The Festival Season 2008
08 March 2008
The new year in Melbourne starts with the Australian Open tennis and we went again this year, seeing a couple of centre-court matches, including an excellent game between Safin and Baghdatis. Pam Ann also toured here and we made up for missing her in LA a year ago by seeing her with friends this time.
This Summer Jay and I decided to get a bit more involved in some of the community activities that go on during this period. We volunteered for the local gay festival “Midsumma” and ended up helping with the carnival day. It was a long day during which we had a shift collecting donations and later helping set up for the Tea Dance.
Here I am soliciting donations from Barbara Quicksand and one of her backing dancers who were promoting the musical of “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” which is currently playing in Melbourne. We had been to see it before Christmas and I found it rather exhausting but certainly spectacular; like twenty dance-party shows one after another. The plot was inconsequential but the costumes were worth the price of admission. The weather at Carnival was a bit wet, but there was still a good crowd and we met up with a lot of friends at the Tea Dance.
We also helped with the Asia-Pacific Outgames which were in Melbourne at the start of February. This was a regional offshoot of the Outgames held in Montreal a year ago. We worked at the Melbourne Sports and Aquatic Centre helping direct the swimmers and waterpolo players to their events.
We had organized to visit Sydney for Mardi Gras well ahead of time. I mentioned it to one of the ophthalmologists I anaesthetize for and he said he was going in the parade this year. Another of our friends was also going in the same group, so we signed up as well. I had been in the parade twice before but it was a new experience for Jay. We were in the “Melbourne Mardi Gras Group”, a mixed male and female, gay and straight marching group who were adopting a military theme.
Danni Crowe who was organizing the group did so with military precision and we had rehearsals three times a week for four weeks. The rehearsals were at a primary school and as you can see there were no restrictions on membership by the ability to remember choreography or distinguish left from right:
Marshalling for the parade itself was a lot of fun. There were about 10,000 parade participants so we were queued up for hours before the parade actually started. Media were in the marshalling area and Jay and I were interviewed by the BBC and Japanese TV. The parade passed in a flash of cheering and photographs. There was a little footage of us on the news.com website:
We stayed at the main party long enough to see Olivia Newton-John perform Xanadu and danced with friends in the RHI: Jim, Rich, Turpin, Julian and James, Gabriel and Christian, Tats and Blake. The following day we went to Toybox which was even better fun and where we saw the friends we had missed at the main party.
At St Vincent’s we hosted the Australasian Symposium on Ultrasound in Regional Anaesthesia. It was a conference with a lot of hands-on ultrasound experience for attendees. I presented eleven workshops over three days which was tiring, but the conference as a whole was very well-received. It was also a pleasure to meet Andrew Gray from UCSF again whose presentations on ultrasound I had found confusing when I was working there but which now made a lot of sense after more experience with using ultrasound.
Before Mardi Gras, Rich came to stay with us in Melbourne for the weekend. He is considering moving to Sydney and was taking some time to look around Australia. I showed him some of the tourist highlights of Melbourne, including afternoon tea at Koko Black (which was quite a departure from the pre-parade diet for Jay and me).
Here we are explaining one-day cricket to him at the MCG. Fortunately the game was rained out around dinner-time so he only had to pay attention for a couple of hours.
Sadly and very unexpectedly, Saxon died suddenly on February 11, a few weeks short of his fourth birthday. This was very upsetting, especially for Mum who had been looking after him. He had been coughing sometimes after meals and had been extensively investigated without finding the cause.
He was a good dog and is missed very much. Mum and Dad decided that they wanted to get another dog sooner rather than later and they did not want to train a puppy. A few weeks later they brought home Zoe from a shelter. She is a seven-year-old Kelpie-German Shepherd cross. She is still quite anxious around strangers, but we hope her confidence will increase once she has been living with Mum and Dad for a while.
Coming up we have a break over Easter but we still haven’t planned what to do. We will need to make plans quickly, though.
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This Summer Jay and I decided to get a bit more involved in some of the community activities that go on during this period. We volunteered for the local gay festival “Midsumma” and ended up helping with the carnival day. It was a long day during which we had a shift collecting donations and later helping set up for the Tea Dance.
Here I am soliciting donations from Barbara Quicksand and one of her backing dancers who were promoting the musical of “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” which is currently playing in Melbourne. We had been to see it before Christmas and I found it rather exhausting but certainly spectacular; like twenty dance-party shows one after another. The plot was inconsequential but the costumes were worth the price of admission. The weather at Carnival was a bit wet, but there was still a good crowd and we met up with a lot of friends at the Tea Dance.
We also helped with the Asia-Pacific Outgames which were in Melbourne at the start of February. This was a regional offshoot of the Outgames held in Montreal a year ago. We worked at the Melbourne Sports and Aquatic Centre helping direct the swimmers and waterpolo players to their events.
We had organized to visit Sydney for Mardi Gras well ahead of time. I mentioned it to one of the ophthalmologists I anaesthetize for and he said he was going in the parade this year. Another of our friends was also going in the same group, so we signed up as well. I had been in the parade twice before but it was a new experience for Jay. We were in the “Melbourne Mardi Gras Group”, a mixed male and female, gay and straight marching group who were adopting a military theme.
Danni Crowe who was organizing the group did so with military precision and we had rehearsals three times a week for four weeks. The rehearsals were at a primary school and as you can see there were no restrictions on membership by the ability to remember choreography or distinguish left from right:
Marshalling for the parade itself was a lot of fun. There were about 10,000 parade participants so we were queued up for hours before the parade actually started. Media were in the marshalling area and Jay and I were interviewed by the BBC and Japanese TV. The parade passed in a flash of cheering and photographs. There was a little footage of us on the news.com website:
We stayed at the main party long enough to see Olivia Newton-John perform Xanadu and danced with friends in the RHI: Jim, Rich, Turpin, Julian and James, Gabriel and Christian, Tats and Blake. The following day we went to Toybox which was even better fun and where we saw the friends we had missed at the main party.
At St Vincent’s we hosted the Australasian Symposium on Ultrasound in Regional Anaesthesia. It was a conference with a lot of hands-on ultrasound experience for attendees. I presented eleven workshops over three days which was tiring, but the conference as a whole was very well-received. It was also a pleasure to meet Andrew Gray from UCSF again whose presentations on ultrasound I had found confusing when I was working there but which now made a lot of sense after more experience with using ultrasound.
Before Mardi Gras, Rich came to stay with us in Melbourne for the weekend. He is considering moving to Sydney and was taking some time to look around Australia. I showed him some of the tourist highlights of Melbourne, including afternoon tea at Koko Black (which was quite a departure from the pre-parade diet for Jay and me).
Here we are explaining one-day cricket to him at the MCG. Fortunately the game was rained out around dinner-time so he only had to pay attention for a couple of hours.
Sadly and very unexpectedly, Saxon died suddenly on February 11, a few weeks short of his fourth birthday. This was very upsetting, especially for Mum who had been looking after him. He had been coughing sometimes after meals and had been extensively investigated without finding the cause.
He was a good dog and is missed very much. Mum and Dad decided that they wanted to get another dog sooner rather than later and they did not want to train a puppy. A few weeks later they brought home Zoe from a shelter. She is a seven-year-old Kelpie-German Shepherd cross. She is still quite anxious around strangers, but we hope her confidence will increase once she has been living with Mum and Dad for a while.
Coming up we have a break over Easter but we still haven’t planned what to do. We will need to make plans quickly, though.
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