1. Women's Day Photo Comp, 1987
I've never thought I was a particularly cute baby, but according to popular media, I was. The proof of this is in a 1987 Women's Day, which features a full-page colour photo of me in a fetching little blue sundress and hat. TBH I think my knees are a little chubby and I could be looking a bit less like I just soiled myself, but mum hasn't sent photos of me to any magazines since so I guess this was me in my prime.
[If I can get the scanner at mum's working I will update this post with the photo - it feels like an empty gloat without it]
2. Masterton pub karaoke night, 1993
Anyone unfortunate enough to have been out with me in Auckland will know I'm partial to a bit of Karaoke. What they may not know is that this passion spawned from a night in 1993, when at age 7 I took to the stage of a Masterton pub and performed my favourite song. It wasn't on the karaoke list and I think they tried to tell me I was too young, but eventually I wrangled the mic off someone and started singing:
Maori joker on a hilltop playing a flute,
Cooler than Goodman, boy he was beaut,
And the thought that he thought in between each toot,
was Tamatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuaketanatahu"
I am not even shitting you. The song has about five verses - which get progressively un-PC - and all of them end with this long and deliberately mispronounced place-name. The audience must have been bewildered. What was this small white girl doing in a Wairarapa pub? Who let her on the stage? Why was she singing this mildly racist song? It was probably just all the Tui, but at the end they clapped wildly and awarded me with a Jimmy Barnes tape. I didn't know who Jimmy Barnes was, and I didn't care. I was elated. It was the first prize I'd ever won.
3. McNugget victory, 1994
Remember how you used to be able to buy Chicken Mcnuggets in boxes of 6, 12, or 21? Remember wondering what kind of crazy person would eat 21 Chicken McNuggets? Well at age 8, that crazy person was me. My memories of this are pretty hazy - but I know that Grandma Jane bought them for me (she always bought us all the junk our parents wouldn't) and that I scoffed them down with Sweet 'n' Sour sauce and not too much difficulty. I also remember I had been pulled out of school early that day to go and watch a special advanced screening of The Secret Garden, making this the single greatest day of my childhood.
4. Kairakau Beach Camp Limerick Competition, 1996
Campers at Kairakau beach were invited to write a limerick starting with the line: "There once was a Kairakau camper", which was then to be recited at a cut-throat competition in the surf club. Thankfully for the purposes of this blog, and literary history, I can remember how mine went:
There once was a Kairakau camper,
Who fancied himself as a tramper,
He was actually a wimp,
So covered in Dimp,
He left when the weather got damper
So I'm not the next Gertrude Stein, but I was 10 and mine was the only poem which didn't try to rhyme camper with wanker. I don't think the other competitors - who I remember thinking seemed a bit dim - actually knew what a limerick was. I took home the grand prize of $14 and bought 14 dollar mixes which I ate slowly and gleefully in front of my siblings. They had been riding bikes and boogie boarding instead of farting around with poems. Suckers.
5. I Can Has Cheezburger glory, 2007
Most people don't know what I'm talking about when I brag about this, which is a shame because I brag about it quite often. Three years ago I went through a stage of making my own Lolcats and submitting them to the I Can Has Cheezburger website (I know, I'm so hip, right?). I never really expected any of them to make it on to the illustrious pages of ICHC, but one day, one of them did. If you're not slapping your hand to your mouth right now then get this - they get over 10,000 submissions to the site each day, of which only about 10 make it on. So you see - kind of a big deal. I wish I could link you to the pic so you could witness the cat-captioning genius for yourself, but sadly it has since been lost in cyberspace. (Anyone who read my pun-riddled cat story on Stuff this week will have a fair idea of how funny it was.)
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