Over and Out

One of my best girlfriends P, arrived back from a year in Cambodia on Friday. P and I used to work together as lawyers at a legal aid organisation for a couple of years and have been firm besties ever since. She has spent the last year working for an NGO Environmental Rights organisation throughout regional Cambodia. It sounds like she had a fantastic experience and looks really well. She has accepted a lawyer's post at a legal aid centre in Broome, Western Australia and starts there at the end of October. She's back in Sydney for a month. P is one of the few close female friends of mine who is equally part of my Sydney gay posse as well as my straight group of friends. She's seen it all. She almost should be an honorary gay man but not in a clichéd faghag Judy Garland way….she's more one of the boys; think Shirley Maclaine and the Brat Pack; she's probably one of the few female friends I have where I am free not to censor anything from the World of Gay when we talk. I usually give most of my female friends a Hallmark version of my life; with P, nothing is off limits. As a result, I've missed her greatly over the last year and I was looking forward to seeing her on the Friday night.

Trev and I had booked Macleay Street Bistro at Potts Point for dinner. There were eight of us going. I had canapés and champagne cocktails at Judy's before we headed across the road to the bistro. I hadn't been to Macleay Street (bistro) in ages and it was super-nice to sample its "lower east-side" intimacy again although if the waiter described another dish as "absolutely beautiful", I was going to offer him a job at the Home Shopping network. We returned to Judy's place for more champagne and an assortment of cheeses I had purchased earlier that day. We were all suitably inebriated and like most people in their 30s and 40s were thinking of turning in.... until Trev said five minutes shy of midnight……"So are we going to the Colombian?". We all knew what this meant. It was the lull before a bender. My heart sank and my liver quivered at the suggestion. P and I exchanged a knowing glance of "fuck….are we going to do this?". P had been away from all the action for a year and 2008 thankfully has been a relatively quiet year for me .... so we were ripe for the picking. Trev is 41 and is a seasoned party professional. As are the other forty somethings in our group. They've all been going out every weekend since the strobe light was invented and have an amazing continual zest for activities of the night. So faster than you could say Amy Winehouse, we were off to The Colombian and soon found ourselves up, up and away and the rest as they say is history. In past years when P and I have had many of these "random" nights out, we've always ended up saying…..well it was unexpected but at least we had a good time. And I'm sure we did in the past but now it just seems a bit tired. Yes we went everywhere; Colombian, Shift, Arq, back to Shift, back to Colombian, Wil and Toby's, Shift….Phoenix…the list goes on…and we met five thousand strangers with whom we shared our deepest thoughts, philosophies, cigarettes and phone numbers and made promises as shallow as the niteclub stamps on on our arms : "lets stay in touch, I think we're going to be great friends, I love that top, we must do this again". Bla bla bla.

2008 for me has been the Year of Living Quietly……finally. After several failed attempts in the past couple of years to cut down on night hopping, this year I've taken up cooking, reading and couch-sitting instead. Not to mention I've fallen back in love with sleep. Don't get me wrong, in the 8 years I've spent in Sydney town, I've had one hell of a time and it's been loads of fun. I always remember the advice though of an old queen I met when I first arrived in Sydney; "Be careful not to go out at 26 and come home at 44 and wondered what on earth happened." There were a good couple of years where it seemed that I was completely ignoring his advice. I started seeing a guy at the time who led me into the world of late night parties and dayclubs. I loved it. We loved it. I took P along for the ride. The love affair with the guy soon ended but not my love affair with party life. P & I were out like a pair of old glow sticks every weekend. After a couple of years of night after night jumping up and down in a dark room with pretty lights and booming music staring at people doing the exact same thing, it all became rather dull . I realised by the end of last year, I was not finding it fun anymore. So I stopped.

Apart from Mardi Gras, my dance card has been delightfully dull and after my big Friday night out with Trev, P and the gang, I have confirmed that I want it to stay that way. The best part of Friday evening was dinner at the bistro, champagne cocktails at Judy's and the great conversations in between; actually spending time with my friends and not staring at them through a haze of dry ice and sweat speaking in consonants whilst keeping your peripherals on guard for the entrance your knight in shining armour is never gonna make.