Friday 22 May 2015

Back up singer for Tammy Why Not on the subject of Sex and Ageing at the Wellcome Collection

How did that happen? I was meeting some ladies from Florida to give them a tour of the Bloomsbury area some time ago. I showed them the usual haunts....Charles Dickens House, Coram Fields, Russell Square, and then I suggested that we go to the Wellcome Collection to view the current exhibition....The Institute of Sexology. It had been on my agenda for months. There was a pause and then a...No....they would rather go to Camden Town and do some thrift shopping, check out the market, and see the longboats on the canal. So, I left them to the dress stalls and telephone box key chains and headed back to the exhibition for some me time.

There, I joined a group of women including Tammy Why Not, to hear an informative commentary on the bound feet of Chinese women, a photo essay on persecuted lesbians in South Africa who risked their lives to have their portraits taken, the burning of a German lab devoted to the study of sex, and a photo essay about people in the US who had made their own sexual devices in basement workshops. Suddenly, we were in the green room discussing this topic....and today, a few members of that group joined Tammy Why Not (performance artist Lois Weaver) as back up singers and performers in her show....What Tammy Wants to Know about Sex and Ageing at The Wellcome Collection.  This show has toured worldwide since 2012 in a variety of venues.

Through this, I have met a very talented group of ladies who I will mention later.

I contributed with a monologue about one of many bad internet dates I had been on. I did this in the voice and style of Double Door Norma....the Tennessee Barfly.

My Husband.....my third husband...I killed him. I didn't mean to kill him. But he gave me a water pistol for my birthday. By the time I got up to his hip, I realised it were a real gun. And so....I have turned to the internet to find my men these days.

One particular man I will call Harry as I forget his name, but he seemed like a Harry.....he sticks in my mind as one of the worst dates I have ever been on in my life....so bad that it was good.

I knew that I would only be meeting this man one time, so I decided to meet him on his own turf as I had never been to Haslemere. I knew it was near the Devil's Punchbowl. I reckon that man has the formula for the that punch. It's probably his own recipe.

It was quite an effort to get there. I rode my bike, then took a train. When I arrived, I  saw a hand waving from a car window that was half rolled down. Would it not be more polite to step out of the vehicle and come forward to shake my hand?

He was intent on taking me to a pub that served a fine confit duck he was told. In retrospect, it is better to start out with chicken wings from KFC and work your way up.

The bartender put a few logs in the fire. The logs were not burning, trouble catching light. I suggested kindling. No...Harry the log expert said that this was birch and birch always had a hard time burning. I said that I did not think it was birch as birch has a thin white bark.....Oh....? No Harry the log expert says that it is birch. It's birch . It's not birch. It went like that. Needless to say, nothing was going to be catching fire that day.

tbc