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August 03, 2006
Has Absence Made The Heart and all that...?
Sorry...sorry...have been away in Aldeburgh, having singing lessons in preparation for being heard by producer Tim Marshall. Watch this space.
While I was there, I was a guest, or rather guests as I appeared as both myself and Madame Galina, on the live Radio Suffolk broadcast from the Suffolk Show. Er...I was expecting a bit of agriculture. Not the booths you get in the mall at Liverpool Street Station and Coes the clothes shop...
Matt Rawlings, on the board of Coes, remembered me from the fundraiser I did for Dance East when I was escorted onstage by a troupe of Coes-clothed male models to performed Gamzatti's solo. For some reason, the models all wandered downstage while I did the opening diagonal, got in my way, had to be shoo'd back upstage, did the same thing on the second diagonal and made me say F very loudly.
Matt gave me a Coes goody bag in honour of it.
Oh, me up against it does get a bit sweary. Last Christmas but one, I took part via Galina as The Queen Of Hearts in the Aspreys of Bond Street Alice In Wonderland installation. (Also with male models. Pattern emerging, I wonder?) Mr. Asprey asked me at regular intervals not to traumatise any more sprogs shouting "off with their heads", not to get them to eat the fake cakes at the Mad Hatter's Tea Party and not to tell them in quite that insinuating way that the Cheshire Cat was at the vets. He had me taken away when I danced to the accompaniment of the string quartet and shouted "not so fast, you f-ers" during the fouettes.
One of said models. Photo: Claudia Pesarini-Smith
I've been studying singing for the past year or so with Pamela Bowling. She came out of the Northern Music Societies hot house and later sang in the Aldeburgh Music Club when Benjamin Britten himself conducted it. I'm finally getting the hang of her view of Handel. The Messiah needs "more emulsion, as the painter might say, on your brush"; Samson "has just been blinded. Must you sound like you're at an Aldeburgh Golf Club do?"; and Jove needs "just sing the bloody phrase without mucking about, he's Chief God not a neurotic librarian".
I came back for a couple of days to watch Lauren Cuthbertson go through her Varna pieces, and was thrilled by what I saw. She clearly thrived on her work with Galina Panova. What a phenomenal achievement getting the Silver Medal is, not to mention Elisabeth Platel making such a fuss of her. Brava Lauren.
I managed to give an interview to a magazine called Full House, all the while believing it to be a theatre rag. To be fair to me, the interviewer didn't correct this misunderstanding. If you want to read it, don't go to WH Smiths; just have yourself committed to a Day Centre and you'll find it on a table in the corner with the AA meeting times, the Hygiene And Your Habit leaflets and the Papier Mache Outreach work with the lumps bitten out. Yes, I did go into the creative impetus behind Galina. But Matt Dibble, genius lad who I met at Lauren's first recital, got (over Pizza with Martin Bunhead Harvey) exactly what I meant about being haunted as a toddler by Pinky And Perky singing I Love Little Pussy, so the Full House journalist had no need to make me sound like Heather Pearl.
""My name is Madame Galina" I said to myself in a high-pitched foreign accent. Then I froze. I'd never heard the name before and had no idea why it had come into my head. Little did I know that my alter ego had just been born.""
Ouch!
Actually, I was worried about what Nicky Ness, director of Combined Services Entertainment, would say about the article, implying as it did that she employed a hair-brain in a hairnet to entertain the troops. She quaked with laughter, only getting serious when she saw that the article was accompanied by photographs that her press office should never had released, one of them in particular of a very high ranking officer. But she was unsympathetic about the way I thought I had been portrayed in the article.
"You know journalists by now..." she said.
And she has forbidden me to e-mail Full House with a True Life Confession about how Galina committed adultery with the aforementioned officer while in a diabetic coma.
Boo...
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