I Saw Someone Famous in a Wine Bar This One Time.

I don’t run into famous people all that much. There are some notables; I saw the guy who played ‘Rick’ on Home and Away at a Motorhead and Motley Crue concert, I saw renowned Australian music critic Glenn A. Baker at both an Eric Clapton concert and on King St. in Newtown, exiting one of Sydneys great record stores as might be expected. But overall, the A through Z list is far from my day to day.

This Fuckin Guy

Also This Guy...

But there was one notable day. I was in Surry Hills, in a wine bar, with a friend who loves wine. It is kind of the only reason I would ever be in a wine bar. This particular wine bar was on Bourke St. nearby my home and it's days were spent closed with brown butchers paper over the windows. The aforementioned friend is a social animal, though also holds something of the detective spirit within her. In this case, the two aligned perfectly.

So, we go. I am swayed to enter the unbridled wank-fest that is a wine bar on the promise that it is not my shout. My companion and myself drink heartily (I drink heartier, trying to chase sour grapes with sour grapes and be comfortable as wallpaper with no earthly business in a place where jeans have given names on them and things are sent back).

We talk films, my friend has just had a medical ordeal in which she was scared and promised to build churches and so on, and so has some fresh insight on what life can dish out. She has vision and passion for a project, still in its infancy, I support the idea and suggest I could write it. I highly doubt I could make a film worth a damn, but I am fairly certain I can write one. At that age I still believe in myself. We laugh and plot seriously, as you do at one bottle in, the moves we will make to bring her vision to term.

And then the second bottle, then more fun. It is closing in on 9 P.M. In walks, flanked by a group as large as that of a rapper or prize-fighter, Natalie Bassingthwaighte. Though at first we don't know that, of course we don't we are talking movies and writing and art. We are talking everything important .

Closer to the end of the bottle my notoriously awful bladder let's me know of the psychopathic rush it needs. I scan the room for the male toilet. Then I spot her. A tiny person among leeches.

'Isn't that the chick from neighbours'

I was, at one regrettable time, a massive neighbours fan. A moment later my pocket shakes, agitating the already radicalised contents of my bladder. My friend, a foot away, has texted me.

'That's the Rogue Traders chick!'

                                                        This Piece of Shit. 

At that time the Rogue Traders where...kind of a big deal.

Now we share something real. Something more than wine or co-drunkenness. We are both in the room with an awful famous person. The urine recedes into me. Nat, as we now know her, is only mildly famous. Still you wouldn't know it from the kid gloves her possy wears. Each of them seems to be gunning for fame by association. My friend and I laugh our asses off at the dancing each of them does to keep on her good side. She is a dictator, by mild fame only.

Then a slightly racist joke is made. So barely, barely racist it doesn't register to me. It is non-funny, it falls on its face. But the eternal Miss Bassingthwaigthe needs to make an issue of it.

'I just don't feel like that is, I just don't wanna be that way'

And a chorus of 'Sorry Nat' sings pedantically.

My friend and I drink on, laughing, one table over. It seemed pathetic, it was pathetic. At the urging of the ring-leder they leave after two bottles and not a one seemed happy. We leave after three, smiling and singing through the bowels of a Surry Hills Friday night.

NP.