Chapters three and four....

Here’s the next instalment of my book.  Currawong’s very concerned that people who don’t know my blog well, will come along and read the story in the wrong order, so I should tell  you now, that if you haven’t already started reading the book that I’m posting on this blog, then you’ve got to go back a post and start at Chapter 1.

That being said, here’s the next bit.  It’s funny.  I’m finding that I’m really sensitive about this book!  It’s such a part of me, and I guess after having gone through the process I described last time of birthing it, I’m as protective of it as I am of my children.  I was sure that nobody liked it after I posted it for a whole hour and didn’t get any gorgeous comments….(ha!)  But then feedback started to come in, and I got over my jitters.  The urge to let it out into the world is proving stronger than the urge to be a wus J

So like I said before, I’d left the Blue Mountains and emigrated to South Australia, and had been in SA for about 6 months when I decided to go back to the mountains for a visit, met Currawong, and then went back home to write this book.  And I left the mountains cause it was all just too confusing.  In my time in the mountains I’d been a fundamentalist church goer, a very unpopular school girl with braces and glasses and knee high socks and below knee skirts and a head taller than all the boys, a dropout, and I disappeared for 3 years after I left home at 15 under police escort and lived with my sister in Bathurst for a while, then went overseas to Europe for a year to do the famous Aussie backpacker tour, then came back briefly to the mountains to be a Council postal clerk by day, and an RSL root rat by night, then went down to the North Shore in Sydney and sold Life Insurance, got pregnant and moved back to the mountains to become a single mother, then a goddess worshipping guided meditator, then a bisexual activist, then an almost separatist lesbian, lived with my girlfriend and our daughters and wrote for the local lesbian magazine, then left her and had a relationship with an eccentric man who worshipped the goddess Kali, at the same time as with a woman who wanted to look after me and take me to Holland………got too confused by everything and ran into a relationship with a young punk fella who had a very iconic name and a sweet heart, started a business in the main street of Katoomba and had some very big and grandiose dreams come to nothing, and then found it all too much and decided to move with my punk fella to Adelaide. 

Pulling silly faces with my best mate at school.....after losing the braces and not wearing the glasses for the shot....

Living in Bathurst with my sister

Sitting on King Arthurs seat in Edinburgh

Selling life insurance on the North Shore in Sydney.....

Being a single mother with a daughter

Being a lesbian at the beautiful Avalon restaurant in Katoomba

At the end of my time in the mountains, I could walk down the street and meet someone from church, then someone from the lesbian community, then a council worker who remembered my time there, then someone I’d slept with from the RSL, then a client from the business I was co-operating, then one of my single mother friends, then a fellow goddess circle member……..and it was just all too much.  I decided it was time to go somewhere and start fresh, without all the baggage of my past.  And Adelaide was about as far away as I was prepared to go.   The punk with the iconic name and I didn’t last long, so there I was in a new state (literally), on my own with my daughter, and trying to work out who the hell I really was after all. 

One of the first things I noticed was how I didn’t have any healthy relationships with men in my life.  So I spent some rather intense months trawling singles sites and having phone sex and talking to men on the internet to the point that I couldn’t talk to people in real life anymore.  So I cut all that out, and tried to make friends in real life, and my next big realisation was that I didn’t know how to fit in and be ‘normal’.  After sticking out so much my whole life, it had become my comfort zone, and I freaked out as much about being ‘normal’, as a lot of normal folk would freak out about being ‘different’. 

So I decided to go undercover, don some ‘normal’ clothes, get a ‘normal’ haircut, try and slide into the reality of the majority of the people around me, and enrolled in Community Services at TAFE.  I gossiped, I talked about boring shit, I didn’t tell any stories about my life, and blended in quite nicely.  And all was going well, and the strain of being ‘normal’ wasn’t too bad, and I was getting great marks…….till two strong personalities in my class started pushing my boundaries.  One of the girls who was verging on being a bit of a bully came out with her homophobia, about how she thought AIDS was a good thing, and the class clown decided to come out with his racist dislike of our indigenous folk, and I just couldn’t hold my tongue.  I literally stood up in the class with the girl speaking homophobia, and bore witness to my experiences and why I thought she was wrong.  And I also spoke very deeply about the racist fella’s opinions and what else I thought he should know. 

My cover was blown.

And would you believe it, they both thought I was awesome for it and all of a sudden I was the most popular girl around!!  Sitting next to me became a privilege, I started clubbing with the more open minded ex-homophobe, and the ex racist fella did an essay on the indignities suffered by black fella’s!  Since there was no point pretending to be normal anymore, I just moved towards wearing clothes that were comfortable for me, and celebrated getting over my normalphobia by just being me.   And people loved me for it.  And I wasn’t reacting anymore.  And I started feeling really good about who I was.  And decided it was about time to go back to the Blue Mountains and catch up with old friends and let them know how successful I was being in my new life.

Little did I know that I was about to meet my soul mate……..

CHAPTER 3 - That first glimpse.........

She’d briefly seen Balthazar that age before when she’d been walking the street with her young male lover.  Her Adonis, young and strong, full of testosterone and laughs, smooth of skin, hung like Pan.  She’d glimpsed him a few times and watched her Adonis grow in battle of preen to outshine him.  They were similar, these two men.  Similar in style and cover and show.

She and her Adonis had walked together down the busy street.  Busy with gossip, busy with conversation, busy with sights and sounds and smells, busy with memories, busy with energies.  They walked the street where everyone met whatever from their past, whichever ghost they most needed to see.  They walked and she held to his arm, his brash young innocence, his muscled good looks, his sliding blend of male and female, his love of her dominance, his obvious difference, and she watched quietly from within.  She watched the reactions to her, to him, to the couple they made, she watched the assumptions made and judgements reached, she watched the souls of others fly by her in eyeballs, she watched what people wanted from her or from their belief of who she was.  And she watched for the qualities she wanted in her next lover, as indeed she knew she’d have one, for this young one, this Adonis, this fear of invisibility, this run away from her past, was a boat that was ferrying her to the other side.  To the shore she knew she’d seek before too long, that would welcome her as its own, and show her the map to herself.  So she watched from her safe place by his side and she’d noticed him......Balthazar. 

She saw his eyes and felt consumed by them instantly to the past they’d shared, the wealth of love, the tangling images one upon the other flickered inside, and she felt drawn into the whirlpool.  She’d seen him, known him, loved him, feared him, felt him, taught him, learnt him, burnt him, claimed him sometime before....but not in this lifetime.  She wrapped him around her like a warm cloak of sanity and peace and the dark......and knew they’d meet again.

...........

He’d seen her strength and soul but couldn’t look, as he was not quite ready to see her yet.  There were a few resolutions just made that he needed to put into practice before meeting her.  He had some patterns to clear, some habits to destroy, some judgements to challenge, some thoughts to stretch.  After a history of enslavement and fear and bloodshed, there were some wounds to heal.  Some salve to supply.

He started heeding that voice from across the gulf when it whispered to him.  Started seeing other selves within.  The strength and bones of his being.  He traversed the gulf and began building bridges.  And finally acknowledged the mother.

He looked around him and surveyed the damage he’d wrought in his battle lust.  He mourned the dead, begged forgiveness from the wounded, and set about paying recompense.  And looked to the mother to see truly within.  All she’d ever asked was that he see her in himself.  See her and love her part in him.  This was all she’d wanted all that time when he’d bullied and railed against her to tell him her secrets.  And even though he thought he’d destroyed her, she existed still in every separated particle, for each particle had once been part of her.

He wept at the waste and bloodshed caused, and the information he could have gained, insights grown, had he only asked respectfully for what he hungered.

And he knew that this time he’d hold her hand.  Respect and love her.  Treat her as divinity.  Share knowledge and support and growth and learning.  Revel in her power and sex and intellect.  Roar with her humour and passion and anger.  And he recognised her as Nimue.  He knew he’d see her soon.

CHAPTER 4 - One year later......

   She shed her young male lover, and her hatred of mankind.  Shed the skin of who she’d been.  Traversed the underground and died to herself, then rebirthed into who was within.  Shed her childhood, her rape, her lost innocence, her wounds, and grew into her whole self.  Her arching sweetly sexual side.  Her dreaming shadowed passionate side.  Her amazon leather bound worldly side.  Her darkly despairing alone side.  Her philosophical truth searching theory side.  Her strong joking tough side.  All were her, all were loved, all were divine.  She was Goddess incarnate and spent time on herself and her senses. 

She created ritual and body scent, inner clothes and outer clothes, stories and experiences, mind stretches and style.  She shed her past and stepped in the flow and decided it was time to return to the street.  To bring with her the new clothes she’d fashioned in the hills.  The new tools she’d learned to wield.  To marry her worlds and heal her past. 

So she’d come to the street, to bounce energy down the sidewalk, and enthral with her raptures.  Willing and able to engage in life around her, and draw in a partner, wrapped to the soul in hunger for learning and life.  She knew her partner would be a man.

And then she saw Balthazar.

.........

He’d walked through fire and found his own insides, his poet and dancer, his singer and wit.  He’d mapped the depths of the empty hole his anger had nestled in, and drawn up plans for it’s renovations.  But he was still moored to his past in the form of a girlfriend.  A ‘you’ll do for now cause I’d rather not be alone’ companion who had come to him in shared desolation.  They’d huddled together against the storm of the wild around them, and now when he stepped out she told him to close the door against the wind.  But the outside to him was full of wonder.  Bright with promise and new faces and inner insight.  The harsh jarring of his two lives was stringing him tight, tuning his bow.  But he didn’t know where to aim yet so he awaited the sign. 

And then he saw Nimue.

.........

It was in the local pub, inured against the cold with warm clothes and a mellow joint, cold beer by the fire.  She walked round to the back room to sit with her friends and saw Balthazar sitting there, perched on a stool.  Waves of emotion washed her and she went to strike up conversation.  Told him how her young lover had been intimidated by him.  Laughed about the young male pride, gazed in each others eyes.  Communicated without words or mouths or moving.  Balthazar sat with Nimue and their worlds began to collide.

And then another day, on the busy street, they’d chanced to pass, and stopped and enticed, and went for a coffee.  Lazily conversed on spirituality and horses, sex and iniquity....and sent out fine tendrils of lust and promise.  That night at the pub again, inured against the cold by sexual hunger, they’d chatted, then sitted, then glittered their way to a hotel room to shed the clothing of outside.

My Currawong

There’s a lot of stories and events in my past that I haven’t even touched on here in my blog yet, and I reckon there’s a few terms and words that I’ve made up that you might like me to explain at sometime… But that time is not now. I keep getting ideas for things I want to blog about, like all the other births that I’ve experienced and what I learnt from them, and a glossary of all the terms I use that aren’t in common usage (yet), and I’ve written a cute little number about optometrists and another one about space in relationships……but their time is yet to come. But right here and now, I really wanna pay a bit of a tribute to my man. My Currawong. My best mate and co-conspirator. The studly father of my beautiful children. The male at the top of the heap in my circle when it comes to the survival of the fittest……..the male that’s preened and made nests and provided beautiful food, keeps our mechanical wheels running, and puts across the best display’s of human nature that impressed me (and him) so much, that we keep having babies. My muse, inspiration, education, and the most bodacious bed mate that ever sprinkled my life with pure human essence.

We’ve just been through a really hard time. And are only now really realizing how traumatized we’ve both been by recent events…….twins was enough on it’s own, but also my daughter feeling down, and us losing the home that we thought we were gonna live in the rest of our lives, and the betrayal of some of the people in that community home…..not to mention feeling poor and homeless, and staying away from our beloved beach community for a couple of months and finding out about an unexpected pregnancy along the way. It’s been really hard. And we’ve done what most other people would probably do in the same situation……..taken it out on each other. Years ago, I figured that fighting amongst couples is actually quite an honourable and trusting thing. You’re telling each other that you believe you can express and display the worst aspects of your personality (and let’s face it, we all have them), and also believe that the other will still be there at the end of it, and still love you, and accept your nasty self for what it is, at the same time as expressing their own. And it’s a great way for letting off steam in a society obsessed with being ‘good’, and ‘fine’. So we’ve been through the hurly burly of late. And just last weekend went down to the hugely loved Willunga and all the wonderful folk who we love and who love us there, and remembered who we were when we feel loved again, and it kinda put all the past hurts and betrayals into perspective, and helped us realize that we’ve both been a bit off the wall for the last 3 months or so. It wasn’t just him, like I kept trying to tell him it was, afterall. And for the first time, in the middle of a blazing and bitter recrimination that I just HAD to inform him about, I did what I’ve wanted to do for years, and told him how much I hated it when we weren’t getting on, and told him I was going to do my bit for making it better, dropped it all, and gave him a hug. And guess what. It worked. He was so happy that I just dropped it all and hugged him, and we haven’t had a cross word since. And it makes me realize again how very much I love him.

We’ve got one of the best love stories I’ve ever heard of. When we first clapped eyes on each other, I was a black leather wearing recent dyke with short hair, and he had a purple Mohawk, and wore black and shades of grey. Our eyes met across a crowded pub, and we stared into each others souls…….which neither of us had ever done before (or since). And then we met on the busy Katoomba street, went for a coffee, and within minutes were telling each other our deepest and darkest secrets. That night he was palming off his mistress, after having left his partner at home, so we could go upstairs to really meet each other…….and you can think what you like about such a meeting, but that’s how it was. 6 hours later we came back to the pub to cheers from observers, and parted, sure that we’d never meet again. He had a whole life that entrenched him, and I lived in another state, and I decided I wanted one just like him, but not him, because he was far too damaged. (I thought) But no-one of the male persuasion had ever treated me with such respect and equality before…….so I wanted to remember all the details. I got home to South Australia and decided to write it all out. And became a woman obsessed. Within 3 months of wondering whether I was writing the book, or it was writing me, I had a tome that I’d written, that began with a recounting of our meeting, and then became a visualization of what I wanted and wished would happen, as well as an autobiography, science fiction novel, and self help manual. It’s written in the most amazing poetic style, and as I wrote it, I’d read back over what I’d written in amazement, wondering where it was all coming from! I reckon I could almost call it a channeled book. I finished it just before Saturn Return and decided to take a trip through the desert and let it go, and take on the changes that would happen, and face my fears, and that trip is a whole other story in and of itself……but on the way home, I stopped in at Katoomba again, and just when I was about to leave and come home, Currawong walked into the pub, and we sank into each other again. I told him I’d written a book about him, and he told me he’d written a song about me, and our hearts melted together. But he was still entangled, so we parted again, a bit sadder this time, and went our own ways again. Till I got a phone call a year or so later, and he’d left his partner, and moved to Melbourne, and wondered if I wanted to come to a party at his house. I drove there straight away, and we spent the weekend drinking large amounts of Stones Green Ginger Wine, and had 7 people traipsing through his bedroom as we kept telling each other that we weren’t into a relationship, and we wanted our freedom, and all sorts of other pretty lies. Till the last moments, when we’d kicked the last person out of his bed, and he said ‘But is that all there is? Can’t there be more between us?’

I was so touched at the role reversal, and he was so soft hearted, that we entered into a period of a long distance relationship. I’d catch the train to visit him in Melbourne, and he’d hitch-hike to visit me. I was in such an amazing place of feeling my connection to the entire world, and understanding that everyone I met WAS me, that we had all these cute moments, like when he met me at the train, and I introduced the 6 people I’d met in the smoking carriage to him, after telling them all about our romance. He was really into being a debonair but angry punk at that time, and was a bit blown away being met by all these people….the toothless prostitute, the ex-con, the psychologist, the speed dealer and the rest… And eventually he decided to leave his punk band and come and see how good it could get with me. And we’ve never stopped the joy ride since. We’ve gone from both wearing black and shades of grey to wearing lots of bright colours, he’s gone from being virulently anti-child to being the best dad I’ve ever seen, I taught myself to spin and crochet and have done it all my own way, and he’s taught himself to drum in his own unique way, despite being told many times by big-egoe’d drummers that he didn’t know what he was doing and to stop. We ran a market together that was one of the most amazing social experiments I’ve ever been a part of – with the complete absence of all forms of hierarchy – and we learnt a lot about ourselves, our community, the environment, and other ways in which we could be activists for change. We travelled all around the country in our hi-ace commuter van, bought a house to have a baby (Spiral-Moon) in, up north in a town that time forgot, sold it after she was born, and then relocated to the hills around Melbourne for a short stint, before coming back to the Adelaide hills to have Balthazar, join a community, avoid the horrendous Melbourne fires, learn through Post Natal Depression and whooping cough, get pregnant with twins, and get to here where you find us now, wondering where our path will take us next.

But that’s just the external journey. The internal journey has been huge. We are both incest survivors and had traumatic childhoods, so we’ve had a lot of barriers and trust issues that needed dealing with in a gentle (and sometimes not so gentle) way. We’ve always had a huge love and lust for each other, but had to learn how to express it to each other in ways that allowed for each other’s particular foibles and scars. Currawong had so many barricades to his heart, that it really took the first five years of our being together, for him to truly believe that I was here to stay, and really loved him. And I needed equal time to believe that I really deserved love too. It was only last year that I really got that he didn’t put other people first, like I’d been accusing him of for years, and was obviously in every part of his being, choosing me and supporting me above all others. A lot of the things we’ve accused each other of over the years have been nothing to do with each other really, and are more to do with the treatment we experienced as children, and our issues with our families of birth. The untangling of family wounds and barriers we’ve built was tumultuous at first, and is getting easier and easier the more we do it, motivated by wanting to give our children as much healthy stuff as we can.

And I still pinch myself regularly, to make sure that I really am here, experiencing one of those epic love stories that I so wished for as a child and teen. He blends in wherever he goes just like me. He can get on with anyone, anywhere, anyhow, just like me. He can skip and jump through any intellectual hoop or concept you care to name, and he’s always growing and learning. He’s Friesian just like me. A bit less than me actually, but it doesn’t really matter, when you consider the coincidence of us having met and bonded at all. He’s the most awesome mirror I’ve ever known. And there’s not a single thing about him I’d change. He’s spontaneous, never boring, romantic in a totally uncommercial way, challenging, compassionate, and a huge amount of fun. We are so similar it’s mindblowing, and we truly have absolutely no secrets from each other. I’m so greatfull we found each other……..

Which is why we’re trying so hard to stay together. Without sacrificing one of us to a job and a mortgage. To keep travelling even sporadically, and make an income from our passions and talents. To keep our family close knit and dedicated to the path of natural learning for us all. To keep carving out our own reality, our own way, without compromising our dreams. And we’re both stubborn, and both resolutely freedom loving, so I reckon we can do it. I’m going to help Currawong get a vlog (that’s a video blog) together, cause his performance is so audio-visual, that I reckon it’s the only medium that will do him justice. His wild talent is so outstanding, I want the world to see what he does. He can drum on anything from glass jars, to computer parts, to play equipment in parks, to preserving kits, to plastic seats, to bodies, while creating the wildest threads of rhythm that keep forming a continuous multilayered soundscape. And he tells stories and plays with kids rhymes and makes up the most amazing lyrics on the spot. Everything he does is improvised genius, and I’m certainly not the only person that thinks so! My man needs the audience he deserves, and as well as busking on our journey, I reckon he could find an international love for what he does via the internet. Which will be easier on our family time than doing the band and gig trip that so many other musicians do.

And I’m going to flog my blog. Remember that book I was just telling you about? Very soon you’ll be able to buy it off me via the internet, either in PDF format, or printed in a hard copy if that way goes easy. I’ve got this idea of selling the articles I’ve written, theories, books, patterns, and creative writing pieces, with lots of pictures added, on memory sticks, and then crocheting pouches for the sticks to live in, as a connection from me to the recipient. And I’m going to revive my etsy site and start selling some of my crocheted creations that are just sitting around. And write more about birth and tell the rest of my amazing birthing stories. I’m even thinking about writing kids books about how we learn together, with photo’s of our gorgeous kids and examples of natural learning and how it occurs. And maybe one day we’ll end up on land and start community supported agriculture and other community hubs, cause that’s what we’re all about.

Cause I’ve decided I want a café income. After doing 6 years of cloth nappies, when I found out there were biodegradable disposable nappies, I decided I wanted a disposable nappy income, and it happened. I was so excited by disposable nappies after 6 years of stringing up prayer flags of colourful nappies everywhere we went, that I could hardly sleep!! And now I want a café income, so we can regularly go to gorgeous organic café’s for breakfast, or lunch, or dinner, depending on the mood. And I reckon if you’d ever experienced thinking up, cooking for, and cleaning up after 6 young children on a daily basis, you’d totally understand my desire!!! And it’s even Currawong who does most of the cooking!! And we want a big purple 40ft bus to trip around in, with beds that we don’t have to pack up every morning, and lay out every night, and a kitchen on wheels!! Cups of tea whenever we need them. And a home…….where we belong to the land more than it belongs to us. And where we can grow food and family and love and community. Did you catch all that universe??

But first, the search to find where we’ll birth this next one……..

So if you’re into what I write about, and think what we’re doing is a worthwhile pursuit to support, I’d really dig it if you helped me get my blog ‘out there’ in whatever way you can think of, and maybe buy my wares when they come online. And check out my beautiful Currawong’s vlog when we get it happening. And I might even try and add one of those donate buttons I’ve seen around to my blog, for the altruistic philanthropists among you. And hopefully it will all come around for all of us, to live our true and authentic lives, and dream our dreams, and support each other to be all that we want and need to be. Love, respect, peace and freedom to you all!

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......