I've been having an amusing exchange with some old acquaintances from my London days which has been reminding me that much British humour revolves around crass, raunchy double entendres and jokes about body parts and bodily functions. Think Benny Hill or Kenneth Williams, Hilda Baker or Mollie Sugden in the TV show 'Are You Being Served' (which, by the way, us righteous lesbian liberationists spent years getting apoplectic about). Most of the rest assaults the other topic American humour doesn't like to touch - class. From the shockingly brutal 'Till Death Us Do Part' to the irreverently self-mocking 'Absolutely Fabulous', it's a beautiful thing - the english laugh. So when these two women started having a little exchange on Facebook I added a comment which started a crude form of banter found most often in the dingy pubs of my old hometown. I remarked that perhaps I had become too polite since moving to California.
Somewhere in there, one of them commented that I had always been a bit polite, and the other chimed in that I had seemed to be 'a quiet lass'. before I escaped to the 'sunny blandness' of the Bay Area. Now look here, I fumed. Who are you describing as a quiet lass? Eh?
But I wandered off down to the landfill with my quartet of fur and my iPod, thought about dinner on the way, parked my beaten up old wagon in the usual spot and greeted some familiar faces before enclosing myself in my particular wall of sound. The weather has been spectacular here recently - warm balmy piercingly blue sky days and evenings bringing the fog to the edge of my kingdom. The hawks soared overhead and the blossoming sunset was the sound of Handel's Largo, the golden grasses swayed like Desmond Dekker's Israelites, and Oscar, Frank, Calvin and Roo danced like The Pogues. And me? A huge freakin' grin spread across my polite face as Kirsty McColl burst into song in my ears - 'Terry wants my photograph, Terry says our love will last forever, and he should know'.
We trotted around, Oscar ran, his ears flapping like the pelicans passing above, and then we came home for meat and potatoes. The cats came home for the night, and I fell asleep with the sound of one fang Joey purring in my ear, and Roo's head on my shoulder. I'll take bland.
I worked with Kenneth Williams once. I was a lowly stagehand in the West End, barely out of school and Williams was performing in a mocking little comedy called 'My Fat Friend' with the gorgeous Jennie Linden in a body suit. The guy was one of the rudest, tactless actors I've ever worked with, and we would avoid ever having to bump into him in the small corridors of the Queens Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue. The barely concealed disdain and 'say no more, say no more' glee when he was taken to hospital with a ruptured anal wall was palpable among all the backstage staff.
As for me, my antidote for the darkest days is myself.
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