Picture of a showgirl

We move through life in a hurry. So much work, so much fun, so many problems, so many duties… We live among people and we see them, talk to them, but often we do not see much behind façades often created for self-protection. I just discovered some layers behind the image of an old lady I visit in a nursing home. I wrote some time ago about my difficulties to become an active volunteer and the red tape around it. It finished well and now I visit a place regularly which the local council found for me. I meet one particular lady, let’s call her Daphne. Maybe my visits do some good to my new friend, but I definitely add something valuable to my life by knowing her.

                     

When I met her first, Daphne was not very keen on having any visitors. In fact she tried to brush me off. She expected to get a patronizing treatment and she wanted to protect herself from it. We both were lucky. It is not my way to great people with “and how are we today, dear?” That was perhaps a redeeming point in my favour. I related to her as I do to any other person. I am not good around small children and people who reached childish mental stage. Thanks God, Daphne is not such a person. I am not sure if she has dementia and if she does what is a level of it. We come from different backgrounds so I am not yet able to gauge if her stories are realistic of a figment of her imagination. Could it be both? I must say that at times I loose myself in her stories. She has a need to offload her thoughts so she talks fast and I at times listen but do not comprehend all of what is being said. It upsets her and it upsets me. Luckily this does not happen too often.

For a while she was telling me that her son visits her very often, calls her and takes her out. Suspicious me thought that it was only wishful thinking. Like in Chekhov's Three Sisters unrealistic dreaming of going to Moscow. It was not! I was very happy to meet her son during one of my visits. Maybe I was even being assessed by the family? To me it was a good sign and I was relieved to realize my thinking was wrong.

So, our mutual trust is being built. During my last visit, unexpectedly,  she showed me a picture from her youth. When you look at Daphne you know that she was a beautiful woman in her youth as she is beautiful now in her fragile eighties. She dresses nicely and puts a lipstick on before my visits. Maybe this is the reason why she asked me always to call her before I visit her. So I do not catch her unprepared? Hmm… Anyway, regular visits were not what she wanted and I call each time before I go to her.

The picture she showed me was of a showgirl! Top hat, cane in her slender hand, great legs, very skimpy costume and a serious facial expression. It was not a flirtatious girl, just a beautiful young lady a bit scared before her forthcoming performance. It was going to be a song and dance. Maybe I should not call her a showgirl as she was a solo performer. She told me that she performed with a band (visible on the picture) and she called the men behind her “boys”. They were protective of her, I believe. Building my story about Daphne I see her as a talented girl who got permission of her mother to sing and dance in a theater. She called it a "serious theater in the city". Obviously she was not a Kings Cross performer. I know too little about Sydney artistic life of the post Second World War era to put the pieces together and fill in the missing gaps. It may come, though, with our future talks, but Daphne is reluctant to disclose too much. I respect that and even if I write about her I respect and protect her privacy. I feel privileged that she shared with me some of her memories. It took few months before she opened her drawer with the picture. It must be an important memory to her. 

I could not find a picture of a serious showgirl. Daphne must have been unique.

                                                              

Daphne’s room is neat and tidy, very few well chosen possessions taken from a big home she had to leave behind. Already on my first visit I noticed a small paining of a cancan dancer performing her high kick. Pantaloons in full view. Vivid colours, lots of bright orange and cobalt blues. Already then I thought that this painting does not fit my expectations. There have been already few surprises while meeting Daphne, some discoveries and still many mysteries, but whoever you were and are Daphne, I feel honoured to know you.

Sydney is vivid at night

I almost missed this spectacular event. I mean Vivid. If it was not for a friend, more watchful than me, who suggested the night on the town, I would have ignored the snippets of information that I was most likely getting without paying attention to it. Life in suburbs can be alienating. 

This week after my regular bridge session I got myself to the city. Crossing the bridge I noticed that some buildings have unusual colours. I mean really unusual – bright pink, neon green, purple… The city suddenly looked like if it was coloured by Ken Done. Rather cheerful. 

                                                               

Walking towards Circular Quay I realized that not only the colours are cheerful, the people around me looked cheerful as well. As I stepped in to the Vivid part of the town I was surrounded by people who were celebrating the colorful beauty of Sydney so I also got into a party mood. 

                                         

The Opera House and the Contemporary Museum, in my opinion, were the most spectacular. The patterns and colours constantly changed and as soon as I opened my mouse to say “have a look at this one” the picture was already different. Long forgotten German word came to mind.  It was only an “augenblick” and things before our eyes were new. It is strange how some of the words and expressions stay in ones mind. I even do not know German all that well. Maybe my language is becoming a collection of memories. Like this American lady who I spent conversing with for few hours at the swimming pool next to a golf course somewhere South of France. We were grass widows waiting for our husbands to join us after completing their 18 holes round. My English at that time was rather poor, but the lady spoke few languages and she used them all in our conversation. Sometimes few of them in one sentence. It must have been an amusing conversation, but I found it rather stressful. It was a rich people place and I did not think I belonged there. I certainly was not rich. It was just that my husband was a very keen and a very good golfer. The lady was considerably older than myself and was a type of Zsa Zsa Gabor in her fifties. She was very bored and very friendly, so she told  stories from her rather full life. She even knew president Cater! Nice memory…

When the pictures on the Opera House changed in a blink of an eye I pondered on my memories. 

                                                              

                                          

Back to Vivid…I particularly liked the drone show that was a modern form of Sound & Lighting.

              

We paid particular attention to the light sculptures as my friend’s son was a designer of some of them. I was impressed. This is one of them.

I promise myself to get out of my suburb more often. Sydney has so much to offer. Somebody even said that if one is bored in Sydney this is not a fault of Sydney.  

The Man Who Knew Infinity

My interest in films returned with more quiet time in the kitchen renovations. Not that the kitchen is finished yet, but we are now into cosmetics and my nervous system is coming slowly back to normal. I started to have better results in bridge and consequently I am back to enjoying it. I still have problems to concentrate on reading heavier books like Adam Phillips (I have his there books on my table waiting for better quality of my concentration) but seeing films is not beyond my current mental capacity, so went to see The Man Who Knew Infinity. I am glad I saw it as the film has not been screen for a long, two days later is off already. This may say something about its attractiveness, but I liked it and would recommend it but not to those who like action movies or love stories. Actually this film is about love but not necessarily romantic type even thought there is a bit of romance as well serving to highlight hero’s life priorities.

The film is about a self-taught Indian mathematics genius Srinivasa Ramanujan who traveled to Trinity College, Cambridge where he stayed five years surprising respectable and famous professors (like Bertrand Russell) with the depth of his conclusions to which he did not think it was necessary to supply proofs. The most involved and revolutionary mathematical theories came to him from nowhere. From God? Definitely from some higher power talking to his subconscious. This is the true story and Ramanujan really lived, albeit a short time and made serious discoveries in mathematical analysis and numbers theory. Most of his theorems have been proven by now and serve us somewhere in the scientific background of our every day life. This is deeply philosophical film, in my opinion, and the question of how Ramanujan  knew what he announced, in such profusion to the stunned professors at Trinity College, does not have an answer. The only answer that comes to my mind is that God exists and is active in our reason driven life. The story of Ramanujan is almost a mathematically based proof of that.

The film is also about an unlikely friendship of two people, an English mathematician G.H. Hardy and mainly self taught very unconventional Indian young man Ramanujan. Jeremy Irons who plays the English professor is absolutely wonderful in this role, but isn’t he in all his roles? He is to me. In this film he is more handsome than ever, but this is rather beside the point.

                                 

Dev Patel is good in his role, but somebody said that it is time he played a villain. I think there is something in it. He is a bit sugar coated in this role as well as he was in Slamdog Millionaire. I still liked his performance a lot, he is convincing playing a young man bewildered by other than his own realities. One can see his growing acceptance and resignation to it. 

One of my detours in life was studying pure mathematics for five years. I did not turn out to be a real mathematician, but these five years were useful and it gave me a powerful message – if I could do that, I can perhaps do almost anything else, it should not be harder than the five years of math. Maybe it was not a detour but an important part of my life education?

I got a glimpse of infinity when a professor presented us with a model of a universe being a circle without borders. My mind went into overdrive and this was my chance to understand the beauty of mathematics. I did not take this chance. Regrets? Maybe…

My talented student fellows were not your conventional people. They were forgetful, eccentric, and sometimes really strange. They loved music and they lost themselves in it. They loved mountain claiming risking and sometimes loosing their lives in the process. They dressed in a most strange fashion. Matching socks were a rarity with some. So when I read that G.H. Hardy was an eccentric, I did not agree with this opinion. He was about normal being a talented mathematician. This is how I know such people. What is in their minds is so absorbing that outside life is insignificant.

The film made an impression on me and woke up memories that had not surfaced for a long time. For me 10 out of 10, but this is a very personal rating.