http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/lifematters/elly-varrenti3a-fall/5641956
http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2006/05/bdn_20060520.mp3
An audio piece I did for the late, the marvellous and much-missed ALAN SAUNDERS in 2006 for ‘By Design’, ABC radio – it starts at approx. 15mins into the podcast.
Forthcoming Creative Non Fiction writing workshop in Castlemaine
HERE’S TO MY 4TH IDENTITY CRISIS
After an excruciatingly protracted death rattle, our 25-year-old-high-quality-professionally-monitored-vocationally-orientated-TAFE course has been closed down and all of its casuals and us permanent staff have lost our jobs.
So now it’s official: I am redundant and have accepted a moderate retrenchment package that should last my son and me about nine months if we are more mindful than usual. That’ll be one latte a day, not three. And no more pub dinners, except on Tightarse Tuesdays.
Before the Government pulled $300m from the TAFE system, those with a dream in their heart and a few bucks and a healthcare card in their pocket could do our Professional Writing course; now the fees have gone nuts. Staff morale is at an all time, all round low and there are more cuts than at your local butcher’s and more farewell brunches than you can throw a vol-au-vent at.
Before our TAFEs had the gizzards ripped out of them, a 40-year-old wanting to return to the workforce or to change jobs and who needed to up-skill or brush-up could. Now if this some person has already acquired a qualification higher than a Certificate 4 in anything from floristry to theosophy, she’ll be up for a few grand. Before the cuts, our TAFEs were a uniquely open door option for young people for whom university was neither a financial or educational fit.
People are losing their jobs all over the place. It’s in the news all the time; it’s the talk around the water-cooler and the talk back on your radio. If I hear the words ‘cuts’, ‘losses’, ‘casualised’ ‘bottom’ or ‘line’ in the same sentence once more time…
Compared to some, I’m lucky. Compared to some, I’ve a broad skill base, a strong professional network and a more than passing acquaintance with the vicissitudes of surviving as a freelancer. Compared to some who are also facing the reality of redundancy this year, I have only one child to support and a comparatively modest mortgage since moving to the country four years ago. I am over 50, that’s not so lucky. We are more expensive over 50, apparently. We are less energetic, flexible and switched on apparently.
Yep, it feels bloody awful being told your services are no longer required and it’s at times like this that one’s identity is in danger of taking a battering big time.
So that’ll be my fourth identity crisis and career change in 20-something years then. Career. That word still manages to suggest a planned and cumulative upward trajectory, doesn’t it?
It’s risky tying up too much of your self-worth, your sense of meaning or purpose to a job, or to anything or anyone for that matter. Given my job was part-time I’ve managed to cultivate other professional and personal relationships and identities outside the work place. But I already miss the structure, the colleagues, the students and the regular income. I already feel my former sense of self being discarded like a letter full of bad news.
Getting back out there and looking for a new job is as scary as dating again. No. Nothing is that scary.
The TAFE where I used to work sent me a letter form its PR department this week thanking me for my years of service, suggesting a career transition counselor, asking for my lap top and keys to be returned and mentioning something about good luck for my future.
And I got a nice paragraph in the Institute’s newsletter and a farewell envelope… for all of us redundancies in the Creative Arts Department, yesterday’s gold watch is today’s art gallery gift shop voucher. 
*Elly Varrenti is a writer, teacher, broadcaster and theatre critic teacher. Her memoir, This is Not my Beautiful Life is published by Penguin.
http://www.mamamia.com.au/social/running-away-from-home-as-an-adult/#ejWdPgeSgrzsFQ9m.97
http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/hormone-hothouse-20140505-37r6a.html
Photo: Mark Chew (2014)
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/lifematters/elly-varrenti2c-retrenchment/5299618
http://www.dailylife.com.au/life-and-love/real-life/when-christmas-is-unbearably-sad-20131219-2zmkg.html
Now Let Me Tell You A Story
Unlike ‘real relationships’, ‘virtual relationships’ are easy to enter and to exit. They look smart and clean, feel easy to use, when compared with the heavy, slow-moving, messy real stuff. (Zygmunt Bauman)
Like some kind of 21st century relationship junket, you took me on a speed tour of the sights. You penetrated me virtual style, got under my skin from a distance, made love to me heart and soul and had me buying a ticket for two to the future. And I loved it.
Sure I was shit scared but we fell together into the abyss – more a madness of mutual transference, but when that magic is coursing through your body who wants psychoanalysis short circuiting the pleasure.
But when my parachute finally opened and I fell to earth, it was one tough landing.
We had only known each another a matter of weeks. We only met twice, had barely kissed let alone shared a bed. Yet, you had touched me, fingered my future and caressed my loneliness. Yet, for a brief moment we had known one other.
You said such things to me. Pitch perfect you were. How does he know that? Is this the man for me? Is he someone with whom I might share a home, our children, a cultural shorthand, some serious sex and intimacy. Someone whose neuroses I actually comprehend?
It was my dumb, relentless hope got me into strife again. I listened to your stories, your perfectly erotic, intellectually quixotic bedtime stories and was rendered putty. I worried I was setting myself up for another little loss, another go at grief but I went there anyhow. Face the fear and do it anyway. Right?
You took me in for a sliver of time and it felt fucking fantastic.
When we first met we kissed a bit. Both shy. All that talking, texting and emailing, and now here we were for real, sitting together on a couch in a bar.
I must tell him I lied about my age before it goes any further.
That second time we met you brought me flowers and took my hand when we got outside. And as we walked along those familiar inner-city streets I could feel you slipping away. You didn’t let go of my hand but I knew you were already leaving me. My mouth went dry and I’d wanted to spit.
Then when we sat opposite each other in that Vietnamese café, unopened menus on the little Laminex table between us, I looked at you and saw it happen. Just like that. I saw you shift – your eyes empty of their connection with me, with the possibility of us. You were like an actor dropping out of character.
‘I can’t do this’, you said. ‘Sorry. I just can’t do this.’
No! Please don’t give up so soon, I wanted to say. But instead I got up, kissed you on the cheek and ran outside. I ran fast and lost, back through those same streets that now appeared so strange to me.
Yes it felt like we had known each other all of our lives didn’t it. But we hadn’t. It’s just that those 3 weeks had held within them the total of both of our lives and it was just too painful, too full-to-the-brim in the both of them.
You ran. I ran. Away.
Click on above link, then go to AURAL TEXT (Wed 27 Nov) and my reading is at about 7mins into the show.
http://www.mamamia.com.au/parenting/help-son/
http://www.mamamia.com.au/social/dealing-with-being-lonely/
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/lifematters/loneliness/4915170
‘Learning to Share THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE UGLY’
This week a piece of mine was published in the above mag under the above title. You can now read it here. There’s plenty of advice, stories and theories, for those of you who are divorced, who want one, or are bloody rapt you don’t need one. My piece is meant to be FOR share parenting and a chap-writer-single-parent called Jesse Fink is meant to be AGAINST. I know, I know…nothing is ever as easy as for or against when relationships are breaking up.
When I signed up for marriage and parenthood there was nothing in the contract about share parenting let alone another maternal-figure in the mix when my ex remarried a year after we separated.
50:50 shared parenting is on the increase and if the so-called traditional nuclear family is not a goer then shared parenting can be. So forget the picket fence and embrace the swinging gate.
My ex left when our son was 5 months old and from the outset wanted equal, or near-equal time with his son. So by the time our child was 8-months old he was already spending 2 days a week at his father’s place. I had post-natal depression and somehow recognized amidst the fog, that my ex was as good, if not a better parent than I was back then. I grew up only seeing my father every second weekend; I didn’t want that for my son.
After the initial shock subsided I was consumed with fury – Where is my child and who is that other woman living my life?
Eventually things started to get better. Eventually on the days I had to say goodbye to my child, I no longer cried. Eventually our share parenting became a routine and our son appeared to be doing well.
Ten years later our family still negotiates two homes and two languages – his father is German and my son bi-lingual. There are clashes. They have always thought I dress our son like something out of Diary of a Wimpy Kid whereas I reckon they’d like him to audition for Benetton if they had the chance.
When he was seven he came home from his dad’s sporting a buzz cut. I like his hair longish and wooly, his father likes it clean and neat. I said nothing. Better to save it for the big stuff. Recently, he’s nearly 11 now; he came back and announced he was going to live in Germany when he was older because education is awesome over there!
It’s confronting when something goes down during your ex’s ‘time’ to which you have been neither consulted nor privy. His father is stricter then I am, so I’ve been seen as too easy or my boundaries toot inconsistent. But then I am my own and there have always been two of them to share the parenting their end as well.
Our son has two homes, not one home and another place to crash. But some days the guilt of having a ‘failed marriage’ and, by extension, of having ‘failed’ our son, nearly kills me. Other days I am grateful I have the child I always wanted and an ex who wants him just as much. It’s better for our son to see his parents living contentedly apart than miserably together.
Time with my son is my ‘time to shine’, even if it might include mind-numbing arguments about computer time and waking up next to a small person who sleeps sideways. Also, I get to give him a Feminist brainwash. I taught him how to spell misogynist the other day and to put it into a sentence. Really.
Today when my son goes off to his father’s I no longer wait in a state of suspended-grief until his return but focus on work, friends, dating (argh!), half-marathons or just staring idly out the window. I get to invite people over to a tidy house or to have a bloke sleepover.
I have not re-partnered, although my son suggests I find a man with kids his age. There have been boyfriends, just no one I’ve felt sufficiently sure about to include in my son’s life lock, stock and barrel.
Yes our son has had to witness some adversity and tension. But I no longer worry that this will irretrievably fracture his sense of self but that it may teach him resilience, adaptability and open-mindedness.
His stepmother believes in God and I don’t. I believe in therapy and they don’t. But we all believe in our 11-year-old. Ours is not a ‘broken family’, just one trying to do the best it can. My ex and I have nothing in common these days other than a mutual interest in our son. That’s enough. It has to be. It is.
Bring your family down to Treasury Gardens , Melbourne, at 12.30 Sat 25 May to send a strong message of community support for Gonski. There will be plenty of activities for the kids – jumping castles, face-painting, balloons, and more, as well as food, music and a few speakers including Daniel Andrews, Meredith Peace and Andy Griffiths! And I am MC on the day.
Andy Griffiths Gives A Gonski!
This community rally is a great opportunity to show the Premier just how much support for Gonski there is in the Victorian community.
Gonski would deliver an additional $4 billion to Victorian schools, and these extra funds would go where they are needed most. This could mean smaller class sizes, more literacy and numeracy teachers, and most importantly, greater individual attention for students.
You can find out more about Gonski at www.igiveagonski.com.au
Please help spread the word to friends, colleagues and family about this important community event.
BARASSI THE STAGE SHOW until 5 May at the Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre, Melbourne.
I am one of those people who has never been into football but who has occasionally been impressed and surprised by those of my friends and colleagues who are. Impressed because the commitment they exhibit is awesome. Surprised because I get to have my snobby prejudices well and truly challenged.
I once dated a nice bloke for a full month before a blathering Collingwood fan and friend of mine pointed out my date was a former well-known VFL player.
But then terrific writers like Martin Flanagan and Gregory Day do manage to unearth the poetry and power of Aussi Rules so that even dire-hard anti-sport-tragics like myself may be moved.
Barassi The Stage Show by Tee O’Neill is less an exploration or investigation into the sport itself but rather an uncritical celebration of ‘Australian football legend’ and ‘Icon’ Ron Barassi.
In its return season – it did pretty well last year- Steve Bastoni as Barassi-the-elder has been replaced by Chris Connelly, and Jane Clifton replaced as the play’s (loud) mouthpiece/ narrator, Melba, by Odette Joannidis. Initially neither of these new cast members appears all that comfortable in their roles. Although Connelly, a fine actor but essentially miscast, does a great job finally of pitching the Barassi killer-instinct against the man who has never quite reconciled the early loss of his father to the killing fields of Tobruk. Joannidis, too, as the personification of the game’s ancient tribal loyalty eventually relaxes into the role having got off to a shaky start.
Barassi is a review-style mix of the cartoon and the corny and is at its best when the fast-paced bluster and backslapping are relieved with moments of delicious slow-mo-footy-style-choreography, the occasional barbershop crooning and the infectious energy and simpatico of Chris Asimos as the young Barassi and Matt Parkinson’s well-paced and credible rendition of Barassi’s surrogate father and coach Norm Smith.
It’s tough to write about someone who is still around – particularly someone as media savvy and switched on as Barassi – and O’Neill and co are nothing if not reverential of the great player, big personality, coach and failed furniture salesman.
Overall O’Neill does a solid job of this straight-up and engaging bio-show and the cast and direction all serve to keep the ball in the air for the most part.
This show is not my cup of tea. But who cares? The opening night audience appeared to enjoy it enormously.
My latest column per ABC RADIO
Health Retreat (Text below)
Health Retreat
The best thing about spending 7 days at a health retreat in a sub-tropical rainforest with 25 strangers is that I learnt how to Salsa. I was rubbish, but I loved it.
The worst thing about living in a hermetically sealed wellness universe for a week with 25 strangers is that some of what this universe accepts as given truths are not always so universal.
Not all of us believe in guardian angels or alternative therapies lock, stock and barrel. Not all of us buy the Positive Psychology model as the superior path to happiness and self-fulfillment. Not all of us consider wearing a name tag day in day out normal.
But then what’s normal about chunking-up my mortgage to pay for a week’s holiday (first in 10 years) to some place where I wake up at sunrise for Tai Chi? What’s so great about sustaining a 2-day caffeine-withdrawal headache and enduring the daily torture of something called a spin class? Why chose to be on intimate terms with mosquitos that think they’re fighter-bombers?
Before I paid for this health retreat that promised to coach me into submission with a personalized ‘wellness vision’, have me living outside my comfort zone and without virgin olive oil, I figured out that my repayments were about the equivalent of 3 lattes and 2 sav blancs a week.
I can do that. Not a biggie when I put it like that. I deserve a break. My stress levels are off the radar. I’m self-medicating with booze and carbs like a wharfie on a busman’s holiday. My family and work commitments are overwhelming and my love life is … well…complicated.
On arrival at our health retreat we all stand about self-consciously, summing up the other in a glance. She’s looks like a pain. He’s a fitness freak bozo. Those two in charge are just too perky-positive to be real.
I am wondering if it’s too late to ask for my money back. This place looks like an upmarket school camp but without any of the sugar highs or sexual experimentation to look forward to.
As the day progresses my initial defensiveness dissolves into surrender, although I do maintain a pretty active bullshit-metre throughout the stay. Initially I leaven it with humor and self-deprecation and then gradually give up the performing for the more serious stuff like learning how to breathe. Apparently I haven’t been breathing properly for 50 years.
Sometimes the daily discussions and workshops about exercise, diet and the latest in neuroscience and mindfulness training really get to me.
First-world worries! I wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t had a special price on offer. Everyone from the psychic flower reader to the life coach with a PhD in chutzpah thinks he’s a shrink. This is a kibbutz but with less concern for the community good and way better bathrooms. A massive share-house for rich people with nothing better to do than talk about gluten intolerance and strengthening their cores.
Other times, like when I’m striding and sweating up and down mountain-sides, the local fauna scuttling up the forest trees, the air clean, damp and smelling of frangipani, and all the while chatting intensely with a couple of my new best friends about everything from kids to kayaks, I feel the best I have in ages.
As we talk and walk, every day a barrier down, a revelation shared, I am blown away by these women. By day 2 we are laughing and crying like adolescent girls on a night out.
We are 20 women and 5 men; the usual gender ratio at this place apparently. There is a husband and wife team too and I just can’t imagine coming to such a place as a couple. I don’t know why exactly but it just seems to defeat the purpose or something. The men are blokey-jokey and we are most of us probably over 40 and at one of life’s crossroads.
I don’t avoid the blokes but the subtle peculiarity of group dynamics means that I end up spending most of my time with 4 women, in particular.
I am alone in my real life quite a bit but there’s always a distraction at hand. Here in this technology-free-capsule I am alone in my room by 7.30pm and it’s just me and my little fast-detoxing brain. I am not used to this kind of silence and it’s confronting. My leg muscles are burning. I can hear my heart beat.
Is it possible to make substantial changes to the way I am living my life after only a week here? They say it takes 21 days to change a habit. But there’s no denying the power of hanging out with a bunch of people who are all trying to be better, let alone absorbing the palpable goodwill and positive vibes.
By day 4, I have done 16 hours exercise, had 2 massages, 1 facial and participated in over 10 workshops about love and intimacy to navigating the hormone highway. The one about stress, cancer and heart disease scares the bejeezas out of me.
But it’s the dance classes where I really let myself go and forget to be embarrassed. I haven’t danced in years and it feels fantastic!
The chef is a fat-free, sugar-free genius and living without alcohol, coffee and chronic negativity is a welcome change to my usual routine back home.
A member of staff here is one of the funniest and inspiring people I have ever met. Another is more inappropriately flirtatious than my car mechanic.
Some people snuck food in. One burly fella had a secret stow of protein shakes. Another, the token husband, becomes the skinny, hungry guy I give my desert and mid-afternoon snack to. One woman confesses she’d panicked and secreted an empty tuna can in her room-safe after a late night binge.
I never thought I’d like yoga. I always reckoned meditation was for other people. I’d never really savored food without oil, tea without caffeine, and sharing 3 meals a day with people I had little in common with. I never thought I’d keep a straight face in a steam room full of naked people.
It was my sister’s birthday while I was away – it’s over 2 years now – and the retreat’s head gardener suggests we plant a frangipani for her on the day. He tells me he’ll look after it and send me a photo when it flowers after giving me a quick hug and leaving me with my plant. They’d be red flowers, he tells me.
I wonder what my sister would have made of this place.
“Jesus El! You would have been better off giving your money to asylum seekers or something! But if it makes you feel better and, you know, more able to cope with me being gone now and everything…. Oh, and by the way, I saw you doing The Salsa. Don’t give up ya day job, will ya?”
By day 6 most of us have become sufficiently institutionalized to be apprehensive about re-entering our former lives. I want to take home the funny and inspiring staff member to keep me on the right track and off the beaten one.
What’s not to like about a week of company, community and conversation? What’s not to feel grateful for after a week of pampering, positivity and papaya fruit?
Back home now and my real-world first-world problems are all still here. There’s been an initial exchange of mutually encouraging txts with my new best friends –
How you handling it? Have re-toxed already. You go girl!
But they have stopped now.
And it feels a bit weird and lonely all of a sudden. It’s like the end of an affair you both knew had no future but was gorgeous while it lasted.