(no subject)

I have messages to run, but I'm wimpish about outside today. The only urgent matter is the one of pain killers and I can get by, I think, even on that front. This means I can do exciting things with all that time freed up today (and tomorrow, well, tomorrow I can run my messages, for they will be urgent) like check old VHS tapes to see what can be chucked and like work on my bibliography. I've already done a bunch of things today.

I may check just one tape and then do my messages anyway, for one thing I've learned these past few years is that leaving things until they're really urgent is a sure sign for getting oneself into big trouble.

And so I leave you on a cliffhanger. What is in that parcel I need to pick up from the post office? (the one I haven't yet mentioned - poor, poor plot structure!)

(no subject)

Courage is my motto. Well, maybe not. I've found three blank tapes, two tapes of TV from the 1990s that I recorded to watch back at a suitable time, and just one tape that needs keeping. That's nearly 1/3 of the total.

I had completely forgotten that, in the days of the VHS, if I were going to miss TV, I could record it for later viewing. I certainly didn't realise that I had kept any of those tapes. One had an old M*A*S*H* episode on it and many ads for gourmet cuts of meat at $5.99 a kilo. The other started with the end of the Movie Show. Margaret P looked a lot younger, twenty years ago - David S hasn't changed as much. The program I was apparently trying to record was a bunch of klezmer musicians strutting their stuff. It's rather good, so I shall save it and watch it when I get back from my messages. It's still going to go out, for I recorded it purely to watch back the once. I didn't know that 'the once' was going to be nearly 20 years later.

So far, only one tape needs copying, though, and I'm hesitant about it, even though it is dear to me. It is of a folk dance party when I was already on the long downhill slide towards that interesting abyss of a few years ago. Still fit, but getting larger and larger from my various disorders. I was very formidable-looking back then. These days, I'm large, but at that time I looked solid as well. It's very strange seeing a person of tank-like build dancing, insouciantly, and knowing that this person is me. I shall think about this one.

(no subject)

This degree is tumbling by. It feels as if I agreed to talk to Van about the possibility of it just yesterday. Just today, Van cleared my abstract.

For an Australian PhD, that abstract is the big sign that the end is near, for it signals that the research is finished, that examiners need to be discovered, that only tidying up remains. Tidying up is a lot of work, but still. The end is near. I may yet be a timelord.

(no subject)

I'm up to my very last VHS tape. Of the seventeen that weren't commercial, I definitely need two and am thinking about another two. All the rest has been rewatched and is going out. The last one (the one I'm about to rewatch) is rather special. I don't know where the other rather special tapes went - the one of my cousin's barmitzvah, for instance, appears to have gone missing. (Maybe I'll do another hunt tomorrow, just in case there is another cache of tapes, lurking somewhere, but I think not, I think that life has intervened.)

This last tape has a story. So much of my life has stories. I should think about becoming a writer maybe, one day.

In the years when I was writing and not telling anyone, between having a bunch of short stories published and being taken firmly in hand and told my writing needed to be seen, I didn't stop writing. I lived narrative then just as much as I do now, but in a different way. I didn't know there were whole communities of people who shared my interests and even my word addiction. I didn't think I could write (despite an award and publications and well over $500 in cold hard cash) but I was still hopeless addicted to story.

Because of my particular background, I had three rather cool communities with which I was affiliated. One - which you know about - was the changing-the-world community. The ones who decided Australia needed a Women's History Month and did solid work to counter racism and gender inequity. I'm still in touch with some rather wonderful friends from those years, and they are still changing the world. Another (which I'm also still in touch with, though life puts restrictions on my dancing and festival attendance) is the folk community, which is and always will be the nicest bunch of people I have ever, ever met. The third is the Jewish community.

The reasons I'm not very active in the Jewish community are mainly to do with the fact that it takes so much time and energy. I can't be a pillar of a small community and active in NCJW and expect to write. When I put the needs of the community ahead of my own needs, however, the need to tell stories chose the Jewish community in which to manifest.

It started as my own private Purim celebration in 1986, when I was doing that first doctorate and was missing my family while I was in London. That's the story I give you here, when there is enough demand. I adjust it to meet the times and add new jokes, but it's my version from London. It was first performed to a group so small we all fitted into a single room quite comfortably in Mecklenburgh Square. The year after was in Sydney, at International House in someone's flat, and we lost our Mordechai so I took out his songs and gave him a sore throat, which he has manifested ever since. Then we tried a stage play in International House, which is the only time in my life I've been Esther, for everyone agreed that if you had only one Jewish woman in the cast, she had to be Esther. And eventually, I was being a very good public servant in Canberra and the Jewish community tried my earlier version (the adults) and then someone had the bright idea that I could teach the kids and they could write a new one. I think the bright spark was me.

For several years I led the children of the Canberra Jewish community astray. A small group came over to my place once a week and I taught them to write Purim spiels. There was much junk food involved and I could tell many stories of derring-do and saving my home made liqueurs from teenage depredations. There were water pistol fights. There was mayhem. And we wrote plays.

I had a fine time. All of the teens I taught are now upstanding adults, so you can ask them if they did. Some of them have found me on Facebook, so I possibly should not suggest this.

Once the play was written (and in the final year it was written by a brother and sister, sans Gillian, over the summer holiday - their mother told me that it was very disconcerting having them practise witticisms while walking up mountain slopes, "Not you, Mum," M would say, when she would turn a mildly surprised look at her daughter's rude remark. "Haman.") The writers were joined by other children and teens from the community and by a few adults and a full scale play was produced. The largest audience we had was 200, I think.

At least one year the Purim Spiel was filmed. Maybe as many as three years. I was given a copy of the tape as a memory, when the community moved onto other matters. I sort of knew I had it. And now I'm about to watch it again.