It looks like the Sun Pictures open air cinema in Broome (C8) is just the place for what our witness Barry Lamb calls “reality mimicking art”. Dave Bertram of Hawks Nest was there in 2017 to watch Dunkirk: “The scene was from the cockpit of a Spitfire over the beach, when an aircraft flew over us, close on the starboard side going in to land.” The same thing happened to Mark Miller of Lane Cove North during a viewing of Australia.
From screen to stage. “A few years ago, I was performing in a production of The Marriage of Bette and Boo at the old Epicentre in Byron Bay, which adjoined the railway line,” recalls Russell Eldridge of Brunswick Heads. “At the precise moment that one of the actors delivered the line ‘Anna Karenina shouldn’t have thrown herself in front of that train’, the 8.15 to Murwillumbah rattled past. The audience roared. Happened the next night too.”
Of course these coincidences are not always welcome. Raymond Pleasant of Kingsford remembers attending an outdoor performance of the stage musical The Rainmaker in the 1960s: “Just when the exposed conman who promised rain was forced to leave a rural area in drought, a brief shower swept the audience and storyline. He turned his wagon around, grabbed the promised bag of cash and the daughter and rode off. Spiritual!”
We’ve done the collective noun thing in the past, but it looks like Derrick Mason’s ‘grumble of graziers’ (C8) has inspired a number of you, and while Michael Kinsella of The Rocks had the first draft with ‘a jealousy of architects’ it was the offering of Gerhard Engleitner of Hurstville who thinks “the collective noun for a group of Jewish ladies should be a ‘Polyesther’,” that got us really feeling verklempt.
“I beg to differ on a ‘grumble of graziers’,” declares Marion Newall of Point Frederick. “Surely, these country folk would be having a beef.”
“How much pink Himalayan salt (C8) is there?” asks Ted Richards of Batemans Bay. “If it’s being dug up and exported all over the world, how long before they out of this valuable resource? It seems similar to the bottles of water ‘sourced from a sparkling spring high in the (insert name here) mountains’. You know that the bottles must have been filled from a local municipal water tap, but people still seem to buy it.”
Column8@smh.com.au
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