Leek and You Will Find

I was already in a mood last night before the creme fraiche pushed me over the edge. Reluctant to face another two hour stint tomorrow without access to the Koru Lounge I sent a cheeky request to Air NZ asking for a free pass based on the fact I'm flying heaps with them at the moment, I've blogged about their lounge twice and I always coil my headphones beautifully using the over-under method before leaving the aircraft.

They said it may take up to 72 hours to respond but it took Roberta less than an hour to shoot me down.

I know this has come out unreadably small but if I make it bigger it gets too wide and slips underneath my 21 members. All you really need to know is Roberta told me to take a flying leap and if I wanted access to the Koru Lounge in Melbourne I could pay $40 in Christchurch which only goes to prove she didn't even read my cheeky request properly. I shall take my revenge tomorrow by ordering at least four red wines on the flight and pissing in the aisle Jetstar styles.

To recover from the disappointment I decided to cook my meal of the moment, Jamie Oliver's Grilled Fillet Steak with the Creamiest White Beans & Leeks. I know Jamie is very busy stopping the world from getting fat but you'd think he'd have come up with a better name for this dish. I would have called Meaty Leeks, or Creamy Meaty Leeks, or My Meat's Bean Leekin' or Show Us Your Knob (of Butter). I went to Coles because I want to cook like a Masterchef cooks but it seems nobody on Masterchef wants to cook with leeks because they didn't have any. How can a supermarket claim to be super or a market when it doesn't have any bloody leeks! Everyone loves leeks! They're long and succulent and Welsh like Tom Jones.

Tom Jones about to take a leek.

I bet they have loads of leeks in the Koru Lounge. That's probably why there were none left at Coles. I walked to Woolworths which is much bigger than Coles and sure to have leeks even though Masterchefs never shop there. Sure enough there were leeks for Africa and butter beans, (which New World in Bishopdale Christchurch do NOT have at ALL....unless you're willing to buy four cans of Four Bean mix and pick out the butter beans...assuming that the butter beans make up a quarter of each can which is a big call, so you'd better buy five cans just in case), but everything turned to custard when it came to the creme fraiche.

Creme fraiche is never easy to find because nobody knows what it is. Do you look in the creme aisle or the fraiche aisle? Nobody knows. I think creme fraiche is French for fresh cream but it's not fresh it's sour and I don't like asking anyone where it is because I never know if I'm saying it correctly. I'm pretty certain your creme should rhyme with phlegm but should your fraiche rhyme with fresh or creche? I wandered around for a good 15 minutes muttering and blustering and banging into people with my basket of butter beans before pouncing on a hapless Woolworths employee stacking spuds.

'Excuse me, do you know where the creme fraiche is?' (I rhymed it with fresh this time.)
'I don't think we have any. It's one of those things we sometimes have for six months and then we don't.'

WTF?? Is there a season for creme fraiche? Do the creme fraiche cows dry up for six months? Is there a French fraiche cartel called OFEC that ruthlessly controls supply to drive up prices? He told me it's usually in the cream section but I knew it wasn't because I'd already screamed at the cream three times. I followed him and he couldn't find any either but told me to wait because his fresh produce supervisor could confirm the absence of creme fraiche once and for all. Then I saw this.

That's right....there was no creme fraiche!

Except for the one in my BASKET!

Hollllaaaaaaaaaaaa!

I had nabbed the last fraiche in Australia. It had been hiding at the back behind the cooking cream and now it was mine. I could see an old woman near death looking enviously at my creme fraiche and I thought about licking it and offering it to her to see if she'd take it but instead just slapped her in the face with my pack of 25 peel and seel envelopes. Wooly boy returned to confirm there was definitely no creme fraiche and I let him finish before producing the evidence to shame him for life. The look of utter bewilderment on his face was priceless. I think I could have pulled Ving Rhames out of my bumhole and he would have looked less surprised. Here's a photo of me at home full of the joys of creme fraiche.

Here's a photo of Jamie Oliver's Leeky Meat Bean Cream.

And you won't find that in the Koru Lounge.

Harry Potter and the Half-Arsed Wand

Here's a photo from the World premiere of Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part 2 in London.

Here's a photo from the New Zealand premiere of Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part 2 in Christchurch.

Here's a photo of two girls attending the New Zealand premiere after an encounter with the two people in the previous photo.

The press would have you believe that those girls were visibly upset due to the franchise that shaped most of their lives coming to an end but as shown by recent revelations in the U.K, the press cannot be trusted and spend all their time listening to your phone messages or pretending to be Hugh Grant on the blower.

The spend on the NZ premiere was equivalent to Emma Watson's boob tape budget which is probably why myself and Cared Jorbin (not his real name), were hired to be Lucius Malfoy and Severus Snape. I think we did a pretty good job with limited resources and Cared even kindly fashioned me a wand by snapping a bit of dowel he found in the Hoyts Riccarton storage room in half.

Not that the wand saw the light of day much. I ended up being the ticket gatherer at the end of the black carpet with both hands cupping a bowl for people to pop their tickets in. My splintery wand stayed firmly down my pants. My plosive repartee went like this...

'Welcome. Have you seen P......OTTER?'
'P...UT your ticket in my P......OTIONS P.....OT!'
'Join Slytherin.'
And repeat 299 times.

I admit my Potter knowledge was severusly limited (hilarious!). All I could remember was that Alan Rickman liked to scream Potter often and spit on his Ps as all classically trained RADA thesps are trained to do. The obligatory Shortland Street stars were also in attendance and to my horror some moron with a camera insisted I and the other actors have our photos taken with them. How the mighty had fallen. Many years ago when my career was hovering between rock bottom and the glass ceiling I was a star on Shortland Street for three episodes and here's a photo to prove it.

Now I was reduced to being a glorified usher with a bit of wood down his pants. I had the hump big-time and pulled as much of my black wig over my face to preserve via anonymity what was left of my dignity. I also had the hump because I really wanted to be Hermione Grainger and wasn't allowed to. I even spent minutes preparing a photo to prove I could pull it off...

 

...to no avail.

Justice for None

I'm sure you'll all be ecstatic to know the ancient dentists enjoyed our performance and even clacked along with our very heterosexual Village People medley to finish. Their ancientness had been oversold and some of them were under 60 and positively spritely so all in all, the show was enjoyed by all.

It was nice to be back in Auckland and catch a glimpse of party central being constructed for the Rugby World Cup. If you want to know what a party central looks like, it looks like this.

It's been nick-named 'The Cloud', 'The Tongue' or 'The Land of the Long White Condom Ribbed For Her Pleasure' and will play host to a finger-licking line up NZ musical talent, including Opshop, The Black Seeds, Katchafire, Greg Johnson and everyone's favourite party central party starters, The Feelers. Sigh. Oh my. Cry.

Regular readers will know all too well that The Feelers are my nemesis but after last weekend's performances in Warrnambool I have found another nemesis so now I have have two two nemesisesesisssessssssssss.....my precious. The best part of the weekend was doing an evening show with fantastic lovely actors in a place called Port Fairy, where sperm whales go to have sex while whale watchers masturbate furiously. We performed in a delightful little run down theatre and even better I found a copy of a script in the men's dressing room called, 'The World Bra Unclipping Championships At Garimba' that will be perfect for the premier production of my soon to be established Running Around In A Circle with No Pants On Theatre Company. I shall be holding auditions very soon so let me know if you're interested. Members of NZ Actors Equity will not be welcome, you must supply your own bra and sign a confidentially agreement on the casting couch before you leave. I do promise to warm my hands up though.

On Sunday we were scheduled to do two improvised musicals for children and flung open the doors to our tent expecting hundreds of eager happy little faces to be gazing adoringly up at us like deaf little people with glass eyes at a Jack Johnson concert. Jack is also a nemesis so now I have three nemesisesisessssisssssssses. There were no children. There were no adults. There was nobody there except for an old bewildered volunteer usher who looked like she had stepped straight out of the volunteer room at Auckland Zoo while I struggled into my Paddlepop Lion Costume. We were all bewildered as well until the old lady croaked 'Justice Crew' and disappeared into a cloud of helpful ancient lady dust.

Who were the Justice Crew? What is the Justice Crew? What had they done with our audience? Suddenly a deep bass rumble (approximately 68 hertz....I've done an audio engineering diploma) began to pulse and its submarine frequencies shook all our woofers to the bone. Doof...doof...doof....doof....thousands of children began screaming as if they were in the Koru Club and I was drawn irresistibly towards the music like a Germanic rat. I pulled back the piece of thin red fabric designed to baffle the doof from our tent and saw this...

The Justice Crew

Outrageous! Not only have half of them forgotten to put shirts on, three look like they are about to run in circles after their pants fall down. Those two at the front could be completely starkers. And this was classed as children's entertainment! The Justice Crew are a hip hop dance and pop music group from Sydney who won $250,000 on Australia's Got Talent last year but it looks like they spent all their money on colossal woofers rather than shirts and belts...just like Trey Songz....another nemesisesissessisseessieissieeisississmississippi. We were down to do two shows and the bloody Justice Crew were doing their shirtless hip hop circle dancing right when we were meant to be improvising stories about magical porridge while creating a train out of a bit of fabric and a red bucket. It was an unwinnable battle and every one of their low frequency doofs was like a punch to the heart.

For the second show I stood outside and tried to lure the children in. I got so desperate I lied to a group of four boys that I was a member of the Justice Crew and took my shirt off and dropped my pants but they just laughed at my milky feminine legs and insulted me with street-wise hand gestures I can never understand. As I stood there shirtless with my pants around my ankles in the middle of a children's festival I felt so alone and ran round in a circle crying at the injustice of it all.