My phone rang one morning at work.
It was
Charlotte Dawson, because she had something to ask me, and because
I like name-dropping celebrities that I’ve co-written a book with. I’m really quirky like that. The book’s out in October. See how that works, with the name-dropping? Quirky.
Charlotte asked if I could make it to Alexandria in half an hour for a
madison shoot-slash-pow-wow, as the properly-famous other person that was going to do it had pulled out. She told me that I’d get my hair and make-up done and th...
“Sure!” I said, grabbing my handbag. A healthy addiction to having people fussing about my face and head with brushes and coloured bits of dust is just part of my whole endearing, quirky thing.
“You should know, though” I warned Charlotte, dropping my voice to a grave, conspiratorial whisper. “I am wearing a poncho”.
There was a silence at the other end of the phone.
“It’s... it’s like, a fashionable poncho” I added, and Charlotte gave me the address.
When I arrived at the studio, I said hello to Charlotte, met our
pow-wow maestro Jessica, sat down to have photographically-acceptable things daubed artfully onto my face, and then noticed
Mikey Robbins in the mirror.
I’d always wanted to meet Mikey, having been an avid
Triple J listener and
Good News Week watcher at the appropriate times, but now that he was just across the room, I got a bit shy. The only thing for it was obviously not to stand up and approach him by foot, but to wheel myself over backwards on my make-up stool. The stool didn’t quite have the reach and oomph that I was expecting, so it took me a minute or two to drag myself across the room.
That’s lesson one in classy ways to meet famous people you admire.
To cover any embarrassment or awkwardness, I loudly asked where the toilets were.
Now, I’m pretty sure this was never supposed to be a written missive praising (or in fact even mentioning) the toilets in a photographic studio, but that’s the thing about life – unexpected stuff happens.
Oh my god, the toilets.
As soon as I placed my relevant bits on the heated seat and perused the (wait for it) electronic bidet menu including buttons labelled ‘pulse’ and ‘massage’ (tell me that wasn’t worth the wait) and ‘enema’ (okay, maybe not that bit), I knew it was the most magical toilet experience I’d ever had. I took a couple of photos (below) and raced back into the studio.
I sprinted up to the first person I saw, showed them the photos I’d taken, and announced breathlessly “Look at this! It’s got every possible toiletary luxury you could imagine! Plus enemas!”.
Charlotte was making a weird face at me.
I was showing Shane Jacobsen a photograph of a toilet.
Kenny. I was showing the guy who brought to life
Kenny, the world’s foremost authority on toilets, a photograph of a toilet.
Mikey Robbins decided that this might be the ideal time to see if there was any wine.
The topic of our discussion was ‘The lessons we’ve learned from love’, and the words poured easily and plentifully out of us as the wine poured easily and plentifully into us. We told what we had learned from our own experiences. We learned from each others’ experiences.
We laughed, we nodded, we sympathised, we empathised, we pretended we knew the difference between sympathy and empathy, and we all left feeling wiser, closer, and just a little bit drunker.
Of course, the main lesson we all learned that day was simple: I am really, really terrible at meeting famous people.
Written by Jo Thornely. For the final product of their wine induced discussion, check out the 'madison ave: What lessons have you learned from love?' article on page 58 of our August issue.