Madame Galina's Doings Diary

She Is Far From The Land...is a huge understatement: Galina had the biggest blast ever in Cape Town.

Kyle The Magnificent. The "stuff" that dreams are made on. And summed up Capetonians for me: geared up for a good time, passionate about his country, stands up to shake hands. Oh, and could easily lift my Nikya...

Kyle doing conservation work

Talking of which: I was in Cape Town to work...

The line up for the most successful Vodacom Funny Festival ever - Riaad Moosa, Marc Lottering, Ndumiso Lindi, Madame Galina, Chris Forrest (seated), Jonathan Hearns, Les Bubb, Eddy Cassar

Oh, and (sigh!) Nik Rabinovitz, who wasn't there for the line-up photo. Busy feeding the goat...

At an almost deserted Cape Town airport the night before last I got tearful all over the VAT-reclaim officer.

‘Sorry’ I snivelled ‘I’m really upset at having to leave Cape Town. And I’ve never claimed VAT back from any other country so am not sure what I’m entitled to and what I’m not. Here you are…’

I handed her a wadge of receipts, which she glanced at before returning.

‘You can only claim for things that you’re actually taking out of the country, sir’ she advised, sitting there on her revolving high chair.

‘So nothing I’ve eaten then?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Or drunk?’

‘No, sir. So these receipts for…’

‘My bar tabs at the Baxter Theatre.’

‘They’re not relevant, sir.’

How could she say that? I got teary. Again. Eddy Cassar, genius behind the Vodacom Funny Festival, had set me off fifteen minutes previously when he dropped me at Departures and thanked me for being a star. And now look. My bar-tabs not relevant she was saying?

The view from the entrance to the Baxter. Right after you pass the sign saying Please Close The Doors And Help Keep The Birds Out.

Did she not know how many fab people I’d met in the Baxter Bar at curtain down? Ewan Strydom, one of the Super Model guys out there, one of Madame Galina’s most glamorous press-ganged Solors ever, chortly and friendly and introducing me to his gorgeous wife Adrienne, and to Karl the Sangoma.

Solor...and Gamzatti, frankly - typical personable Capetonians

‘What, a real Sangoma ?’ I’d asked, stopping crunching my twenty-five pence a packet bar snack.

Karl nodded. There was a strand of light pulsing from in front of his left eye to his right cheek that that seemed not to be something physical, rather something he carried round with him.

‘Did you have all the illness stuff, the Calling?’ I asked.

He nodded again. ‘Thwasa, it’s called. I got very ill but knew that rather than get medical help I had to let me body fail to the point of my organs collapsing. Then I got my health back and along with it came the ability to heal.’

‘Amazing.’ I took another gulp of eighty-pence a glass Vintage Champagne. ‘Though you wouldn’t need some of the older Sangoma skills any more, would you? Breaking witch’s spells or finding lost cattle…’

‘Not so much, maybe.’

‘Did you sacrifice the goat when your initiation was over?’

‘Yes.’

See? Does this sound not relevant to anyone?

Similarly, does meeting Paul Snodgrass, the Cape Town John Inverdale, who scooped me up for trips to pubs, comedy clubs, the enchanting Old Biscuit Mill Market and to his parents for Sunday lunch (how kind is that?) sound not relevant?

The Great Snoddy

The Old Biscuit Mill

Long Street, where the Zula Bar hosts comedy nights

Paul, one of the top sports analysts in South Africa, also does stand up in the rant style. I howled at his F’s a plenty take no prisoners but take left 'nad out set at Zula the first Monday of the tour; and on the last Sunday was beside myself at his young Lauren Bacall look-a-like mother Beverly presiding over a Blonde lace and family silver laid table, tactfully ignoring the chicken being braai’d (barbecue’d) on indirect heat with a three-quarters full can of Vinthoek up its arse, but absolutely down on Paul.

‘Paul: knife and fork together if you’ve finished, please. And, no, you are not ‘stuffed’, what you meant to say is: “Mother, that was delicious and I’ve had enough” and ‘Must we have that word so often on a Sunday?’

Of one of her fellow Book Club members Beverley said, ‘Not wishing ever to be unkind, but he repeats and repeats the same anecdotes until I long for Alzheimer’s- for either him or me.’

She’ll be in Amersham in August. I’m meeting her at Marylebone Station for a schmodel and coffee in Oxford Street. Can’t wait.

Cokey Falkow, who I also met through Paul, will be “coming through” London in November on his way to LA. Be at the barrier. See a star. Cokey improvised a breathtaking fifteen minute set at Zula including a Disneyfied take on premature ejaculation – a moment to rank alongside Marianne bumping into Willoughby, Fonteyn’s broken bourrés as Marguerite and Mary Schneider yodelling the Tritsch Tratsch Polka.

Cokey Falkow

All this not relevant? Not to mention that the Baxter Bar is where I first got chatting to fellow turn at the Vodacom Funny Festival Chris Forrest; planning a power walk from Place On The Bay in the direction of Llandudno to look at dussies. For those of you may not know: a dussie is one evolutionary step away from the elephant; yet might be the offspring of a grizzly bear and a dormouse.

Derek Dussie

Chris Forrest is the South African equivalent of Jack Dee, probably, though his material is filthier. He drove down from his home in Johannesburg for the Festival and from day two made sure I saw something of Cape Town other than the inside of a four-star serviced apartment on the beach (if you please) or the view of the Atlantic through the pillars of Café Caprice.

‘Have you seen the Dutch Fort?’

‘No.’

And off we’d go. Me being horrified all round the museum at the way the Dutch had raped South Africa.

‘At least when the Romans invaded Britain we got roads, sanitation and sex – from the Dutch Cape Town got little more than gabled churches.’

‘It wasn’t just the Dutch’ Chris said. ‘It was the Portugese, the French, your lot…’

‘I know. And I think they were all heinously in the wrong to come and colonise. So what if it’s on the way to trade routes in the East? You don’t just arrive and take over and expect all the indigenous people to join in nicely with it.’

‘It isn’t quite as simple as that’ said Chris, smiling. ‘Would you like to see the slave houses this afternoon?’

‘Oh my God, they’re not still?’

‘Former slave houses.’

‘I knew that…’

Because many of the indigenous South Africans told the Dutch where to go, the Van Der-Brains had to import slaves.

‘Beautiful colours on the façades’ I commented as Chris and I tittup’d through narrow cobbled streets. ‘Almost makes up for the dullness of the bloody gabling.’

Each morning thereafter Chris arranged an excursion. We took the revolving cable car up Table Mountain, the chuck-up inducing boat-trip to Robben Island, the N1 out to Stellenbosch for wine tasting and lunch with Julian Westoll AKA Dr Yeast Extract on account of his research and AKA Angel From Buffy on account of his prettiness. I was on my own going to the hairdresser in The Bay Hotel, however.

Wendy on reception at Place On The Bay rang to book an appointment, after I confided that my hairnets weren’t sitting properly and that my death the previous night from the snake bite had dislodged my tiara.

‘Before they decide what you need and how much it will cost’ Wendy informed me ‘they say they need to see your hair in person.’

I bimbled along the prom to the hotel, passing It Boys and Girls converging on Caprice, Gum Boot Buskers and bead-work street sellers, looking across Victoria Road every few seconds at the opening chords of the sunset.

Hoorah for this, frankly!

The Bay Hotel

When I saw the Bay Hotel set back from the Victoria Road, I was glad that I’d stocked up on four mix and match smart casual outfits from Woolworths, Cape Town’s M and S, for the equivalent of thirty-seven pounds forty-nine pence and wasn’t wearing my old jeans and CSE T-shirt. When Shaidaih, head stylist, saw my hair in person she flinched and, without taking her eyes off me, said to the two assistants, ‘Get me the colour chart for this one.’

There was a two-person pile up in the bolt for the cupboard that had the colour chart in it.

‘Always calm and dignity, girls, please’ Shaidaih breathed.

Moving with the languorous yet dangerous gait of a panther, she waved me to the nearest sink and continued with her present client: a whey-faced woman in a beige twin set, no pearls, and a face-framing bob. Backcombing the bob and noting the amount of grey re-growth, she said, ‘Mrs. Palmerston, now, I don’t want you coming back to me after this holiday same as every year with your hair so heavy from the stuff you put in it that we have to work at it for a month’s worth of appointments before we can make you glamorous. Okay?’

‘I don’t put anything different in it, I…’

‘Every year you tell me that and every year you come back with the same old heavy hair. I don’t need to hear it again. No stuff that you don’t buy from this salon must go in your hair, do you understand?’

‘Yes, all right.’

Shaidaih winked at me and asked, ‘You had your hair done in a foreign country, right?’

‘I live in one’ I replied, ‘England.’

Shaidaih sucked in her breath and gave Mrs. Palmer a look that said, ‘See now?’

A wash, head massage, colour, cut, style and all but uninterruptable comic monologue from Shaidaih cost me fifteen pounds.

Each afternoon saw me back at the Place On The Bay for a pre-show rest. Staring out at the sea, or watching the black police-women on Victoria Road. A product of Affirmative Action, these women patrol in sevens up and down the prom. They’re meant to patrol in pairs at intervals, but you never see them in less than sevens, sauntering along singing and cackling, wearing their uniforms in the way children wear clothes out of granny’s dressing-up box. Occasionally, they grab a homeless person to join in their walk with them, like the Dodo cajoling Alice into joining the Jolly Caucus Race. Otherwise, the only time I saw them not either sauntering with or without a homeless person in attendance was when one of them got some gum stuck on the bottom of her uniform boot and all the other six screamed and fled onto the beach. Meanwhile, the real policing is done (at the private expense of the shop, hotel and restaurant owners opposite) by Congolese illegal immigrants under the supervision of a brutish and clinical Afrikaner with a lizard eye and a circus strong-man moustache.

View from my balcony at Place On The Bay

VAT-Woman asked to see some of the goods that I was taking out of the country. I opened my suitcase. On top of my tartan pyjamas was the pass that got me free-lunch each day at the Green Dolphin Restaurant on the Waterfront.

‘I had fantastic Calamari at the Green Dolphin’ I blubbed at the VAT-Woman ‘overlooking Quay 4 with Table Mountain just off to the right. Table Mountain’s its own weather micro system, but I expect you already know that. And I swear it gives off some magical power that explains the number of quadruple pirouettes in my sets. And at the Green Dolphin I had line-fish, brown lentil soup or the most perfect beef-burgers - only very occasionally having a beef-burger as we don’t want my Lycra getting overstretched, now do we? And the seals would hoist themselves out of the sea and bask on the jetty next to the boat sailed by the toothless fisherman from Durban. And one day an American woman decided a seal – Chris Forrest told me this – on the jetty must be distressed and climbed down to push it back into the sea. I don’t think she grasped that it was a mammal. And it bit her nose off.’

The Waterfront...where the seal incident took place

See? Seals scare even the biggest and brave

‘Oh, dear' said VAT-Woman.

I nodded and bent down to rummage again beneath my pyjamas, finding my new make-up bag full of my new make-up.

‘Ohhhh’ I wailed quietly. ‘This was given to me by Charmaine our assistant stage-manager because my old one went walkabout.’

Charmaine would nightly quote from my Galina set. Instead of saying Testing, Testing One Two Three into Marc Lottering’s mic before she placed it off-stage she would say Three Brushes Front, three brushes side and travelling left: Pas De Chat, Pas De Chat, Pas De Chat.

‘Chairmaine pointed out that I’m a perfectionist like Maria Callas. She didn’t say like Callas, actually. But every night during Iphigenia at La Scala in 1954, Callas would reach the same step on a downward hurtle on the same high note. And Charmaine told me that Craig Febuary on follow spot told her that when I ran down the auditorium stairs at all twenty-three shows, I would reach the same step each night to admonish the audience: Keep the applause going, shit heads, it's a long way to that stage. So it is like Callas isn't it, really?'

Craig February, who can have me in his beam any time he likes, frankly

VAT-Woman didn’t respond; too busy entering figures into a machine that was half PC half premature baby incubator.

‘And here’s one of the lipsticks I bought for the equivalent of ninety-seven pence’ I said. ‘But ssh! - Chris Forrest told me not to keep harping on about the exchange rate, as it’s only good for us and not for you.’

The exchange rate made me very happy. My morning Chocacino with flake at Café Caprice cost seventy pence; Eggs on Toast one pound sixty. Nice Rosé cost eighty pence, excellent Champagne three pounds seventy. Interestingly, Horlicks cost about the same as it does in Sainsbury’s. But it was the lippy for ninety-seven pence that really thrilled.

‘I got the lipstick at Dis-Chem with Chris’s fiancée Tabitha the day she bought her wedding shoes for eighteen pounds in Nine Zero and I got recognised’ I told VAT-Woman. ‘How cool was that? And I got recognised at Guguletu by some people who had been to the show.'

Vodacom funds projects in Guguletu and the other townships, as dictated by executive Priscilla AKA Dame Corporate Conscience, who understands just how vital is the light of aspiration in people's lives.

Mzoli's, Guguletu, the best braai on the planet. As the Sutu Vodacom employee remarked, 'But it loses its flavour if you don't eat it out of the single pot along with everyone else...'

I also got recognised (we're on a roll here) by the pharmacist in Camps Bay. On day two of the tour, my fouetté-leg arthritis went bonkers; I found I’d forgotten my medication, so I gingered along the prom to the shopping precinct.

‘I do something physical and need the strongest stuff you can give me for it, please’ I said to Alan, the pharmacist.

He searched the shelves and presented me with Voltaren tablets.

‘These are the strongest I can give you without prescription’ he said. ‘But what is the physical thing that you do?’

‘I’m an act in the Vodacom Funny Festival.’

Alan fluttered. ‘Are you by any chance the ballerina?’

‘I am.’

He looked around and replaced the Voltaren. ‘I shouldn’t do this, of course – but you can have a suppository!’

Now back to the lipstick. I told VAT-Woman, ‘It’s the only lippy I’ve ever found that gives the exact Fonteyn Tea Rose gash. Copying Margot’s hairnet-cum-snood look took me long enough, frankly.’

VAT-Woman stopped typing to acknowledge the Pink Blush I was holding out, and motioned for me to hand over my make-up receipts.

‘Hang on’ I said ‘I have a couple more in my wallet.’

My wallet was booby-trapped, sadness-wise, with business cards given me by people interested in flying me back out to launch web-sites, restaurants, even a barbecue aka braai.

As VAT-Woman manically typed amounts directly from my three-page long Dis-Chem receipt, I held up a business card for her to not look at. ‘I met this guy, Duncan Woods, here’s his card, through Paul Snodgrass. Paul’s like our John Inverdale, and he’s a great mate of Chris’s. He and Chris both came up through on the comedy circuit together, with Nik and Riaad. Ndmisu’s a bit younger. Marc’s a bit older. Paul Snodgrass took me on the first Saturday to the Fireman’s Arms to watch the Springboks game against Italy. I don’t think Italy should be allowed to play in whatever that tournament is because they’re shit at Rugby but play dirty – even I could see that – and what if they injured Francois Steyn or something?’

With us in the Fireman’s Arms for the Springbok game were the Vida E Caffé boys. Check out www.caffe.co.za for a shot of lifestyle with traditional music. Shaun, Lloyd and Grant at the helm. Shaun thrilled me by calling out ‘beer for the Ballerina’ when Paul told him who I was. ‘I haven’t seen the show’ Shaun said ‘but they were raving about you today on Good Hope FM.’

This would have been DJs Tyrone or Sugar, which is so down with the kids compared with Sunday afternoon plugs on Sally’s Chilled Sunday on BBC Radio Suffolk.

Shaun, Lloyd and Grant are brilliant entrepreneurs and look as though they’re carved from marble.

‘The men here are huge aren’t they?’ I pondered at VAT-Woman. ‘Take Duncan Woods – sorry, that’s who I was talking about, isn’t it? – Duncan’s the captain of the South Africa Water Polo team and we shook hands on me coming out to dance at the launch of his website www.thesportingnetwork.co.za. That kind of site is something they don’t have yet over here – and he’s a curvy lad. But, do you know what’s interesting is that though the men here take old school chauvinism to glorious heights, it’s obvious that they all have a proper moisturising routine.’

I had only one negative experience with machodom out there, onstage with the HR of Coca Cola. He thought it would be funny to try and knock me off balance when he was meant to be supporting my pirouettes. Off-mic I warned him once. I warned him twice. Then I belted him one across the ear.

"The thwack was audible from my sound desk" Josh told me afterward.

We love you, Josh

Also in my wallet among the make-up receipts was the fold out-business card for the Aquila Game Reserve.

Added to the list of sponsors’ treats that included a month’s stay at Place On The Bay, free lunches at the Green Dolphin and a visit for three absolute blissikins treatments at the Mangwanani Spa was an overnight trip to Aquila.

‘And within an hour of starting out on our first drive’ I told VAT-Woman, abacusing away, ‘we had seen The Big Five: hippo, lion, elephant, rhino, buffalo and springbok, giraffe - even a pair of turtle doves, actually. The people in the drive after us said the dominant male lion put his paws on their vehicle, luckily on the opposite side from where they were sitting. They were only two of them on the drive, you see. Our vehicle was full, though, so there would have been someone sitting at that strategic opposite side. I’d vote in retrospect for Les, our mime to have been sitting there. Some Americans had been staying at Aquila the week before us and they were warned and warned and warned not to leave the gate open leading into their enclosure. Didn’t listen. Woken up by a hippo bellowing and staring at them in bed.’

I felt I wasn’t doing too badly now, sobs-wise. Till I caught sight of the name Colin on a receipt for Chocacino and Eggs On Toast from Café Caprice.

‘What now?’ asked VAT-Woman with a non-committal expression on her face.

‘Colin is a waiter at Caprice and he came to the show and I’d promised not to get him on the stage as he’s shy…’

Colin and tired me

Colin doesn’t so much talk to his customers as riff.

One morning, in his back of the neck Afrikaans accent, he said, ‘They’re all so big here on your five year plan, having to go on from where you are. But I don’t buy it. Where I’m going to be in five minutes is enough. In December, here’s a plan, I’m going through to Paris to stay with my sister Amanda then to go off on a ship to work as a deck-hand, croupier; space and seeing places.’

He wiped up my latest Chocacino spill and went on, ‘I hadn’t seen Amanda in years till a short while ago. I was adopted out of a children’s home and had been separated from her when I was tiny anyway. And I was working in Sea Point and hanging out in Paramount and she was having her hair done next door and we bumped into each other. Our blood spoke. I just knew she was my sister. We both were dead quiet for a long time. We just, like, ‘How’s it going?’ Just obvious questions: ‘What do you do?’ ‘Let’s hook up sometime.’

He nodded seaward.

‘See the baby whale?’

I did. And bollocks to it, frankly, I was enthralled. ‘Go on’ I said.

‘I knew I had this older sister, and there she was. After being out of any real home there was another person from my blood family to connect to. I gave her my number. We didn’t know each other at all. It took a while to get to know one another. She had been adopted by people from Holland and they were killed in a car crash when she was seventeen. Which is the age I was when my own adoptive parents – I’m not going into this one – showed me the door. My mother wouldn’t have done that. She tried to stop it, I know she did. But he put me out. She said she would sort it out for me to go back. There was a long corridor at the Council Youth Centre – where I had to go back or would go on the streets – with a phone at the end. Three weeks after I got put out, I phoned my mother and asked if I could go back. And she’s like, ‘No you can’t’; and I melted right away on the floor. I’ll never forget that picture.’

I asked where he went.

‘Stayed at the CYC till I was eighteen when I ran away’ he said. ‘I worked as a waiter and barman as now and tried to stay at friends’ places. Sometimes I could, sometimes not. Then I slept in abandoned houses. One important thing was not to go into a feeling of stress because the universe will chuck negative things back at you.’

‘Did you really believe that at that age?’

‘Yes I did. Still do. But the main thing for me back then, honestly, was to keep my work clothes clean. Whenever friends’ parents were away they would let me use their washing machine.’

When the Caprice crowd came to the show along with Colin, they were screechingly adamant that I manhandle him onto the stage to audition to play Solor. But I’d promised not to and didn’t. However, Colin sauntered down from his seat at the back of the Baxter to take part.

His Solor was straight out of the Wild West with hop-a-long steps and lasso. Afterward in the bar I asked what his motivation had been for this.

‘Champagne, Sambuca, more Champagne, Jack Daniels and Lime’ he said. ‘Why? What’s it meant to be?’

‘Indian.’

‘Oh.’

During the run of twenty-three shows a number of potential Solors played their warrior as Zulu.

‘On dodgy ground there’ Chris Forrest commented. ‘You don’t want to piss Zulus and their pride off.’

He went on to tell of a Johannesburg comedian who quoted evidence for the great leader Shaka Zulu having been gay.

‘He got death threats. In the end, he had to go and sacrifice goats with the Zulus to appease them.’

The ultimate press-ganged Solor

As Eddy Cassar drove me away from Camps Bay to the airport for my flight home, I looked back at the sea, at the roof of Caprice, clutching the once-read copy of Spud I bought for thirty-four pence from the library surplus stock.

‘Iestyn’ Eddy said, ‘how could I make this coming out here to do the Vodacom Funny Festival better? What could I improve?’

‘Honestly?’ I asked.

‘Yes. Tell it straight.’

‘Nothing.’

On the plane, with a G and T scotching my bereft state, I sorted the receipts and cards in my wallet and came across Brad Pohl’s business card. Brad has connections to the Harare Festival and wants to hook me up with them.

‘Though I wonder if they’d be quite ready for Madame Galina there,’ he said.

I would wonder about going to Zimbabwe. (One of my early-doors Solors in Cape Town was the son of one of Mugabe’s commissioners. He said that Mugabe is indeed evil; but is hugely charismatic.)

Two things I wish for: oil to be struck under Mugabe’s palace to ‘justify’ NATO in taking him out. Second, that South Africa will learn from the outrageous mess that is Zimbabwe. Too many skilled people are emigrating from South Africa, while millions of refugees pile over the borders. And having fallen for the place, I pray that things will get better.

Beverly Sills (lots of Beverley action today, hey?) said:

“Art is the signature of a civilisation.”

In Cape Town I was privileged to work with a truly great artist: Marc Lottering, MC of the Vodacom Funny Festival. If Ian Hislop and Joyce Grenfell had mated, Marc would be the result. Grab yourself more life: discover him. I'll now go to one of Marc's shows for the same reason I would, say, re-read Austen, listen to Rosa Ponselle or watch Fonteyn’s Cinderella on the Producer’s Showcase DVD.

Marc gets constant offers to work for great chunks of time abroad.

‘And the money they offer’ he says. ‘But my heart is in South Africa. And so much of my inspiration. I can’t leave. I just pray.’

So must we all.

Anyway, shut up now. I’ve sat here for two days writing this. My knee has seized up again.

Passe-moi le under-counter suppositories...