Tonight we play our fourth Jewish Xmas show, it’s become something of a tradition. It almost didn’t happen this year as one of the daughters said she wasn’t feeling it. Fair enough, it’s been another difficult year. The show was called off (well not technically as it hadn’t been announced yet). The parents were sad but what are you gonna do? Then a few weeks later she said, ok let’s do it, a smaller version, and the show crept back in. Then another daughter got bitten by a spider and had to take time off her midwifery placement (during COVID she’s gone back to study) and had to pull out of the show as they put her replacement placement on this week. Sad but again, what are you gonna do? Her part is being sung by a wonderful singer but it would've been nice to have ALL the family onstage, even with the attendant rivalries, emotional eruptions and resentments that these things entail. And tradition is tradition, right? Somehow this little show has become an anchor in these stormy years.
It’s a simple, joyous show, Xmas songs written by Jews. But it’s actually more. Those Jews were escaping pogroms in Europe, were escaping centuries of persecution, ghettoisation, coming to a new land and able to flower. Free and mostly accepted, they helped define 20th century popular culture. And the show was being sung by the family of Holocaust survivors, granddaughters of a couple who had lost their parents, their brothers and sisters and survived things unimaginable. Who after the war came to Australia and made a good life for themselves. So this simple show is about us all and our better instincts. About music, joy, creativity, acceptance, the possibility of things being better. It’s wonderful the show is going on, we have all seen that nothing can be taken for granted.
So we just want to say for those of you who celebrate religiously, Merry Christmas, for those culturally, Merry Xmas and even to those who just want a well earned break, Happy Holidays. Have a joyous season, be well and let’s hope for a new year where:
"Someday soon, we all will be together, if the fates allow
Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now"
Happy New Year to the faithful & the unfaithful, to the movers & the shakers, the sad & lonely, to those who get it done & those who want it done. May you appreciate this is all a gift that one day is taken away and passed on like a baton in a relay that you wish could be held onto just a little bit longer. xx
From 1999 a rarity called Happy New Year. By the time New Year rolled around in 1999/2000 we were in hospital with a one day old baby girl, our third. We briefly wished each other a happy one and then went back to our dreaming.
From Paul Kelly’s self-described ‘mongrel memoir’ ‘How To Make Gravy’ pg 139-140
"Everybody Wants To Touch Me’ is sometimes read as a riff on celebrity. That seems to be Sydney cabaret singer Paul Capsis’s take on it on his album of the same name. Medusa-haired Deborah Conway, Melbourne singer-songwriter and mother of three, knows a little about celebrity and pregnancy both. She fronted a band called Do-Re-Mi in the eighties and had a big hit with a song called ‘Man Overboard’, featuring the memorable lines ‘Your pubic hairs on my pillow, your stubble rings the sink.’ Her shapely posterior was also famous, full-framed and proudly bare on big Bluegrass Jeans billboards nationwide, with the tagline ‘Get yours into Bluegrass’.
Do-Re-Mi functioned as a collective - a shaky construct in pop music at the best of times - and used language such as ‘ideologically unsound’ (the predecessor of ‘politically incorrect’) in their band meetings. Deborah, with her ...
Antarctica, destination of majesty, of mystery, of dreamlike otherworldliness; the air so clear you could see the future. Our nights rocked by the seas, our days filled with light, colour, wildlife, adventure.
And no internet! For 11 whole days the world could not intrude.
Thanks @Chimu & @Intrepid
Back in Australia with almost enough days to recover from jet lag before the next stop - Israel.
