Unfair dismissal

Hello Possums. For those of you not from Melbourne, we have a comedy duo on our drive-time radio: two young men stuck in school-boy mode called Hamish and Andy. They are pretty funny and very endearing, if not juvenile.

Their phone-in segments are usually a scream, yet lately the responses they are getting from the public are very unimaginative. Yesterday they offered to busk (for some purpose, maybe a charity, didn’t catch that part, but you can check their website or podcasts if you’re that interested) and wanted their listeners to suggest which busking discipline each of them should choose in their quest. We caught the start of the segment in the car on the way to the shopping center and the two calls that came in during this particular journey were very dull. The suggestions were: tap dancing and miming! Can you believe people would choose these for a radio program? The kids and I did a little brainstorm in the short time we had before we got out of the car and between us we thought of heaps more fun ideas, for example: playing the kazoo!

They also played repeats of another call in. This segment played listener’s stories in response to, What is the stupidest reason you have had for giving someone the flick? They repeated a bloke’s story (twice in our short journey) of how he left a woman because he heard her fart like a trooper.

Now apparently the repeated air play indicates that this is really funny. My response is: Is that the best people could come up with? I’m sure many of you out there have much funnier stories. I’m actually going to give it a go myself and tell you the story of the Super Hero Party (the third worst date ever):

Fearless Fly Gets the Flick

I met this guy at fencing. (I used to fence – still have my foil). I was in between serious relationships. That seemed to be my pattern in those days – two year relationships from the age of 16, one after the other. Although, this was a patch of uncertainty for me and I was also at the stage of my dating career that I was fed up with wasting time dating if I wasn’t really interested in the person. I had said to my friend Sue at a girly dinner in Lygon Street – if I think the next person isn’t someone I could imagine being with forever, I’m not even going to pursue it. I’m sick of dead-end relationships. My next boyfriend is going to be the one I want to marry!

This guy from fencing was new to the scene, and he seemed to have a good sense of humour and lots of energy in a bouncy, fun sort of way. He was cute without being handsome, and he didn’t immediately attract me in terms of sex appeal, but when he asked me on a date, I said yes because I thought I would at least have a bit of fun, and who knows where it could go… So, I was prepared to find out if we clicked or not.

He invited me to a Super Hero Party. This appealed to my fun side and I was open to meeting a new bunch of people and being introduced to his friends. So on the day of the date, I went to the fabric shop in the morning and purchased some fabric to make a super hero cape in lime green and yellow, and a yellow top edged in the same green fabric with a red ‘R’ on it. I had red basketball shorts, yellow tights, black boots, a black face mask and a short boyish hair cut at the time – put it all together and you get: Robyn, the Boy Wonder!

I spent the rest of the day making this outfit. At 8pm that evening I put it all on and waited for him to pick me up. I was pretty pumped, and ready for a party because the outfit looked great! My family were all home watching telly and I just lounged around as Robyn the Boy Wonder waiting and waiting, and waiting, and waiting…

I started to get frustrated, and concerned. I rang him and he said that he was putting his outfit together, sorry he was running late but he’d been at work and hadn’t had time, but that he’d be there to pick me up when he finished – very soon.

Waiting, waiting…

At 11pm he finally arrived. I opened the door to find him standing there as Fearless Fly. He had a tea-egg as a mask, opened up with the mesh sections over his eyes and the handles sticking upwards as antennae. He looked hilarious and perfectly Fearless Fly. (It’s worth getting a tea-egg from the kitchen and having a look at how funny this looks in the mirror, or getting someone else to model it for you, then you’ll get the gist of just how funny a sight it was).

Unfortunately, I had serious humour failure and by this stage was very tired and had been bored out of my skull with hanging around, not to mention my concern that I had an early start the next morning at my part-time job (cooking the brekky shift at the Pancake Parlour). Needless to say I was more than mildly unimpressed, and bordering on being totally pissed off. But, you try articulating these sentiments to Fearless the Fly – impossible, it can’t be done! So we went to the party.

It was at someone’s house in Nothcote. It had a large lounge/dining room area in the old 50’s post-war design, connected to a separate kitchen and a hall that you could walk around and end up back in the lounge again. It was dimly lit and there was a huge crowd, not particularly sober at this stage in the night. I wasn’t a big drinker anyway and there was no way I was going to catch up with this lot. He didn’t introduce me to any one, and I lost sight of him soon after we entered. There was no dancing and people were not that friendly. All I remember is talking to an overtly gay guy, who was nicely pickled by alcohol at this stage, about how much he adored Robyn the Boy Wonder.

I found my ‘date’ amongst the crowd in the kitchen at 12.30 and asked him to drive me home, citing my early start as the reason. He was surprised and if he was shitty, he disguised it well. He dropped me off and that was the last I ever spoke to him. I totally gave him the cold shoulder at fencing and he never approached me. I did hear through another fencer that he was perplexed about my behaviour, in a brief conversation that went like this:

Such-and-such can’t understand why you stopped talking to him. He thinks its very strange for a person to shut another person out for no reason.

My response: Well if he wants to know why, all he has to do is ask me.

But he never did and that was that!