But the upside is that when all the shows are up and running, when the cast are basking in fame and fortune, the production manager is tallying the profits and the director is getting loudly drunk and picking fights with drag queens at the bar, I will be left holding the greatest gift any artist can hope for… The Festival Pass.

Given that for the last 6 years my income has been so tiny that my accountant is convinced I’m laundering money through a mob-run bakery, going out to the theatre and spending 60 bucks a week on shows is absolutely prohibitive.  Being an artist in the festival entitles me to watch my peers for free, this is unquestionably the greatest act of artistic support that the festival organizers could give.

I heard somewhere (probably Oprah) that to write a good book you have to read 10. (At least 10! With my level of expertise I’d be more comfortable with 100.) The same applies to theatre. If you’re planning on writing a show, or even just performing one, you should be going out and seeing as much of it as you can. It doesn’t matter if it’s good, even the bad stuff can be a valuable lesson in what not to try. But the fact is that the more theatre you see, the better placed you are to create it.

For all its faults (and there are plenty) Comedy Festival has this system down to an art. For so many Melbourne comedians, April is the time to fill up the cornucopia of inspiration. In between their own gigs you see comedians tearing from one venue to another, squeezing into whatever venue will hold them for the chance to see their peers at work, see what audiences enjoy and what makes them vomit, and fill their own heads with spin-off ideas and thoughts that would not have struck them if they’d stayed home to iron their underwear. The comedy scene in Melbourne is remarkably well connected and established comics are usually mad keen for the chance to help newbies.

In cabaret this is less so the case. Whereas comedy nights are packed with contemporaries rubbing shoulders, congratulating each other and offering advice, cabaret is generally a solitary endeavour. Outside of fundraisers, you rarely see cabaret nights with 20 people on the list and there is only one monthly cabaret try-out room in town that I’m aware of. I think this solitude leads a lot of new cabaret performers to believe they’re breaking new ground when they’re really just reinventing the wheel.

The number of times I see first-time shows with the title “Bad Boy” or “Diva” is astounding. And very seldom are the artists as bad or as diva-ish as they proclaim. One “bad boy” I went to see struggled and blushed all night about dropping the C-bomb onstage. He’d clearly never been to see the Beautiful Losers who opened their show by singing the line “this is a show where we say the word Cunt” as a Gregorian chant, and closed with the upbeat reggae song “Cunts we should kill.” And all the poor kids who put up posters and claim to be the mortal incarnation of Liza/Bette/Marilyn/Ella/The Jonas Brothers would do well to see at least ONE of the other thousand acts claiming to be the mortal incarnation of Liza/Bette/Marilyn/Ella/The Jonas Brothers.

One tragic format that new cabaret artists frequently use is the educational angle of running their first show as a masterclass in how cabarets are built. This format is better left to people who’ve done the rounds a little longer, who can make fun of cabaret conventions rather than sound like they’re reading instructions from a book.

Every time I’ve been to a forum where people are discussing cabaret no one has actually been able to nail down what it is. They talk about styles and genres and conventions, but no one can sum it up. This is because cabaret makes itself up as it goes along. An artist can slide their show into the moving stream of Melbourne cabaret and it will fall somewhere within that. The transience of the medium is even more reason to go and see other shows.

The truth is that art is meaningless if it’s created in a void. If people are getting onstage without knowing who else has been on that stage, who else is performing at the same time as them and who’s coming to town next, then it’s impossible to know where to pitch your show. You can’t tell everyone that you’re the next big thing if you’ve no idea who the last big thing was. You can’t say you’re the toughest, the prettiest, the drunkest, the smartest or the funniest unless you’re absolutely certain that it’s true. Yes, your mum will be impressed because she’s too busy ironing your underwear to get out and see other people’s shows, but boy howdy the critics will be on to you faster than flies on a turd-shaped rock.

Personally, I know that there are at least two other World War Two-style groups working the circuit in Melbourne so I can’t market World War Wonderful as Melbourne’s only/best/THE WWII group. I have to market it on the more specific merits of having an original score and being a black, subversive comedy. Similarly, Filthy Secrets had to be written specifically about revealing the secrets of the upper class to avoid treading into the territory of Michael Dalley or the Beautiful Losers – if we strayed too much, we’d be compared to them and risk coming up second best.

If cabaret was a more community based, help-each-other-out area, we’d see those stereotype first-show ideas like “Confessions of a drunk/slut/office girl” or “How To write a show/be a bitch/sell your family to the circus” develop into much more personal, intricate pieces. Any idea can be done well, you just have to know what you’re doing. And conversely, I’ve done some absolutely shocking pieces of theatre in my time, but I was aware of their context and at least I knew they were bad.

So this festival I will be running madly from show to show, soaking up as much culture as I can. Learning what cabaret means in this city and how I can help move it forward instead of basking in the absurd notion that paddling around in my own talent is good enough. I’ve put on two shows in this festival so now I have at least 20 to catch up on. It’s the only way I’ll improve and the only way I can be sure my shows are making an impact. AND IT’S FREEEEEE!!!

Herefollows my thesis on this subject.

Xboxes are like boobs in that they both teach key lessons that benefit human development but deliver these lessons in very palatable ways. Boobs teach the subliminal emotional lessons of tenderness, physical gentleness, intimacy, sensuality and empathy through a medium that everyone loves: sex. Xboxes teach the subliminal cognitive lessons of cause and effect, memory improvement, trial and error and complex problem solving through another medium everyone loves: violence. These are certainly lessons that children must learn in order to function easily in society, but must the learning stop once they’re too old for nappies or school uniforms?

Perhaps originally, gaming consoles and boobs were constructed to be used by children but in our era of high intelligence, multitasking and corporate downsizing it’s a natural inclination to build upon original design and upgrade hardware for more varied purposes. If the technology and innovation allow it, evolution occurs. I must therefore disagree that Xboxes and boobs are now intended entirely for children.

Consider the Xbox. The gaming console was born with such limited capacities that slapping a square between two animated strips against a black background was the height of entertainment. Flashing colours, long uploading times and limited control meant that in the early stages of electronic gaming children were the only ones who really possessed the attention span and sufficient level of awe to permit them to sit in front of Pac Man or 3D painter for hours on end. In this sense, gaming consoles were not so much designed for children as children were designed for gaming consoles.

Since then, technology has exponentially leaped ahead and we are now getting games so intense and violent that small children can’t wrap their heads around the concepts involved. Take Dragon Age Origins in which the player must not only manage a team of four differently skilled fighters in battle and navigate volatile political leadership negotiations, but also be savvy enough to maintain sexual relationships with up to three different characters at once without pissing any of them off. Try giving that responsibility to Dennis the Menace.

The essential tenets of electronic gaming are such that a person of any age can gain satisfaction from playing. Nowadays, software companies are recognising that and constructing games to suit demographics more diverse than the young kiddy stereotype. Every grown up enjoys over coming obstacles, satisfyingly finishing a task and shooting freakin’ zombies in the face.

Of course Xboxes can still be used by children. There are still games available in which you do nothing but pat baby rabbits and ride a pony in circles. Such games are about as complex as the original Pong but with even brighter colours… and more ponies! But the stigma of being an adult and playing an Xbox is slowly beginning to wear off as public awareness of the complexities involved in adult gaming continues to grow. Xboxes, like life, are ultimately what you make of them.

Consider the boob. The human breast was born with such limited capacities that slapping a baby on the end of it and letting the bugger gnaw away was the height of entertainment. Conservative social ideals, religious constrictions, monogamy and the idea of women as chattel meant that children were the only ones who were in a position to get hold of a boob let alone enjoy it. Children being sexless creatures were the only people allowed to interact with with a boob without causing angst in the general community. In this sense, boobs were not so much designed for children as children were designed for boobs.

Since then, society has exponentially leaped ahead and we now live in a post sexual revolutionary era in which women are allowed to do as they please with their own bodies. The technological triumph of the pill and subsequent freedom from unplanned pregnancy means that women and men no longer have to view the female body as something that’ll spew up babies at the drop of a hat (or trouser) and the focus can shift from function to form, a concept small children – who exist solely to receive – can’t wrap their heads around. If you eliminate the necessity to reproduce then the boob as a functional tool becomes redundant. Humans naturally see a resource and must utilise it in some manner, so the boob evolves to a higher purpose of a “funbag” for adult hands. In this context a boob definitely requires a grown up to navigate it and tread the line between being too rough, too wussy, too reverent, too eager, too bored, too dribbly, too twisty or too afraid of it. Try giving that responsibility to Dennis the Menace.

The essential tenets of boobs are such that a person of any age can gain satisfaction from playing. Nowadays, society recognises that and allows boobs of all shapes and sizes freedom to enjoy themselves  amongst demographics more diverse than the young kiddy stereotype. Every grown up enjoys fondling obstacles, satisfyingly finishing a task and shooting freakin’ zombies in the face. Wait. What?

Of course boobs can still be used by children. There are still people who want to have kids and don’t mind their boobs becoming a feeding unit for the next generation. But the stigma of being an adult and playing with a boob has long worn off as public awareness of the awesomeness of boobs continues to grow. Boobs, like life, are ultimately what you make of them.

The major discrepancy between these two fun, interactive learning tools is availability. Xboxes are fairly thick on the ground and easy to access. They only cost a couple of hundred bucks, your mum might buy you one for your birthday and if all else fails, just borrow your friend’s. The same cannot be said for boobs. Boy howdy. They are relatively more difficult to get a hold of considering that you need either a reasonably high level of social competence… or two grand and a motel room. the accessibility of Xboxes and the slightly lower accessibility of boobs leads a section of the community to find solace by following the path of least resistance.

What this means is, the more time you spend playing Xbox the less likely you are to encounter a boob. In terms of human development expending all your energy in the violent cerebral area means that one might neglect the emotional sexual area. Also, in terms of sheer hours you sit in front of the TV, you’re unlikely to bump into many chicks. The ultimate outcome for these people is nervousness around boobs, poor communication skills and a semi-conscious wish that a zombie would walk in so you can shoot it in the freakin’ face.

So, as usual, I have the answer: we create an Xbox game called Boobs. The game consists of a giant, high-res, megapixel boob on the screen who instructs the player to do things like “have a shower”, “ask how my day was” and “don’t poke me with your elbow”. This will bridge the cerebral and the emotional gap and give exclusive Xbox users real-life advise on how to deal with boobs and hopefully give them a leg up when encountering boobs in day to day life. This will benefit everyone in society. Bar no one. The only possible downside is that some users might prefer the virtual boob to the real thing… but that’s still a benefit coz who’d wanna get busy with that dickhead anyway?

If you’re in the lucky position to spend too much time with boobs… well, I can’t really see a problem with that. As long as you know when to touch them (like at the drive in or in the back row at your sister’s wedding) and when not to touch them (job interviews, visiting Nana, attending a feminist rally) then you should be fine. Overdosing on boobs has been colloquially linked to people losing the ability to walk straight and shut their mouths but this has never been clinically proven.

In conclusion. Xboxes and boobs are for everyone but should be used in moderation.

There’s a special kind of happiness that you get from sitting in a room full of delightful, like minded people, and there’s only thing that can bust that up: a total jerk. No matter how selective you are with the people you call friends, you can’t be sure your friends are as picky as you. You might be invited to a small social evening with your dearest pals only to find a loudmouth, Young Liberal Game Cube-junkie sitting to your left, just because Tim decided to reach out. Bloody Tim.

I love being invited for a visit, but I hate being ambushed by jerks. This is a particular danger if you have nice friends who make an effort with new people and give them a chance. I heartily disagree with this kind of radical thinking. It only leads to me having to listen to longwinded tales about trying to return a used toothbrush to Coles or the top 150 reasons that Hitler was right.

This is a phenomenon I call the Friend Six Pack. In this situation you have maybe 3 good friends, a new person who you don’t hate and 2 new people who make you want to fake a severed arm and excuse yourself.

“Do forgive me, my arm seems to have come off and I must go home.”
“But I can see your arm! You’re holding a scone with it.”
“Oh that? That’s just my deformed nephew biting my shoulder again. Be gone, Pierre!”

The experience is much like drinking a six pack by yourself.

The first couple of drinks are great, you’re talking, you’re laughing, your inhibitions are down and you’re connecting warmly with your mates, the third might even have you singing our loud and hugging, remembering the good times. When you get to the fourth you’re a little bit paranoid, you stare a bit and try to remember if you’ve seen this guy before, you can’t think of anything witty to say but you keep talking anyway so that it’s not awkward. By the fifth you’re starting to regret saying yes to this party, your eyes can’t focus, you’re feeling sick, the room seems a lot wobblier and more awful than it was when you arrived. By the sixth, you’d rather leap into the front yard, spew and pass out than stay there listening to this trash spin round and round one minute longer.

You might manage a six pack with only one jerk beer in it. You might get all the way through the evening and only spew the next morning when you realise that he’d been saying “rape” instead of “rave” all night long. (“I raved all night with twenty of my friends!”)

The absolute worst situation is when you make a wonderful new friend who you’d move mountains to high-five, only to find that every single person they like is a dickhead. That’s a cheap and nasty six pack where touching the second can to your lips makes the kebab you just ate leap to the tip of your throat and you start to wonder if the first can was really alright to begin with. Luckily, you’ll usually only be in this situation once before you start inviting that friend out for movies where you “accidentally bought one extra ticket… and ONLY one!”

Usually I end blogs with some kind of advice or grand scheme I have for solving this problem once and for all, but in this case I really don’t have any answers. You can’t boycott your friends until they get better taste and you can’t show up to a party and blank half the people in the room. I guess you just have to go to the party, drink your six pack quietly and vomit into a pot plant when no one is looking. Or perhaps the mere fact that I think this way makes me the dickhead. Perhaps I’m the judgmental curmudgeon making other people lose the feeling in their face and cry for the motherland.

I suppose the only way to ensure you don’t encounter jerkfaces is to not encounter anyone. This can be achieved by isolating everyone inside igloo-like self-sufficient chambers, dotted across the landscape like giant alien braille. Although this would theoretically solve the problem, I am unconvinced that this is the best way for society to proceed. Would I really sacrifice my best buddies to avoid being contacted by Eat Pray Love-toting, 40+, arrested developed, Bella-from-Twilight wannabes? On second thoughts…

Cast yourself into the mind of an innocent bogan child. His mum and stepdad want to take him out to experience all the heartwarming joy of the city. They burn down the freeway at 120k’s per hour and show their son the strip club where mum works and the first pub that stepdad was ever thrown out of. Then it’s back home up the freeway, for Maccas, and a quick Xbox before bed.

Now cast yourself into the mind of a discontented bogan teenager. There’s nothing to do in the outer suburbs unless you enjoy moshing at Coles. You seem to remember a place in your distant memory… a strange, magical place where people wore closed toed shoes, shops stayed open after 5pm and dentists didn’t get hanged for sorcery. You don’t remember where it was, because you’ve inhaled so much paint thinner since your salad days, but you remember that you had to go down the freeway to get there. Burning down the M1 at 120k’s per hour.

You see, fellow social anthropologists, the bogan mind has been encoded from infancy to believe that anywhere worth driving must be driven to quickly. Fast is a substitute for good, in every arena. That’s why McDonalds and KFC are thriving while Sizzler is long rotting in the grave, and why Broadband spelled the end of the video library. Fast equals good.

When the now-adult bogan gets behind the wheel of his refurbished Holden, he doesn’t know where he’s driving but he knows how he’s driving. I witnessed a bogan brigade yesterday, drive hell-for-leather into a cul de sac, donut the bejeezus out of their tyres and scream off into the sunset. Clearly they were searching for something… somewhere… and only speed would take them there.

Normally I wouldn’t interfere with the lifecycle of the bogans, we live in a nice symbiosis of mutual ignorance. They don’t buy tickets to my symphonies and I stay out of their lynch mobs. But we need to break this cycle for the good of all humanity. When a bogan spins out of control on the freeway he might hit a bassoon player and then where would we be? One Fagotti short of a woodpile.

The only way to solve this problem is to separate bogans and freeways. This can be done by removing access, need or temptation. Placing barbed wire barricades over all onramps outside a 15km radius of the CBD would be costly but effective. Alternatively we could relocate all bogans into inner city accommodation, thus eliminating the need for driving altogether. However, this might result in a mass existential crisis when the bogan population collectively realise that their 60 inch Sony HDTV with surround sound is neither as big nor as loud as the one in Fed Square.

The third option would be to psychologically deter any bogan children from having any positive experience outside of their home. Give them some good ol’ Pavlovian negative reinforcement. Anytime a bogan child leaves his suburb of origin people should make loud noises and give him small electric shocks (eg. from a tazer.). That way he’ll start to associate fast movement with bad experiences and hence be discouraged from using freeways. This method may take upwards of thirty years to become effective, but as I am not a bogan, I’m prepared to wait.

The recourse for a safer tomorrow is in our hands. And don’t worry, they won’t see it coming. The bogans all stopped reading this after I used the word “concentration.”