Reading through some magazines in the dentist’s waiting room the other day, I suddenly realised what is lacking in the Mail & Guardian. What this newspaper needs is something to set off its level of formidably prescient and relevant journalism, something to mollify its incisive comment. The M&G should think about sticking in a bit of bubble and froth, a weekly column of mindless inconsequentiality, something that plunges our minds into luke-warm, endearing banality. We all enjoy that now and then. I solemnly propose the following because Gwen Gill should not be allowed to have it all.
“Tongues were all aflutter last Sunday when your reporter sniped along to the Exclusive Kooks launch of Scherzo Minnie-Badenhorst’s enchanting first autobiography, Tubs and Scrubs. In it, Scherzo recalls her wretched teenage years on a Karoo farm where once a week she had to undergo the shameful ordeal of being forced to strip naked and take a bath in an iron tub in the farmhouse kitchen. During this grim ritual, she had to endure having her back and firm young breasts gently scrubbed and massaged by a racially disadvantaged fellow teenager called Lisa, the troubled girlchild of drunken, shockingly poor farm labourers ‘of colour’.
Scherzo waited all of 40 years to write the 216 pages of this deeply affecting remembrance, glowingly raved about on the top left-hand corner of The Sunday Independent‘s literary page by foxy Stellenbosch intellectual, Michiel Heyns.
Your reporter couldn’t put Tubs and Scrubs down often enough. In it, Scherzo describes, in sometimes naughtily gruesome detail, the intimate but racially challenging encounters between two young and vital women, cruelly separated in opportunity and privilege. Those inflamed years led to devoted friendship and out of this emotionally crippled and racially challenged crucible blossomed a strange and tortured love. Scherzo and Lisa have been living in unrelenting misery ever since. Scherzo describes their partnership acerbically as a farm-fresh lust machine.
There Scherzo sat, looking quite a few weeks less than her 56 years, in frothily casual bright yellow and maroon flared pantaloons, topped by an off-white gauzy peekaboo blouse. Her hair was an indigo concerto, floating around her head. Her sweet little scarlet Cupid’s bow mouth gleamed and pinched in concentration as she scribbled away. Once-embittered-teenage-backscrubber-now-life’s-partner, Lisa, squatted on the end of the table in a grimy leather short-sleeved jerkin. Unwashed and unrepentant, one work-roughened hand crushed around a complimentary beer can, she sneered down with distaste on the gathered humiliates.
Talking of unwashed: Jameson Gonad, director of Hairy Palm Publications, was much in evidence. His gravy- and drivel-splattered tie was a bright beacon in the asphyxiating cloud of Camel Plains smoke around him. In his inimitable style, he belched out a garish little welcoming speech and had the whole table in a roar when he made some tasteless remarks about the lasting literary values of ‘Love in the Hottie Tub’. In the car park afterwards, I saw Lisa had got him down on the ground and was kicking the living shit out of him with her studded love-boots. Cherchez la Farm!
More artistic news, my dears. Next month, they’re going to start the ball rolling on the competition for the most expensive but most tackily pretentious taste in interior design shown on Top Billing each month. Top competitor this month will no doubt be Kedgeman and Helénè Cohen-Oppenheimer’s Clifton Third Beach chalet-de-penthouse for which they sacrificed their bank accounts to buy some apple-green seur-Italian aero-concrete patio furniture. This was set cunningly in a vivid young purple-bamboo forest, itself set in a Japanese rock garden made from pale Pacific Ocean-washed pebbles Helénè had schlepped back from a lonely beach in Peru.
As Helénè kept telling us, Hubby Kedgeman is creative director at McCreeps Addleman, so the addition of wind-stained hessian curtains, a whole wall papered with Glenryk Pilchards In Tomato Sauce labels and three strategically placed acrylic Simba Chips carton replicas added a welcome touch of poverty-chic.
Friday rushed in and your reporter was not at all dismayed to find himself at the annual Vodacom Lifetime Tosspot Awards and, what’s more, to also find himself seated next to the rail-thin, parchment-skinned young American anorexic activist, Lyddya Fernon. Lyddya was on Oprah last week, explaining how to vomit discreetly when at award lunches. Around her stalk-like neck she carries a little plastic bag, disguised to look like a handkerchief. When having a sequestered pukette, she looks as though she’s simply blowing her nose.
As a celebrity, she confessed, she is continually being asked to eat things. She said if she swallowed a solitary 1% of what she had slapped down in front of her she’d be as big as a Boeing. Ultra-thin is not only beautiful, it’s humanity-giving! Her message about self-denial was quite moving, even if every now and then she had to stop and tuck her left humerus back under its skin.”
If you liked this column and believe the Mail & Guardian needs more of such gentle frippery, please inundate us with approving e-mails, faxes and SMSs. If you don’t like it, no one will blame you for keeping your opinions to yourself.