"But I Digress ..." (4 page)

Darker side of Christmas lurks in every living room

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 27 DECEMBER 1998

C
HRISTMAS IS THE
great leveller. Perhaps if I had risen from a Muslim tradition I would be writing: “Eid is the great leveller”; but such are the vagaries of birth and life.

It is easy to be flippant about Christmas, to make sly references to Boney M and that new terror from the north, Helmut Lotti, to dwell on the Coca-Cola origins of Santa Claus and his red-and-white suit, but ultimately Christmas, with its memories and hopes and its excessive consumption of cheap sparkling wine from glasses bought at Clicks, comes down to one thing: fear. Christmas is the great celebration of deep, unshakeable, inescapably personalised fear.

Whether it be fear of the past or fear of not being able to recreate the past, our frenzies of eating, buying, drinking, remembering, forgetting are driven by the ghastly apprehension that we are alone, that childhood has gone, that that fugitive sip of champagne at the lunch table between the first cracker and the first roast potato will never again taste as good as when we were not allowed to take it.

I have in my possession a small plastic compass that came tumbling from a Christmas cracker when I was a chubby lad of nine, testing my strength against my sad-eyed Aunty Lynn, who wore too much make-up, even for the 1970s, and always smelt inexplicably of Old Spice. The needle of the compass was wobbly, but always pointed north, no matter which way I twisted it. Even at the bottom of the next-door neighbours' swimming pool, with a large magnet and, for some reason, a brick, that needle never moved away from the big N.

“At least you'll never be lost,” lied Aunty Lynn. “And you'll always be able to find your way home.”

It was an obvious lie – a lie that became increasingly more obvious as I grew older – but at least it was a comforting one. I will take one comforting untruth over a thousand desolate honesties. That is what I appreciated about Aunty Lynn – for all her unsettling personal characteristics and easily imagined personal unhappiness, she was a comforting figure. Isabel Jones is like that too.

Aunty Isabel is a true South African hero – the local equivalent of the men of 911, or a similar service in a fantasy world where free, speedy, efficient assistance is but a phone call away. Whenever I shut my eyes and think about the nativity – an increasingly less frequent occurrence – the three wise men always have the faces of Desmond Tutu, Willem Heath and Isabel Jones.

Isabel was doing her bit for the festive season this week on
Fair Deal
(SABC3, Mondays, 6.15pm). Her target, for a change, wasn't a swindler, charlatan or mail-order shyster but mince pies, traditionally a subject of some indifference in the Hot Medium household.

Mince pies, I have always felt, are the unwelcome relatives at the Christmas table. While not exactly prone to getting drunk, feeling up the host's wife and telling loud stories about the good old days in Rhodesia, they still don't really fit in, do they? Offering neither the comfort of a solid meat-'n-potatoes scoff, nor the hot, silently screaming fuzziness of a healthy tot of Yuletide spirit, they seem to lurk without fixed intent, undesired, a strange remnant of someone else's idea of Christmas.

“Ooh, I couldn't possibly, I've had so much already” – those are the words most familiar to the veteran mince pie who's seen a Christmas or two in its time.

Undaunted, Isabel rounded up a trio of what she called “celebrities” to blind-taste a selection of retail pies. Mark Gillman was one, and a pair of actors from
Isidingo
(SABC3, weekdays, 6.30pm) were the others. That should tell you something about how many celebrities hang around in Johannesburg over the Christmas season.

They boldly tucked into their samples. “The pastry's crumbly,” complained the first
Isidingo
gourmet.

“The pastry's supposed to be crumbly,” murmured Isabel diplomatically.

“I've never tasted a mince pie before,” mentioned the second connoisseur. Isabel smiled bravely.

Gillman, meanwhile, was fumbling for some wackiness. His entire radio career is built upon the twin pillars of being wacky and shouting into the microphone. On television you are not allowed to shout into the microphone. “This mince pie tastes like … tastes like … this!” he mugged, grabbing something from the table in front of him. Unfortunately the camera failed to follow his hand, so we will never know what he grabbed. I suspect, however, it was another mince pie. How Isabel must have wished she was still dealing with swindlers, charlatans and mail-order shysters.

On Christmas Eve I shunned SABC's various treasure troves of festive tunes (if it's not sung by Sacha Distel, I just ain't interested), and turned instead to the baubly wonders of satellite. Sadly, there was no Christmas Channel – which makes me wonder exactly how the Osmonds make a living these days – but I happily settled down to
The Wizard of Oz
(TNT Classic Movies, 11pm).

I have always considered
The Wizard
to be a far more appropriate Christmas film than those other staples,
The Sound of Music
(in which Julie Andrews tries to sing the Nazis into submission) and
It's A Wonderful Life
(in which Jimmy Stewart demonstrates the socially productive aspects of attempted suicide).

It is an unsettling film. Things stir beneath the surface of the story – fearful things, only half-apprehended by children, and the more powerful for that. With its witches and flying monkeys and unreasonably cheerful midgets, there is a dark shadow rimming the candy colours and heel-kicking tunes of Oz. It is, I think, the shadow of adulthood, of the farm back in Kansas with its mortgage and its freak tornadoes and failed crops.

Watching the young Judy Garland, pumped to the pigtails with diet pills and amphetamines, turning her face to the skies and to the future, yearning to be somewhere over the rainbow, I couldn't stop myself whispering: “Stay right where you are, babe.”

A night with Monica Lewinsky

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 14 MARCH 1999

W
HEN I WAS
11
, as cute as a grazed elbow in short pants and haversack, dreaming of growing up to be an ichthyologist or Joe Hardy or, in my more solitary moments, that woman from the Morkels advert, I conceived a fascination for a girl in my class. In fact, we all did, after it became known that Shirley Whiteside had gone all the way with Craig Barnsley, an oafish youth in Standard 5 who, with an unrelated passion, used to waylay me on the way home and make me eat grasshoppers.

I had only a fuzzy grasp of what going all the way might entail. Surely Shirley didn't actually swallow the grasshoppers? (I used to stow their chewed-up corpses under my tongue, grinning and mumbling with a studious nonchalance, then covertly spit them out once Barnsley had released the downward pressure on the back of my head. It is a technique that even today serves me well in editorial conferences.)

Still, Shirley was pretty hot stuff among the boys of Mrs Kincaid's form class – we speculated endlessly about the events of that hot Durban afternoon beneath the frangipani tree while Mr and Mrs Whiteside were at work. Steven Kenton thought it had happened in the shady ditch behind the woodwork room, but no one ever listened to Steven Kenton.

Shirley was the focus of a small-boy curiosity of almost unbearable intensity. I would lie awake at night in a restless fever – in the morning the sweat stains on the pillow (if you tilted your head and squinched up your eyes) described the silhouette of Shirley Whiteside. When she played those mysterious games on the playground with the other girls, involving a length of elastic and plenty of squeals, her calves flexed unfathomably and her ponytail shimmied and trembled with the impenetrable secrets of adulthood.

Happily, I never learnt what went on at the bottom of the Whitesides' garden. As a result, my imagination prospered, and the sticky, tawdry disappointments of grown-ups had to wait until I was, well, grown up. And a good thing too – adolescence would have been positively unbearable without the comforting throb of itchy-fingered anticipation.

All of which may do little to explain why I felt so unshakeably empty and depressed while watching Jon Snow interview Monica Lewinsky last Sunday (
Carte Blanche
, M-Net, 7pm). “You have the right to see it all” is
Carte Blanche
's oft-repeated motto, a sentiment with which I am in hearty disagreement.

Frankly, the world would be a great deal more attractive with a few more veils and secrets and frilly petticoats, several degrees more appealing if it maintained hidden areas of tangled undergrowth and deep shade, dark places where daylight never reaches.

The Lewinsky affair, of course, was never the stuff that dreams or fantasies are made of. It was a tatty little episode, as dull and workaday as a suburban husband flirting with his neighbour's wife over the Sunday afternoon braai, as routinely tiresome as an attractive woman being interviewed by Tony Sanderson. It would be dreary enough to watch it unfold in real life; to watch it on television was to feel one's own life shrink to the stature of a dripping garden tap.

There was a listless diversion in spotting how many sexual double entendres Snow could weasel into the interview (“What did you hope would flow from the relationship?”), but the pleasure soon congealed.

There was a brief interest in determining which of the two better carried their weight. Monica, though looking as slinky as a bag of charcoal briquettes tied in the middle, edged a narrow victory by virtue of her tactically sound legs-crossed position, which broke up her outline; Snowie just slouched in his chair with his belly thundering upwards like the dome on Capitol Hill.

There was even the perverse entertainment of watching Derek Watts acting like some husky-voiced shill for a Mills and Boon serial at each ad break: “He needed lovin', she was ready to oblige,” Derek twinkled throatily. “After the break we pick up the story!”

But these were temporary pleasures. Ultimately nothing could disguise the fact that we were watching a perfectly ordinary young woman describing a depressingly ordinary encounter with her boss. “Did you feel a sexual connection?” demanded Snow delicately.

“Yes,” she said patiently.

“Did it make you tingle?” said Snow, drawing on a lifetime's experience of cheap soap operas.

“Tee-hee,” said Monica Lewinsky.

Snow's high-school debating-club gravitas rapidly became comical. “The sex was very one-way, if I may put it in a male sense,” he murmured, smoothing his tie. Monica frowned, as though displeased at the thought of him putting it at all.

“He was a quarter of a century older than you,” persisted Snowie gravely, for all the world as though discussing a matter of international importance.

“Oh, but age is just a number representing how long you have been on the planet,” said Monica confidently. There was no arguing with that.

She was likeable enough, was Monica, and bright in a general sort of way. She was the girl you see in orientation week at university – keen, well groomed, eager to be liked, drinking too much peach schnapps and giggling while she puts her hands in some postgraduate's trouser pockets. Her ordinariness was too stark; it made our voyeurism too suburban. If we're going to feel cheap, let us at least be entertained. Let's have some sensation in our sensationalism.

Everybody loves Oscar

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 28 MARCH 1999

I
F AN OSCAR
ceremony was held in a forest, and there was no one around to see it, would Tom Hanks' wife really exist? There are many arguments for holding Oscar ceremonies in forests – it would teach those wattle-and-daub Knysna hippies a damn good lesson, for one thing – but the prospect of Tom's foolery evaporating in a puff and a sniffle is perhaps the most appealing.

Hanks himself hogged a good deal of camera time during
Oscars 99
(M-Net, Monday, 8pm). There he lurked like a sinister scoutmaster in the second row, dewy-eyed and dimpling and practising the secret cub-scout handshake on himself. In a misguided effort to butch up, he has grown a scrappy new beard, which doesn't so much create the effect of a rugged leading man as much as it does a hairy eraser at the end of a pencil.

The Oscars play an important role in our collective sense of well-being. Far more revealing than
paparazzi
snapshots of Kate Winslet without her make-up or John Travolta without his cigarette, they offer a fleeting glimpse of what stars are like when they write their own scripts. Always remember Hot Medium's first law of social success: under no circumstances appear in public without a script. Spontaneity requires practice, and original thought is like original sin – it only ever happened once, a long time ago, to someone who wasn't you.

Whoopi Goldberg, sad to say, did have a script, yet still contrived to throw me into the torments of embarrassment with which I suffer through bad speakers. For some reason she chose to punctuate every sentence with the word “honey!” (“Wooo, honey, this is going to be a long night!”), as though she were a bad drag act opening for Billy Ray Cyrus in a honky-tonk bar.

Besides impersonal terms of endearment, there are two crimes unforgivable in a public speaker – one is repeatedly laughing at your own smutty jokes, and the other is noticing that no one else is laughing and demanding, like Whoopi: “Are you having a good time? Are you? Yeah!” All right!”

Much like those other dreaded interrogations, “Do you remember what you did at the party last night?” and “Are you sure you love me?”, “Are you having a good time?” is a question only ever asked when the answer is bound to be roundly in the negative.

Blessed relief from Whoopi-Cushion Goldberg was the delightful dance number, which demonstrated that choreographer Debbie Allen has lost none of the talent or taste that made
Fame
such a must-see programme in at least four households around the world in the mid-1980s. Let those who mock the artistic value of the Oscars watch a long-haired, bare-chested Spaniard tap-dance the theme song to
Saving Private Ryan
, and blush. When the dancer flexed his pectoral muscles in a moving tribute to the fallen soldiers, I could scarcely contain my bravos.

But the magic of the Oscars lies in the winners' speeches. My immediate delight that Tom Yanks didn't win the best actor award was tempered by the realisation that Roberto Benigni had. Some may consider the chair-climbing antics of the excitable little continental chap charming, but I felt they lowered the class and tone that Debbie Allen's dancers had tried so hard to establish. “I am surging with the love,” gurgled the little loon, once he'd made it up to the stage. “I am wanting to hug and kiss you all and put my tongue in your ears.” Perhaps Hanks had slipped something into his
chianti
.

Steven Spielberg gave me pause for thought with his acceptance speech for best director. “I want to thank all the families who lost sons in the Second World War,” he declared. I wonder: what would be the correct response if you were one of the families being thus thanked? “It's a pleasure” seems insincere. “Not at all, any time” likewise. Perhaps “Don't mention it” might be closest to the mark.

Anyway, it all paled next to Gwyneth Poltroon's speech. Even Whoopi paled next to that speech. As poised and gracious as a block of processed cheese, as concise and pleasing as a song by Celine Dion, it had me regretting that Benigni couldn't have won best actress too. It was fun counting how many different people in her speech she loved “more than anything in the world”, but it did become a little morbid when she thanked her cousin Keith, who'd been dead these past years. “I miss you, Keith,” she declared into the cameras, which raised the inevitable questions about whether the dearly departed watch the Oscars, and if so, whether M-Net or SABC3's coverage is favoured in the afterlife. I am inclined towards M-Net – it may be more long-winded than the SABC's edited highlights, but you've got to pass the time in eternity somehow.