Well, that might have been a bit unfair of me. Madonna can act her way out of a paper bag, after all. OK, so maybe she can’t act her way very far out of one - but still, she managed to successfully create a character which was separate from herself, whom you could more or less believe in. You didn’t keep thinking “Ooh, that’s Madonna!” all the way through. Although she was onstage almost all the time, she didn’t hog the limelight and she didn’t upstage the rest of the cast – you felt that the production was a proper team effort. Basically, I thought that she just about got away with it.

I had to admire her bravery. No, really. If you’re one of the most famous women in the world, but with an unfortunate reputation for making terrible films, why would you choose to do this? To put yourself on the line night after night, in a small, intimate theatre, risking considerable ridicule for all the obvious reasons? As with her musical performances, you could see that she was stretching her talents to the very limit - and I like that about her. She’s a tryer.

The last performance of Up For Grabs is on Saturday – there were only three more shows after the one that we saw. Maybe the knowledge that this is the final week helped galvanise the production; certainly, many of the weaknesses that I was expecting were barely evident. Madonna’s voice, for example. Yes, it was a little bit on the quiet side, but her vocal projection improved the during the night, and sitting up in the Grand Circle (second row, dead centre, perfect view), we had no problems hearing her. We could also see that she needs her roots re-touching, but that’s by the by.

The play? Well, it was an okay little satire on the New York art world, in particular on super-rich art collectors who buy for all the wrong reasons. It was quite funny, if a little thin and obvious at times. A light comedy, essentially – and there’s nothing wrong with that. The supporting cast were solid, and the staging was just great, with some imaginative use of giant video screens. From our vantage point at the top of the theatre, these screens were particularly effective, as they were frequently suspended above the actors, sometimes relaying real-time footage from dimly lit areas at the back of the stage.

It was reasonably intelligent light entertainment, which did its job perfectly respectably, and a genuinely exciting and fascinating chance to observe a huge, iconic star at close quarters. I got my money’s worth, and had a bloody good evening. Can’t say fairer than that.

After the show, Buni (a huge fan) said “Come on – we can’t miss this. Let’s go round to the stage door.” Well goodness me, what a spectacle awaited us. Maybe 150 people were crammed into the alleyway behind the Wyndhams theatre, held back by security, straining for a glimpse of Her Madgesty. Out she came, head down, not looking round for a second, straight across the alleyway – and straight into the stage door of the Albery Theatre, which backs onto the Wyndhams.

Suddenly, 150 very excited, giggly people were charging back towards us at full pelt. Buni twigged before I did. “Come on – quick! Round the corner!” We joined the throng, and dashed round onto St. Martin’s Lane, to the front of the Albery. There was a bigger crowd here – maybe 300 or so – lined up on either side of the pavement, held back off the road by half a dozen police officers. A huge whoop went up, as Madonna exited straight into a black limo – windows completely blacked out – which sped straight off down St. Martin’s Lane towards Trafalgar Square. As Buni said (once we’d finished whooping – well, you can’t always help yourself), it was a pure Princess Diana moment. Hilariously silly and bonkers, as I think most people there realised (for a bunch of hysterical stalkers, we were a relatively mature crowd).

The night progressed.

---

Our choice of late night venue was ultimately very simple: we chose the only place within walking distance of where we were staying. This was Substation South, who were holding their weekly Boot Camp night. “Masculine dress code”, the blurb said, and gave some helpful examples: leather, rubber, denim, military, skinhead, sports, jocks. Hmm. And here were Buni and I, still dolled up for the theatre. Would we get in? I was wearing denim and a checked shirt (no surprises there then), but the denim was Diesel and the checked shirt was Paul Smith – distinctly borderline. As someone pointed out to us in Comptons earlier on: when they say “denim”, they actually mean George Michael 1980s tight stonewashed denim, not the lovely, dark, low-slung, very slightly flared Noughties version. Meanwhile, Buni was all sleek and svelte in a black short-sleeved shirt and trousers. Well, black does equal “masculine” in these circles, right? It's not as if it was a dangerous, threatening, dick-wilting shade of pastel - for I well understand how pastels can throw those butch numbers right off their strokes. (Shriek! Pastel! I’ve lost my mojo!)

They let us in. As well they might have done, as Boot Camp wasn’t exactly heaving. I’ve been to Substation South a few times before, but generally for Queer Nation on a Saturday night (lovely, swishy, funky, sassy, classy, “proper” house music). This was very different. Not having been to a full-on London gay club in yonks, I had forgotten that all that pumping, hard 'n fast, dark, oompoom oompoom stuff still existed, and was still being churned out by the gallon. Depressingly, there had not been one discernable musical advancement in the genre since “my day”. Shut your eyes, and it could have been any year from about 1995 onwards.

Actually…open your eyes, and you would have had the same problem. Like Teds, Mods, Rockabillies, Punks, Ravers and Goths, gay male fetish queens do not change much over the years. The same old uniforms, overtly sexual in intent, but strangely unsexy in their effect. The key word here is possibly “uniform”. If you’re going to dress up as a figure of fantasy, then shouldn’t you add your own personal twist somewhere down the line? Off-the-peg erotica betrays a lack of imagination, and there is nothing less sexy than a lack of imagination. A sense of playful fun is also fairly essential, I would have said – and yet this was all being taken so bloody seriously by the scattered ranks of silent cruisers, lined up against the wall, staring into the middle distance.

Not really my scene, then. Still, I did my best to get into the spirit of the occasion. The shirt provocatively opened itself up and the belt was daringly whipped off, as I went for the whole low-slung bum cleavage effect, so au courant in urban homosexualist circles these days. Well, it’s one of the looks that I go for, at any rate.

Adapt and survive, right?

Right.

Ker-CHING.

Dot dot dot.

As cultural barometers go, our old friends Dymbel and Dymbellina are generally pretty reliable - especially when their respective opinions concur.

A couple of weeks ago, Dymbel and Dymbellina went down to London, to watch Old Mother Ritchie in Up For Grabs at the Wyndhams theatre. They left in the interval, and didn't come back. Apparently, Joan Collins also did the same thing not so long ago.

It is already abundantly clear that Her Royal Madgeness could not act her way out of a paper bag. I mean, we all know that, don't we? But that's not the point, is it?

Therfore, I hereby resolve to stick the play out to the bitter end, no matter how dire. Full report to follow tomorrow night, hopefully.

Celebrity Angst.

Despite being one of the world’s most incurable third-hand namedroppers, I have actually had very little direct experience of famous people, or even semi-famous people for that matter. On the rare occasions where I have been in the company of someone well known, I have found the experience rather stressful. Self-consciousness consumes me. I start over-thinking my responses and reactions. Nothing comes out quite right. False notes are struck - stupid, kick-yourself-later comments are delivered – and I eventually lapse into dumbstruck, simpering silence, longing for the encounter to be over.

Why is this? Partly, it is the desire to impress someone who has already impressed me. I want to be noticed and remembered. And of course, when we deliberately set out to shine, we are prone to fall flat on our faces. Conversely, there is a great counter-anxiety that I will come across as yet another fawning sycophant, dazzled by fame, blinded to the person behind the celebrity. Thus, I try to affect nonchalance, as if the famous person were just another regular human being (ha!). And yet, the famous person is already well aware that their public image precedes them. Viewed in this way, pretending that the fame doesn’t exist could almost be construed as an insult. It’s a social paradox. And so I fall between stools – trying to be liked while trying to act cool, trying to ignore the fame while also wishing to acknowledge it. No wonder that false notes are struck.

Furthermore, the famous person and I are starting from unequal positions. The famous person knows nothing about me; I know (or think I know) plenty about the famous person. I have to remind myself that, as familiar as they may look, I should treat them with the same amount of polite distance as anyone else whom I have just met. However, the automatic reflex instinct veers towards over-familiarity – towards greeting them like an old friend. This happened to me once when a well known comedian unexpectedly opened the front door of my sister’s shared house – I greeted him effusively, and only then remembered that we were in fact total strangers. You can’t easily back-pedal from such situations.

Do you have any tips for socialising with celebs? Chig (who sometimes interviews celebs) tells me that his secret is to imagine them naked.

I shall bare it in mind.

Boom boom!

As it seems a shame not to share the fruits of this morning's research, here are a couple more Vietnamese snippets.

From A Day in the Life of Hang Bo Street:

From Learning Experiences In Hanoi:Other Vietnam links:

• Destination Vietnam - a collection of travel articles.
  
• Lonely Planet guide to Vietnam.
  
• Vietnam travel tips.
  
• More Vietnam links.

"In Vietnam, everything is illegal and anything is possible..."How glad I am that we will be visiting Vietnam as part of an organised tour group. Having just finished working my way through this guide for independent travellers - alternately hilarious and terrifying - I know that we could never, ever have hacked it on our own. The whole country sounds quite, quite mad.

Oh yeah - and how about this for a menu:- from Valerie Schumacher's travelogue (and excellent photo-journal).

Blind Psychic Gropes Buttocks To See Future.

6 Brookside, Cambridge. 1979.
Academic Centres, Students and Young Professionals

Ah, the faux maturity of the Senior Sixth. Each Autumn, a few sixth-formers would stay on an extra term at school, beyond A-levels, in order to sit entrance exams for Oxford or Cambridge. For some of us, a flat was provided, situated outside the school grounds. This was a thrilling first taste of adult independence for us – mainly because we could now sneak out to the pub and back, without having to run the gamut of inquisitive housemasters along the way.

We were a disparate group – roughly half a dozen in all - thrown together at random inside the flat. I shared my large room with Andy, a day boy, and so had the place to myself at night. Andy and I got on well, and socialised with the same crowd of Sixth Form Leys boys and Fifth Form Perse School girls. For a while, our particular hang-out was Martin’s Coffee Bar on Trumpington Road – 4 o’clock every weekday, where seven or eight of us would cram into a wooden booth, making four cups of tea between us last an hour, smoking, gossiping and giggling. It was all sweetly platonic, with almost no romances developing between the boys and the girls. Hanging out together was perfectly sufficient for us.

One Saturday night, Andy and I threw a party in our room. We didn’t bother inviting most of our flatmates – they belonged to the high-flying school-prefect crowd, and we thought they would only treat our motley little gathering with superiority and contempt. Simultaneously, the other half of the flat had arranged a large sit-down dinner for the same night, and hadn’t bothered to invite us either. We all met rather sheepishly in the kitchen, stirring our respective cauldrons of mulled wine. Our side was boozier, noisier, more fun, and won hands down. I drank too much (for the first time in my life, but not the last), spewed everywhere, and was laid out on my bed underneath newspapers – bringing the party to a swift end.

It was the autumn of 2-Tone (Specials, Madness, Beat, Selecter), of Video Killed The Radio Star, of Lena Martell warbling “One day at a time, sweet Jesus” on Top Of The Pops, of Public Image Limited’s astonishing Metal Box, of gigs at the Corn Exchange (The Undertones, The Damned), of evenings drinking Southern Comfort at The Anchor, The Mill, The Fountain, The Eagle, of experimenting with hash in an abandoned garage, of skinny ties and Oxfam shops, of feeling on top of the heap, with an assured bright future stretching ahead. The fact that I failed my entrance exams to Christ’s College Cambridge barely registered on my radar. My place at Nottingham University was already guaranteed. I was on my way, outwards and upwards, eagerly looking forward, accumulating and savouring each new small freedom.

Jump to next station.

Labels: stations

A couple of gruffly pervy Teutonic curiosities for you this time round…

The Troubled Diva Old Curiosity Box - Item 28.
Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft – Der Mussolini (1981)

A clear influence on the likes of Fischerspooner in 2002, this track has somehow rejuvenated itself in recent months, so that it once again sounds fresh and relevant. An attempt to satirise the perceived “fascism” of the disco (this being quite a big issue with arty radical types back in the day), it ends up being a meaty dancefloor stomper in its own right.

The Troubled Diva Old Curiosity Box - Item 29.
Laibach (Germania) – Sympathy For The Devil (Who Killed The Kennedys) (1988)

Tucked away on a very limited edition 12-inch remix package, this cover of the Stones classic is credited to a mysterious, probably fictional group called Germania, who sound (very approximately) like Bananarama on cheap drugs. For a few weeks in the Spring of 1989, after some relentless plugging on my part, this was the biggest record on my dancefloor – possibly because my weekly Fever club night was just about the only place you could hear it. This track sounds nothing like Laibach’s usual sound, although it certainly retains plenty of their perversity. With a bit more exposure, it could have been massive. One of my most prized vinyl curiosities.

Update: Sorry - you weren't quick enough. These MP3s are no longer on my server. I generally make them available for a week or so (sometimes less) before substituting them for new ones. Better luck next time!

• In other news, I'm still knackered after two late nights on the trot.
  
• In other news, when you get to 40, a good hangover can easily last two days or more.
  
• In other news, my brain refuses to work, despite much coaxing.
  
• In other news, today's activity has therefore mainly been confined to moronically repetitive tasks (see below).
  
• In other news, that London blogmeet sounds (and looks) like it must have been fun.
  
• In other news, the London Mardi Gras festival sounds like it must have been ghastly.
  
• In other news, I'll be seeing Madonna on Wednesday night.
  
• In other news, we'll be having dinner with A Well Known Journalist on Friday night. Six months ago, I might have told you who, but I am far too Big And Important to divulge such matters to you now. Oh yes. Oh yes I am. No, I think you'll find I am, actually.
  
• In other news, I'll be meeting one of the bloggers from my sidebar for the first time next Sunday. Clue: in the last week or so, she has become extremely Big And Important in her own right.
  
• In other news, I can no longer do Two Big Barmy Late Night Sessions On The Trot.
  
• In other news, it's time for a cup of tea.
  
• In other news, urgh, groan, wibble.

In other news...