A musical trip down memory lane.... Part 1

Currawong got home late from drumming last night, and we sat up till early in the morning as I took him on a trip down memory lane with music clips from Youtube.  I told him a whole heap of depth to my stories about my dyke days in Katoomba that I'd never told him before.  It's wierd.  I had such a blast, and I've always been very  proud of my stories as a scene queen in the Blue Mountains, but I kinda stopped telling them when I became very monogamous and heterosexual with the love of my life, and having copious amounts of children....kinda didn't seem to fit anymore.  And I was always wary of the voyeuristic tendancies of the folk I told stories to, and thought that if they wanted to know the intricacies of lesbian culture, then they should go have a look themselves (if they were the right gender of course), rather than get a peek through me.  And I was also very aware of the privacy and respect that a lot of the women I hung out with would appreciate from me.  So I just kinda tucked all my stories away, and got on with only being so weird as to be a big hippy with lots of kids, and a crocheted bus, living in and around community, into homebirthing and natural learning, and traveling, and the festival, market, and dance scenes.

But strike me pink and call me lemon, I had a huge amount of fun. I'm gonna tell you some of those stories, doing my best to respect everyone's dignity and privacy, just cause they were some of the most brilliant and magical moments of my life.

I moved back to the mountains when I'd got pregnant from a fling while selling life insurance to have my first child.  Her birth transformed my life completely and showed me layers in our culture that I'd never known about before.  Feminism, the Goddess, the divine feminine, spirituality, pagan culture, my world exploded into realms I'd never dreamt of.  I went to a meditation group and kept hearing about this tall, striking woman who was a lesbian, and when we met we almost instantly fell head over heels in kindred, platonic love.  We talked and compared and enlightened and shared and learnt the patterns and trends of whole new worlds together.  And just when we were both on the verge of thinking that women were the most splendid creations on the planet, and we could just launch into a parallel universe where men didn't exist, (more colloquially known as separatism) she brought a blue eyed man to visit me one night, we talked all night, and he instantly became part of our platonic love triangle.

We were all three intensely into LIFE and honesty, and unpeeling layers off our childhoods and popular culture and 'reality' and trying to find out who we all really were.  Exploring music and art and literature and concepts and foods and smells and sensuality and sexuality and gender and textures and natural found objects and everything we could lay our incredibly open minds on.  We got so into intense and brilliant conversations with each other that we forgot all about the people around us, and sometimes we'd all come too and find we had an audience with hanging mouths who'd been listening to our collective journey.

They became like parents to my young daughter, and we fast became inseperable, and they lived in a plush wooden mansion in Blackheath on Shipley road, with an incredible view from massive glass windows of cliffs and valleys reaching into Megalong Valley.  And we whirled and glittered and spun and talked, and freaked out nearly everyone around us.

We gals were bent, he was straight, I had a daughter, he was in a wheelchair, and we talked and laughed and tussled with concepts while dashing through the mountains in bright streams of colour and wafts of pure delight.  We challenged nearly every stereotype we could find, about disability, sexuality, relationships and gender.

"Your inability to see my ability is your own disability..."

And in the middle of these halcyon days, my gal pal and I were asked to make some music for a dyke dance in Katoomba.  We already had a reputation from a few parties we'd been at where we'd hijacked the sound system, so we set to our task with joy, using his music and our music, and sewing ourselves lush velvet capes with hoods, and long fitted frocks for the occasion.  We were cheeky as we made the tapes, putting on songs we knew were very different to the music normally heard at such events, but playing the music that inspired us nonetheless.  And even though he helped us create the soundtrack, our third mate couldn't come to this event, not even we tried to stretch that particular boundary.....

 
It was one of the most amazing nights and dances I've ever been to, still to this day.  It was like all cliches and stereotypes and distinctions dissolved, as all the gorgeous women of all shapes and ages just got on with the business of having fun. All the songs we thought would be challenging were just plain enjoyed.

We knew when this song was coming, and ran outside to hide while we giggled helplessly about what the reactions to it might be, and to our surprise, no-one said a word.

At one point outside the hall, there was a circle of about 10 women standing together, hugging and holding and talking and sharing, and everyone seemed to step out from their internal worlds and stand together united.

 
And when this piece played, as it was our threesome's collective favourite at the time, me and my beautiful friend skipped and swirled round the dance floor with capes billowing out behind us, and slowly all the women joined in as we whirled our way through the drum beats.

And we all had a huge amount of fun......