Published Messenger Newspapers, Adelaide, March 3, 2004


LET’S FACE THE MUSIC AND DANCE


AT SOME stage in life you reach the point when you realise the future belongs to the young. Like when V8 means vegetable juice instead of hot cars. My epiphany came sometime between two recent concerts at the Entertainment Centre - one by Dionne Warwick and the other a joint effort by Robert Cray, Bonnie Raitt, Bryan Ferry, and Chrissie Hynde and The Pretenders. Both shows had ambulances parked out the back in case one of the ageing performers had a coronary - though surely not Chrissie, who appeared and sounded ever-young. Looking around, I realised almost everyone else was older than me. I felt out of place and self-conscious. Even the roadies looked grizzled and grey, wheeling around drum kits and organs on pre-set platforms. Castors must rank close to safety pins as useful inventions, along with ear plugs. A sign in the foyerr ead: “Complimentary ear plugs available from the cloak room.” People were asking for two pairs - one for the show and another for their partner's snoring later in bed. Singers can do things I cannot do - sing, for example. Or maybe I can sing but simply don't have the ticker to do it out loud. Recently I watched a TV program by eco-educator David Suzuki, showing how a heartbeat, rather than being a regular pulse, quickens and slows, rises and falls, in line with the body's changing needs. To illustrate the point, Suzuki plotted the beat of a healthy heart on a computer and then assigned a musical note to each beat. It came out sounding like a lyrical Bach cantata. Wow! A healthy body is literally singing its heart out, glad to be alive, if you could only tune in and listen as J.S. Bach apparently could. By comparison, an unwell heart sounded tone deaf, a series of unconnected off-notes, which deteriorated to become a single droning hum at the near-death end of the scale. All of this hit me as an overpowering revelation of music having been instilled in our hearts in advance of us coming into the world. It still doesn't mean I can sing. I cannot dance much, either. At the Dionne Warwick concert, a group of women who looked like the cast from Absolutely Fabulous were dancing in front of the stage, waving their arms around. A friend of mine thinks white girls wave their arms to try to mask their ungainly lack of rhythm. Black girls, he says, sway their hips, not their arms, and look much sexier for it. True enough. I later mentioned this theory to a notorious arm waver and she almost snapped my head off. “What about Hawaiian hula dancers? They wave their arms! Balinese dancers wave their arms! Indians wave their arms!” Whoah, sorry I mentioned it! I have a hundred and one things to worry about - sore feet, dying pot plants, untimely yawning - without brooding overly about my lack of song and dance ability. I've managed so far. And when my heart sings, it sings like a tom-tom.