Robyn’s Secret Passage

The wedding reception/cocktail party was cool. After briefly having a social anxiety moment and deciding that I would stay at home and clean my bathroom rather than going, I ended up teaming up with another friend who was going through exactly the same crap. Yay for social anxiety!

So we showed up. It was held at a bar down by the waterfront that overlooked the harbour and a bunch of apartments. There was free brooze. Chur. The bride may have been very drunk, or she may just be like that all the time. I’ve only met her once before, so it was hard to tell. There were speeches. An ex-girlfriend yelled out something. It was briefly moving and touching and all that, but my friend and I ended up speculating on how long it would last.

Not that we specifically thought their marriage was doomed, it’s just that I only know a couple of people my age who are married, but a know a whole lot more who are divorced. A few get engaged then break up, but most couples just seem to stay together until they get sick of each other. How very modern.

The wedding cake was chocolate, which is very pleasing because I’m not much of a fan of the old fruit cake. (Dammit, I should have taken a slice home and squished it under my pillow so I could dream of my future husband.)

There was a bit of talk about how the wedding wasn’t traditional, but it was actually very traditional. The little details within the wedding may have been updated, but the basic traditional wedding template was exactly what it is for most weddings. Just because you get married on a beach instead of a church, or have a DJ instead of an old lady at an organ, it doesn’t mean you’re breaking new wedding ground. Not that there’s anything wrong with ye olde wedding

After the reception we went to Burger King and continued bitching about weddings.

I bought some running shoes a couple of days ago. It’s the first pair of proper running shoes I’ve ever had (having previously gone for cross-trainers). They fit superbly well and support all the mutant parts of my feet. I’m going to do Round The Bays, and I want to run as much of it as I can. So today at the gym I did a solid ten minutes of running on a treadmill. This is good because running has always been really hard for me. Now I have one less excuse.

I was trying to buy a new bra but I couldn’t find one that fit. I realised that I didn’t actually know what bra size I was, and that there was only one solution. I had to go to Smith and Caughey’s and get fitted properly by an old lady with a tape measure.

The last time I was properly fitted for a bra was when I was about 11 and I underwent the highly traumatic process of being dragged along to the D.I.C. department store in Hamilton and being declared a 10AA and given a hideous flesh-tone slingshot/bra.

It was slightly better this time, though still not one of those really rad things that happens in life. It turned out I’d had the chest size wrong. I’d been going bigger, but I should have been going smaller, to a 14. (And, yeah, a lady does not reveal her cup size, etc).

Now that I know my proper bra size I can now go and buy bras that fit. No more ill fitting cups, or bits digging in or bagging out where they shouldn’t. How incredibly novel it is to actually have a bra that totally fits properly. Highly recommended.

I was also out looking for a nice top to wear to this wedding reception/cocktail party thing I’m going to on Sunday. It was utterly traumatic because etiquette rules that ones does not wear black to a wedding, but that black is entirely appropriate for a cocktail party.

I tried on a bunch of tops and realised that now matter how discounted they were, the pregnant westie chick look was never in and will never be in.

It’s also alarming to see all the red, black and red and black clothes. It’s like that Girls Aloud video has been blown up and scattered amongst the chain stores of Aotearoa. This is one of those trends that’s come in and gone right out again in the UK. Therefore I can not bring myself to partake in it in this country. Besides, black and red are (along with turquoise) those colours that look really bad on me.

(Oh, it’s so hard being a girl.)

In the end I decided that I need a new pair of running shoes more than I need some crappy top.

At the Big Day Out I was sitting up in the stands being disappointed by some band. So instead of trying to enjoy their mediocre set, I looked around at all the people and noticed what was going on.

Among the items of Metallica merchandise was a bandanna. Various bogan guys could be seen around the stadium with the bandannas tied around their heads. However, it was a more difficult look to pull of for girls. I saw one petite girl walking along with her boyfriend. He had the bandanna around his head, and it looked ok on him. She had also tied hers around her head and it looked terrible. Her small head meant that the bandanna was all out of proportion, and coupled with her hair sticking out the top of it, it looked more like a head bandage than a cool bandanna. Shortly after another chick walked past me. She had the bandanna tied around her hips, and it looked so cool that I heard some guys behind me commenting on its hotness.

Dehydration is a legitimate concern, but compulsive sucking of a bottle of water is freaky. There’s the baby bottle aspect of it, the gross sucking noise it makes, and the undeniable fact that seeing someone sucking on a water bottle just isn’t attractive. To use the sipper-top requires screwing your mouth into a nasty sneering position. But people have started to pick up on this and I noticed more than a few people unscrewing the sipper-top and drinking out of the bottle. It’s, like, the cool thing for 2004.

In the Black Eyed Peas “Shut Up” video, Fergie wears an boobtube with a bra underneath. This look was all over the Big Day Out. It’s cool because it means that girls who need the support of a bra can now wear a boobtube, and girls with a small bosom can wear a boobtube without it looking like they’re wearing a support bandage. But there’s one sort of girl who shouldn’t do this look: the extremely obese girl. There’s a difference between celebrating your body, not hating your wobbly bits and putting on a freak show. Boobtubes do not normally come in size 20 so the few girls like this I saw had squeezed themselves into probably a size 16. People looked, but it wasn’t a “wow, there’s someone who isn’t afraid to dress how she pleases”, but more like “Oh my God… look at that!”.

Thanks to mentions over the last year on “Space” and C4, jester hats have now moved into the category of fashionably uncool. Normally there’s a stall selling them, but I didn’t see one this year. I did actually see two jester hats, but one had beer logos on it (which probably makes it worse). Quietly on the way out is dyed hair. Back in ‘94 at the first Auckland Big Day Out I remember all these incredibly cool guys who’d dyed their hair blue or green especially for the occasion (and had the stained hands to prove it). This year I didn’t see anyone who had done BDO dye job. There was a stall run by some hairdressers who were doing spray-in colours, but hardly anyone seemed to have gone there. The few people I did see with the spray-in colours looked like they were living in the past.

I just got back from the Peaches show at the King’s Arse. Wicked.

1. I missed the Coolies, but I might be able to catch them at the Big Day Out. The Cortinas were the other support group and I arrived about halfway through their set. They were cool. I think I’m only mentioning this out of some sort of feeling of obligation to mention the support acts. But they weren’t why I was there. I was there for Peaches.

2. Peaches rocked. She rocked so hard that the random guy standing behind me gave me a shoulder massage halfway through. She had a really simple set-up. She sang along to the backing track and was sometimes joined by two dancing girls. She performed most of the cool songs from “The teaches of Peaches” and “Fatherfucker”. For “Kick it,” the duet with Iggy Pop, a giant screen was brought out and a film of Iggy singing the song was played so that Peaches could sing along with him. She’s got fuzzy thotch, y’know.

The show was very joyful and celebratory. There were a few dudes in the audience who’d just showed up to see some sexy laydeez, and a few bFM hipster types, but most people were just there to have a really good time. My absolute favourite song of the night was the karaoke version of “Fuck the pain away”. Fangirls were picked out of the audience to sing along with it and they all knew the words and they all performed it really well.

Seeing Peaches makes me want to move to Berlin and become a performance artist.

If the Boiler Room isn’t living up to its name too much tomorrow, I think I’ll see Peaches again.

3. So, I arrived at the King’s Arse and stood around at the front for a bit then decided to go up the back where it was less crowded and hopefully a bit cooler. I was working my way through the crowd when I came up to two fellows. I was having trouble finding somewhere to put my feet and stepped on the foot of the guy on the right, and ended up having to kind of touch my hand on the other guy’s arm to get through. I looked up to be polite and give a friendly excuse me and realised who I was walking between: Julian and Nikolai from the Strokes.

Yeah.

When I finally got closer to the back of the bar I saw Nick standing a little bit in front of me. Later I was out in the garden bar and by then the whole band was out there, hanging out. Julian, who is beautiful, was looking at the rain drops falling down, lit by the outdoor lighting. He’s very tall and skinny. So is Nick. Fabrizio is really hot, but everyone knows that. Albert looks cooler in person, and Nikolai still has girly hair. They were all excellently dressed.

Most people around were pretending not to notice them, but was also sneaking glances in their direction. A few people had photos taken while others were just happy to be in the same area code.

4. All the street parking was taken, so I thought I might have to park blocks away and walk to the King’s Arse in the rain. Then as I circled back, a van was leaving a space right across from the King’s Arse. Perfect.

I was waiting in line at an ATM at St Lukes and noticed that the fellow standing nearby playing with his cellphone was none other than Savage from Deceptikonz. As tempted as I was to break into the chorus of “Stop, Drop and Roll,” instead I stayed incognito.

After I’d finished with the ATM, I was hobbling along in my blister inducing shoes (I’m breaking them in, very slowly, very painfully) and I noticed I was catching up to Savage. He was walking really slowly, like he had sore feet too. Maybe the burden of fame is crushing down upon his being.

It’s said that television makes people look fatter than they are in real life, but he looked fatter than he does on TV (That’s ok ’cause he’s doing all he can just to lose some weight, trying to feel healthy and get in shape.) But, not surprisingly, he looked a lot shorter. He also proved one of the “What Not To Wear” pieces of advice: if you’re short, wearing long shorts just make them look like short trousers, which tricks the eye into thinking that your legs are shorter than they really are. He also had some white cloth tied around his head.

We were both headed up the escalator and as he got up to the second level, a group of teenage boys were sitting on some seats in front of the escalators. They all saw Savage, recognised him and their eyes bulged and jaws dropped. They had a quick conversation that seemed to be like “Is that him? OMG, it’s him! Let’s follow him!” and, keeping a safe distance, they followed him down to the other end of the mall.

See, I’ve always maintained that hanging out at the mall is really hardcore, and this just proves it.