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Meow Meow is dressed in a long, busty black-sequinned outfit, looking less the burlesque diva of lore and more a figure from a Whistler painting. She poses for the camera in the velvet surrounds of a Melbourne small bar-café, where the local press claim her as their own.
So where exactly is home? “In my bags, darling,” she says. Soon she’ll be appearing at the Sydney Opera House singing Nick Cave and Laurie Anderson numbers, inveigling us to celebrate Christmas in March, after which she’ll perform shows in London, New York, Miami, LA, maybe Seattle and San Francisco too, and, most naturally, Berlin.
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Two gay men, heads shaven, stand side by side but avoid looking at, much less touching, one another lest they stir their capricious guards to violence – yet through the power of imagination the pair build to an erotic climax that’s poignant and amusing and above all liberating, in spite of the horrors that doom them.
In keeping with this year’s Mardi Gras theme of History of the World, Sydney-based Focus Theatre and B Sharp are bringing to Belvoir’s downstairs theatre Martin Sherman’s 1979 play Bent, the story of party boy Max, swiftly derailed from decadent 1930s Berlin to Dachau, the first concentration camp opened in Germany, where he meets his would-be lover, Horst.
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Back in mid-1992, hurricane Katrina whipped through the Mardi Gras workshop as the new party and parade production manager, prodding squawks from the festival’s gay male Sydney artist clique over the feisty lesbian in their space and, finally, withdrawal of their services entirely just two months out from the 1993 parade.
“I was the evil coming of everything,” laughs Katrina Márton. “I was character assassinated all over town.”
Yet the redheaded working class girl from Adelaide mastered the storm-tossed seas of homo-Realpolitik.
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(a queer festive fiction)She owns three Blackberries – one for New York, one for Sydney and the other for … oh yes, work. She’s off to Bondi today, she announces with a flick of her blonded mane. The guy on the other side of the table assumes she means the beach, and looks up from his notebook hoping there might be some detail; north, south, a cliff top walk to Tamarama next door, perhaps? She declares they must talk about the book she wrote, concerning what lipsticks colours indicate about a girl’s personality.
Annabel Edelman, US-based entertainment host and ex-soapie actress, has cautioned through her publicist that her beginnings onshore in Neighbourly Home Away are strictly off-limits, much less her severed friendship with co-star Kate R.
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