Plenty of work and plenty of joy

As we all know, all work and no joy makes Mac (or Jack) or anyone else for that matter a dull boy - or girl.  There sure has been plenty of work going on around here but luckily there has also been truckloads of joy.  All members of this household have been enjoying new interests.

My swimming lessons are still in the early stages (my best stroke is still Drownstroke) but I am determined to get to the stage where swimming is actually fun.  My partner is a gun swimmer and most Saturday mornings he can be found far out to sea with many other "Masters" (while back at home I try to ignore radio news reports about shark attacks).  Somewhere in the pictures below are my partner, my swimming tutor and several of their clubmates completing this year's 3.6km Busselton Jetty Swim. 

I don't intend to ever join him in using swimming as a means of transportation, but the other hobby he and my daughter have taken up does look like a lot of fun.  They are having surfing lessons at a local surf school and are both doing brilliantly.  Here they are only one hour into their first lesson.

My daughter has also taken up hockey

and my son is making great progress with lawn bowls. He now trains regularly in Perth with the state junior squad who are the Australian juniors champions.  Lawn bowls might seem like an unusual sport for a boy his age but I am thrilled that he has found a sport he enjoys and is good at as that is something that has eluded me my entire life.

While he attends his day-long training sessions, I get to indulge in one of my favourite activities and explore new-to-me parts of Perth.  On the last trip I took the opportunity to finally buy something new that I have been trying and failing to buy secondhand for three years: a bike!

I use it to do chores, visit friends and tootle here,

and here.

Yup, still op shopping.  I also now have a legitimate reason to obsessively scour through Trademe as I am helping a friend in Christchurch to furnish her new office.  Our most exciting find so far is a huge set of String style mid-century shelving - for $30.

I am finally teaching my daughter to sew by working with her to create her costume for this year's Supanova Pop Culture Convention where last year we spotted the cutest Doctor Who ever.

So plenty of play for everyone but now I really do need to get back to doing some work.  I have been offered a very exciting (and a little bit scary) new role and I need to write up some ideas for a meeting. 

But I'll end with a wee skite about something that has come about as the result of absolute truckloads of work over the past three years by one member of this household and his workmates.  The Mandurah Performing Arts Centre won the 2013 APACA Drover Award for the Performing Arts Centre of the Year.  Woohoo!

That centre is certainly not run by dull boys - or girls.  There is so much happening there that so far I have had absolutely no need to seek entertainment just down the road from there ... at the bingo hall.

The Be(A)st of Taylor Mac - in Mandurah!

"He's an unflinching witness to a host of society's ills... linked together by a gentle, impassioned humanity and a wry humour that can have you helpless with laughter, then overcome by an urge to weep - and ultimately left thinking, and wanting to make life better. For real, and not in some cyber-limbo."
Review of The Be(A)st of Taylor Mac by Mary Brennan in The Herald

"An intellectually arduous and beautifully realized piece about the dangers of homogeneity, and what happens to the soul when it forgoes the richness of the imagination."
Review of The Be(A)st of Taylor Mac by  Hilton Als, The New Yorker

Ohhhhhh that sounds like just what I need.  Lucky me this Sunday night I get to go and see  New York performer Taylor Mac in action.  TimeOut New York called him  "One of the most exciting theater artists of our time" and American Theater Magazine says, "Mac is one of this country’s most heroic and disarmingly funny playwrights."

Astonishingly enough he is performing right here in Mandurah at the Mandurah Performing Arts Centre.  I've seen some great stuff there already but nothing quite like this!  I do hope Mandurah realises how lucky it is, local folk bring their open minds to the the party and that I'm not the only one there!

(All photos swiped from here.)

The Mandurah Performing Arts Centre

Smack at the head of beautiful Mandjar Bay in the centre of Mandurah is a stunning building: The Mandurah Performing Arts Centre.  This lovely, elegant building was designed by architects Hames Sharley and opened in 1997.  It houses an 800 seat theatre, a 144 seat theatre, an art gallery, a dance studio, various meeting rooms and foyer spaces so expansive and lovely that I just can't help planning events for them every time I walk through them. 

I love this building not just for its great design; I love this building because it gives me hope.  Yes, hope of seeing exciting and interesting shows, attending stimulating exhibitions and fun events there. 

But today as I walked through those light-filled, wood-panelled, expansive foyer spaces, I was filled with another sort of hope.  See today I spent yet another looking at rental houses so ghastly I'd have to be permanently tanked-up on Margaret River wine to live in them.  So the MANPAC building gives me hope that somewhere in the city capable of building that beauty there must be rental accommodation I could live in (sober). 

I've long given up hope of of finding rental accommodation that:
a)  isn't filled with the design crimes known as vertical blinds,
b)  doesn't have at least six archways,
c)  doesn't have wall-to-wall dark brown clinker brick in at least half the rooms,
d)  has eaves (you know, those useful things that shade a house when it is scorching hot outside and shelter it when it is pouring with rain...),
but I draw the line at paying money to live with pink decor.  Given that 90% of the rental accommodation on offer here seems to be pink (or salmon, or dark apricot, or rose...), I'm not doing very well.

So I live in hope, and if I'm wrong, I'll pitch it to the centre's General Manager that my family could move into that beautiful foyer and call ourselves an installation.