killers. we were there as starfuckers and were happy to admit it.

the crowd that night was really freaky. this tall, weird forrest gump type dude kept trying to hit on nit (in a gentle but creepy way) and he asked both of us separately if we were either french or italian... which we're not... and don't look it... or sound it??

anyways, when the very hot and very rock and very fucked-off-her-head juliette came on stage we moved away from forrest gump and pushed down the front (forrest did follow but we shook him eventually)... but it was really funny because the people up close to the stage were also totally fucked-off-their-heads. like... not in a happy/lovey kinda way... but in a shake your head and body around violently and keep lunging aggressively at juliette kinda way...

nit and i had to stand with our arms in a defensive position (my stance was learnt from basketball/karate and nit's was from her time as a shopping centre security guard) in order to prevent the drug pigs from breaking our noses with the back of their heads. full on. and then for a minute a couple of the drugs pigs fought each other and one of them got dragged away by someone.

but juliette didn't mind all this. she contorted her face in all sorts of aggressive but euphoric ways and lunged back at them in the crowd. she even crowd surfed and we all got to touch her clammy celebrity skin.

when juliette (who's eyes were really big and sometimes wayward) did a cover of acca dacca's 'dirty deeds' she brought the house down and the drug pigs shook their torsos from side to side as well as their heads. nit and i decided that we may as well do the same... at least this way if the rhythm was right we'd avoid a collision.

LEST WE FORGET these 5 days of fun...