Hollywood A-listers on the invite list for tennis slam

Hollywood A-listers among the big hitting tennis fans but capacity limits put a dampener on wannabe starlets.

Natalie Portman is among the A-listers on tennis invite lists. Picture: AFP

HOLLYWOOD A-listers Down Under, think Matt Damon, Natalie Portman, and Zac Efron, are obvious big hitters when it comes to invites to the Australian Open when it finally lobs.

But getting around locations amid ever changing COVID restrictions is still a line call.

Kylie Minogue, who is in Melbourne after completing hotel quarantine, at least has an open invitation.

Wannabe influencers hoping to score a Rod Laver Arena freebie might find it harder than they think this year with the capacity limits.

Kylie Minogue made a surprise appearance at the Sound Better concert in Mallacoota. Picture: Mushroom Group

An on-court VIP seat will put back punters a whopping $15,000 odd. Make that around $27,500 if they want to get to the finals.

Frontline workers, however, will appear in on-court Piper-Heidsieck seats during a couple of sessions. The Official Champagne of the Open is hitting off with a Better Together campaign after our horror-show year, with the bubbles popping for the people who count.

Don’t worry, there will be a WAG or fashionista of note, maybe Pip Edwards and Michael Clarke, milling around the Piper-Heidsieck Champagne Bar on the Terrace outside Rod Laver Arena.

In recent years the Australian Open has done sponsorship in style, upstaging Flemington’s Birdcage and the Grand Prix marquees.

But COVID restrictions and working with the Victorian Government’s movable feast of guidelines has put a dampener on how Melbourne’s first major event will be served up.

“We thought Gill McLachlan had it tough with the AFL,” one major sponsor told Page 13.

Pip Edwards and Michael Clarke are odds on to be on the invite list. Picture: Getty Images

“That’s nothing on what Craig Tiley is going through. The goalposts keep moving.”

Read line calls!

The Tennis Australia CEO is working around the clock, often finishing up at 6am, only to then crack back into it.

The annual IMG players party at Crown is usually the first date on the social set calendar. With international agents and overseas entourages at a minimum, the event has been scrapped.

But let’s hope for a Barty Party!

There will still be some exclusive events before the Open officially starts on February 8. Piper-Heidsieck will present its Better Together dinner with special guest and ambassador Stan Wawrinka. Following the off-court Margaret Court drama this week, it’s wonderful to see the Australian Open behind the Pride for AO 2021 annual event on Wednesday. Soccer’s Andy Brennan and new mum Casey Dellacqua are on the speaking panel. New official partner Grainshaker Vodka will also serve up a VIP dinner at the Botanical pub in South Yarra with none other than George Calombaris making a cooking comeback.

Game. Set. Pop!

GAGA’S DANCING QUEENS

“Goodbye COVID, hello dancing.”

Just days after singing the Star-Spangled Banner and giving Mike Pence some serious side-eye at the presidential inauguration, Lady Gaga was giving Melbourne’s gay club scene her signature monster claws of approval.

“Happy for Australia! Praying for the rest of the world that we can all be dancing together soon,” Gaga tweeted to her 83 million-odd followers with a video of unmasked revellers dancing to her track, Replay, at popular Fitzroy Sircuit Bar.

Lady Gaga. Picture: Getty

Another video, this time of clubbers vibing out to a Gaga banger from DJ duo Popchops at Melbourne institution Poof Doof over the long weekend.

The now viral footage video sent people gaga making Melbourne’s gay dance scene suddenly celebrated worldwide. Queen Gaga herself said so.

Both nightclubs were strictly adhering to COVID and QR scan regulations and density guidelines as Melbourne recorded 23rd consecutive COVID free days on Friday.

As Poof Doof’s Susie Robinson put it, “We all endured a hard lockdown to get here. And while we are all doofing COVID-safe. It has been a spectacular recovery.”

Just dance!

PILLOWTALK PUT TO REST

AFTER 30 years helping listeners deal with their sexual hang-ups, Dr Sally Cockburn has hung up her microphone.

Cockburn’s warts-and-all radio program, Pillowtalk, was the sweet spot on the 90s airwaves.

Hormonally-ravaged pubescents, giggling girls and often adult males caught in an emotional tangle would call in to ask Cockburn’s on-air persona Dr Feelgood, intimate questions about sex, bodies, and relationships.

Nothing was off topic, although the Doctor says management still hates the H-word.

H-word? Herpes!

“I got a call from the general manager once saying did you just talk about herpes on my radio network. I said yup and I’ll do it again.

Dr Sally Cockburn survived a near-death experience thanks to her dog Molly. Picture: Josie Hayden

“He said, but it’s HER-PES. And I said, yes, and it doesn’t discriminate.”

Dr Cockburn says everything needs to be on the table. Sex. Abortion. Mental health. Family violence. Voluntary-assisted dying.

“People just need to hear this stuff,” Dr Cockburn told Page 13.

“If I’ve been able to just make a difference and people feel they can ask the hard questions, then I’m fairly happy.”

After Pillowtalk, Dr Cockburn hoisted a rebooted national Saturday night show.

“We don’t have sex on 3AW,” she laughs. “It wasn’t the sort of place. It was more important to talk about health.

“I’ve always thought health can be entertaining.”

Talking live on air with a suicidal man after he had come out to his family was one of the most powerful moments of her career.

Scrapping any thoughts of radio ratings the doctor kicked in and Cockburn kept a man with a rifle in his hand talking on the airwaves.

The man eventually found help and support. “We saved that man’s life that night, it shows how powerful radio and the community it brings together can be.”

Teaching rigid medical practitioners to talk candidly about taboo topics without condescension has become her focus.

But we couldn’t resist asking about the proclivities of some of her callers.

There was the one about the woman who had a large hare who didn’t like her boyfriend.

“He was a thumper,” Dr Cockburn says, of the hare.

“She and her boyfriend were in bed in a particular sexual position and, well, it wasn’t a good place to be with a big hare thumping around.

Cockburn once advised a man to put a “cold tinny” on his penis after catching it in the zipper of his jeans before going out on a date.

One question she couldn’t answer was how to get a cane toad out of a toilet.

Cockburn thinks she may be the only person to have a stalker turn her down.

“He would write to me and say we were going to live together forever, all that kind of stuff, then his last letter said he had started taking medication and wanted to apologise because after seeing me on TV he realised I was way too old for him,” she laughs uproariously.

Cockburn says a lot has changed since those Pillowtalk times. Recognising sexual abuse survivor and campaigner Grace Tame as Australian of the Year speaks volumes.

But Dr Cockburn says one subject is still taboo. Herpes!

AUSSIE WHITE HOUSE

These pages deal in matters of high moment and finds that Melbourne has an extraordinary connection to President Joe Biden’s new secretary of state.

It came when Antony Blinken moved from New York to Paris when he was nine to live with his mother and stepfather.

The stepfather, Samuel Pisar, was a survivor of the Holocaust who said he might have become “a terrorist or a gangster” had an aunt not sent him to Melbourne where two uncles had fled the war.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Picture: AFP

The boy who had run from the Nazis, becoming a thief to survive, said he began “a physical, moral and intellectual rehabilitation” that saw him win a scholarship to study law at Melbourne University.

The young Holocaust survivor said the then dean of law and later governor-general of Australia, Sir Zelman Cowen, “guided my comeback from oblivion.”

Pisar then went to Harvard in the US where another future secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, was a classmate. Pisar became an adviser to president John F. Kennedy and later Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev and according to Australian Olympic Committee President John Coates, acted as a lawyer to the dynastic Packer and Lowy families.

“He was big time,” said Coates. He told people “Australia saved him.”

President Biden’s new secretary of state lived with his mother and stepfather as part of an elegant and sophisticated world in Paris before he, too, went to Harvard.

“I was his friend and maybe his mentor, a little bit,” Pisar told the Washington Post in 2013 when Blinken was deputy national security adviser to then president Barack Obama.

It was an understatement. Secretary of State Antony Blinken might look back and say thanks to his stepfather, Melbourne made me!