2021 FADES AWAY

 
                           HOPE FOR 2022

     Family are of great value this time of year. They let you know that life does go on and there can be great moments to be had in your future. There are Christmas Parties. Here I look like I am ready for the French Revolution rather than a family gettogether.  

     For many 2021 has been one strange year where if you can work from home that is what you have done. This will continue well into 2022. Travelling interstate dodgy. Journeying overseas doubtful. It has been a damp Christmas where I am. This is better than bushfires.

          Some success with plays in 2021. Always good to have the right director and actors.

     I made some inroads with Dragon Queen in 2021. It was helped along by great cover art.

     There have been a few successful birding expeditions in 2021. Looking forward to doing more and with a new camera.

     I have fond memories of my trip to New Zealand. I visited the main north island and a few small islands. 

    I visited my friend New Zealand author Lyn McConchie and found out more about Norsewood, a small town where there are trolls and amazing socks. 

     What about 2022? More writing and photography. What else? I don't know.

            Talk to The Hand a Success

    At a small theatre, near the train station at Coniston, there was theatrical magic. It was Short and Sweet Illawarra Week 2. It ran from Thursday 2nd to Saturday the 4th of December. All these plays were expected to be shown earlier in the year but, thanks to the pandemic, that was not possible.

    Talk to The Hand was among the plays and, thanks to director Gabriela Gonzales and actors Matt Bonnici and Michelle Phillips, it got a lot of laughs. As a writer, I couldn't have asked for a better crew to bring my vision of hands that do talk to life. 

     One of the other plays that was staged I took a liking to was Clean Swap, a comedy about a street robbery that goes wrong. In it both Molly Turton and Johnny Chamberlain give great performances. 

      Another was Press Pray, about a woman seeking guidance in a church and encountering a call centre that drives her crazy. It stared Jasmin Shojai as the distressed woman and Toryn Biester as the prayer centre voice.  

     Socialite Networking I didn't take to Thursday night, but thought it ran really well on the Saturday. Set in the 1930s, it is about the rich and the want to be famous. It is a selfish world in which only fame matters. It starred Georgina Reed, Isabella Franklin and Tom Hadley.

      My sister, who saw Thursday night's performances with me, concluded that Spell it Out, starring Sally Evans, Ihaka Jones, Barbara Weir and Gabriela Gonzalez, was definitely worth a mention. The build up was slow but once it got going it was indeed great. It was about a woman who has the compulsion to spell everything out, a strange psychiatrist, a friendly nut job and a waitress  unhappy with her work.

       My only regret with the staging of Talk to The Hand is that it only ran for three nights. It would have been wonderful if it had gone on for two weeks. Even so, with three nights of very few empty seats, and an audience finding humour in Talk to The Hand, I did alright.