I guess I hadn’t read the invitation on Facebook all that closely, because I genuinely thought it was the original show from Broadway, Forbidden Broadway which was playing at Statement Bar.
Pretty soon after arriving, Colin and I got the vibe that it was, however, an amateur production, or at least something pro-am.
We were worried for a moment because both of us really love Forbidden Broadway. Colin has seen the show a few times, and I am familiar with the material through the CDs.
In essence, Forbidden Broadway is a fairly biting satire of musicals and musical theatre.
In the publicity, tonight’s show was described as…
A wry spoof of the greatest Broadway shows, characters and stars of the last 40 years, where else can you see the likes of Bebe Neuwirth, Stephen Sondheim, Carol Channing, Chita Rivera, Rita Moreno, Idina Menzel, Mandy Patinkin, Liza Minelli, Barbara Streisand, Harvey Fierstein and John Travolta all under one roof (and for one low price!)
Of the work I’ve heard on CD, a particular favourite has been their parody of Mamma Mia…
On the West End it looked ridiculous
here in New York it’s meticulous, deep and smart, an equivalent to high art
For a moment we were a little disappointed that it “wasn’t the real thing”, as we were incorrectly expecting. And it was just a moment, because as soon as they came on, we realised soon this production was genuinely bloody good.
With strong performances, split-second costume changes, the four-member cast worked together really well, under what appeared to be very good direction.
Speaking of which, we got to talking with a woman sitting next to us in the front row. She had travelled down from Newcastle, she told us, because her grandson was the director, Jay. She entertained us with some lovely stories about how he had been directing plays since childhood, and how she had helped with costumes. A particular favourite story was how she had created a seven-foot-tall “bong” for a production he directed last year called, “Reefer Madness”. “What a groover”, we both thought.
I’m not sure how much you would need to know about musical theatre to appreciate the show, as there are a lot of “in jokes”. The “Liza Minelli” routine worked especially well, even if you weren’t completely aware of all her work.
And even if you didn’t know all that much, I suspect it would still be enjoyable as a night of fun and music.
It’s on at the Statement Bar for just two weeks. Tickets through Moshtix.
Heading home this afternoon, I faced a dilemma. With a fifteen minute wait for the bus I was planning to catch, I couldn’t decide whether to stop in to a nearby pub for a quick beer, or wait in line. In the end, my choice was made for me, as I saw a group of people walking up Oxford Street, Sydney, headed towards Taylor Square.
They were re-enacting the first-ever Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras protest march and parade. Though the parade is now held in late summer (they changed it because Sydney in winter is always a bit cold and a bit wet), forty years ago, Mardi Gras was held in the middle of winter, coinciding with the anniversary of the Stonewall riot.
It was a terrific case of being at the right place at the right time.
It’s been four weeks since I last went to Swedish class, and I was feeling apprehensive. I’ve had a few commitments over the last few weeks which have kept me busy and unable to attend class. I’ve also been neglecting study, and haven’t really listened to or read much Swedish in the intervening period. I was anxious the class would have moved well beyond me, and I would have found myself struggling.
Yes, I struggled a bit, especially with a grammar exercise, but it wasn’t too bad. In fact, it was a lot of fun, especially as we spent most of the class chatting. There were three new classmates who have arrived in the intervening period, and it was great to meet them, and interesting to hear about the reasons why they’re learning Swedish. One had been a student in Sweden years ago, another had a wife, the third had a Swedish mother, and although he spoke well, he was there to learn to read and write better.
And then the subject got around to jeans. We had an exercise where we had to talk about a photograph in a Swedish photo book. The subject of one photograph got one of the classmates talking about Swedish fashion, and in particular jeans. He’s quite fashion-conscious, I think, and has quite a collection of Swedish clothing. He listed off half a dozen different Swedish clothing brands. Not being as fashion conscious myself, the only brand I recognised was ACNE.
Another classmate chipped in, and mentioned the difficulty he had in buying jeans in Sweden, since Swedish men tend (and this is a broad generalisation) to be quite tall and thin. A 34″ waist is a bit of an oddity in Swedish clothing stores, he noted. It’s a problem I shared a few weeks ago in Stockholm, when I asked for a 34-36 inch waist and was immediately taken to the “Grandpa Jeans Department”.
The original guy, who is reasonably short, complained he always has to have his jeans mended because jeans in Australia tend to be far too long. Another classmate chipped in, noting that at least H&M sell more varieties of sizes in terms of waists and leg length in Sweden than we find in Australia. I agreed. Until now, my best fitting pair of jeans was a pair I picked up in Copenhagen which recognised that some people are short and fat, not everyone is tall and thin. We all sighed that H&M hasn’t opened a store in Australia yet.
And then I chipped in with my anecdote about buying a pair of Swedish jeans from a store in Surry Hills, “Somedays” a few weeks ago. I couldn’t find the right size in Stockholm, but I found a perfect pair in Sydney.
Despite my apprehensions, Swedish class was great fun.
Afterwards, I had a drink with my friend The Best Judge about a project I’m planning to undertake. He provided some wonderful, sound advice.
As I prepare for the official launch of The Limb Shift podcast later this year to coincide with Amputee Awareness Week in October, I am going back and editing and reflecting heavily on the earliest interviews I recorded. One of the first conversations I recorded—and undeniably one of the most memorable—was with Mandy McCracken.
Mandy’s life was completely upended by a sudden medical emergency. She did not lose her limbs to trauma, but to a silent and rapid killer. “I had no say in the amputations because my hands and feet were dead… The only say I would have is if I didn’t have them amputated, I wouldn’t be here today. So there was no choice,” Mandy explains.
“I got sepsis from a streptococcal infection… It kills more Australians than breast cancer, prostate cancer and the road toll combined. But of course nobody talks about it… sepsis can kill you in a matter of twelve hours”.
For Mandy, the onset was terrifyingly swift. She went to bed on a Wednesday night feeling slightly unwell, and by Friday morning, her body was shutting down and her hands and feet were turning black. She was placed in an induced coma for ten days to save her life.
Waking up from the coma, heavily medicated and experiencing intense hallucinations, Mandy faced the surreal visual of her dead limbs. “I looked at my hands and they were literally black and I was like, ‘Wow, look at that’… it looked like my hand had been dipped in paint,” she recalls. In those early, disorienting days in the hospital bed, a profound moment of connection arrived via the television screen.
It was a turning point that gave Mandy and her plastic surgery team a tangible blueprint for the future. As she describes it, “The real turning point for me was I had Matthew Ames on the television right at the time that I was having my amputations done. So I’m lying there in hospital and quite literally watching a fellow who had just had his hands and feet amputated twelve months before me… And he was playing cricket with his kids. So he was my pace car, quite honestly. Like everything I’ve done in life, I’m a year behind Matt”.
Mandy McCracken with Matthew Ames (supplied, used with Matt’s permission)
Having that representation on her television was “massive,” not just for Mandy, but for her entire support network. “My entire community watched Matt and, and it actually gave us a real sense of, ‘Oh, okay, you know, there’s life after this. We can deal with this. It’ll be fine'”.
Survival in the McCracken household became a collective effort driven by a very specific coping mechanism: dark, unapologetic comedy. While Mandy lay in the ICU, her husband had to bring their children in to say their goodbyes. When she defied the odds and survived, the family relied on wit to navigate the horror.
Mandy reflects, “He used a lot of black humour to get through it, which has actually been incredibly helpful across our entire family. Having a good giggle about, you know, leaving body parts around the place… If you can’t laugh about a situation like this, you’re just going to rock in the corner. So that’s pretty much what we did”.
Mandy laughs as she shares family anecdotes, like her husband being pulled over for a random breath test and telling the officer, “No, no, but my wife’s legless”.
Beyond the humour, raw psychological survival required a severe narrowing of focus. On day four, having had a tracheotomy and being unable to speak, Mandy mouthed the words to a nurse asking for a counsellor. The advice she received became her anchor for the next year: “Don’t look at tomorrow… Just get through today. Just do today”.
To pass the time during those long months, she literally watched the second hand of the clock tick by, turning her brain off to avoid dwelling on the situation. Slowly, the outside world crept back into her room. Her daughters—aged nine, seven, and four at the time—along with their school friends, began blanketing her sterile hospital walls from top to toe with paintings and drawings from home.
When friends visited, terrified of what they were about to confront, Mandy would crack a joke to break the ice. “One of them I remember saying to me, ‘Oh my God, you’re still you, you’re still Mandy.’ I’m like, ‘Of course I am. Like, I’ve just had my hands and feet chopped off, but I’m still me'”.
While hospital offered a controlled environment, returning home after a year away presented a harsh new set of psychological hurdles. Fiercely independent and fit before her illness, Mandy found herself navigating her old spaces in an electric wheelchair. As she notes, “My husband popped me on the wrong side of the kitchen bench… I was a stay at home mum… And then when I came home, he, my husband put me on the guest side of the kitchen bench. And I’m like, ‘No, this is not good.’ So I really had to learn where my new role was because of course, I wasn’t the boss of the house anymore… They had a routine that didn’t include me”.
The physical frustrations compounded the emotional ones as she tried to learn how to operate robotic prosthetic hands, dropping glasses constantly. Her stress levels skyrocketed, prompting her to lean heavily on her psychologist—a practice she maintains monthly. She learned to take deep breaths, give herself permission to fail, and drive her wheelchair out to the letterbox just to sit and calm down when she felt furious about what she had lost.
Eventually, determination won out over anger. Mandy consciously decided she was going to thrive, systematically ticking off milestone goals: learning to eat, going to the bathroom independently, learning to drive, and eventually rock climbing and holidaying through Europe.
She accepted her new physical form entirely. “My plastic hands are me… Everybody looks at you… I don’t really care anymore. I’ve just moved on”.
Mandy McCracken (pic supplied)
Mandy later crossed paths with Matt Ames again, along with another quadruple amputee, Korrin Barrett. Sitting around a busy pub table in Noosa with prosthetics resting among beer glasses, they realized the power of their collective visibility.
This meeting inspired Mandy to help form a Facebook group called the “Quad Squad,” which now connects over 400 quadruple amputees globally. The group allows members to openly discuss the universal, nitty-gritty realities of multiple limb loss—from car modifications to NDIS applications. “It’s fantastic for them to be able to see the likes of, you know, myself, Matt and Korrin who are traveling the world,” Mandy says. “We’ve moved beyond the trauma stage and we are now in the thriving stage”.
For Mandy, thriving means being an active, moving part of a community. After an arduous, highly complex building process, she recently constructed a fully accessible house. The emotional payoff was instant. “I rang my sister the day that we moved in… ‘I got into the shower by myself for the first time in eleven years.’ And the two of us cried”.
Ultimately, Mandy’s message to anyone sitting where she once sat is rooted in grit, kindness, and a refusal to self-pity. She often remembers a high-single-leg amputee at rehab who bluntly told her to stop being a martyr, get off her ass, and accept the electric wheelchair so she could look after herself. “I reckon that is invaluable. Like, okay, wallow in self pity, but times, time, get on with it,” Mandy concludes. “Be kind to yourself… talk to people who have been through something similar… Time and practice and, you know, grit and determination goes a very long way”.
Mandy and Rod McCracken (pic supplied)
Note: This conversation with Mandy will appear in the Limb Shift podcast launching in October 2026, and which will be available on this website, Spotify, YouTube & Apple Podcasts.
Today was the first time in about a month when I had time at work to “breathe”. For many industries, October/November is a time when people start to wind down. But in the industry in which I work, it’s quite a busy time, with planning and negotiation around summer leave (24×7 requirements), and as contract negotiation for the following year is finalised. There will be more busy activity over the next week or so, and so it’s not over yet. But today, for the first time in what seems like forever, I actually had some “thinking time”. I also had some time tonight to review some interesting/”random” photographs from the last few weeks, and have shared them with you here today.
This is “Biscuit”, our apartment block’s “collective cat”. Orange is the new cat. Snapped through the glass at the ABC, the News 24 team during the US election.Snapped from the back laneway.The last week has been “crazy as #$^&”, so going through some forgotten photographs now, including this lovely photograph from last Wednesday, when we celebrated my birthday with a yummy cake with colleagues.Have had an amazing encounter thanks to one of the “whatever happened to..” groups on Facebook. This week someone posted a photograph of family member, Gloria who I recognised instantly. 1964 maybe?Each year, the ABC supports Australian music with #AusMusicMonth, and one one day everyone is encouraged to wear a “band t-shirt”. I haven’t had an Australian band t-shirt in years, and so I’m pleased Nat and the team from ABC Melbourne were able to help out with their t-shirt, featuring their Breakfast presenter and former Skyhooks member, Red.
You know how when you walk into a shop, the person behind the counter will almost certainly smile or wave hello?
That wasn’t the case when I walked into a “fashionable” optometrist in Sydney tonight. The guy behind the counter looked over at me, and then looked away as if I wasn’t worth his time to acknowledge. My aunty Edna once described something similar as she entered an optometrist in Brisbane wearing glasses held together with sticky tape.
As I wandered around looking at the display spec, I overheard the other sales assistant chatting to a reasonably fashionable-looking young woman. “Darling, how old are you”, he asked with the intonation of the character created by Sacha Baren Cohen of “Brüno” the uber-gay fashionista. “You should never wear glasses like this until you’re at least forty”, I overheard him say. I think I might have laughed out loud.
I looked around for a while and at no stage did either of the shop assistants come up to me and ask if I’d like some help. In the end, it doesn’t matter, as I don’t need glasses. I was just wandering around looking in shop windows, as it’s the first time in at least a couple of months since I’ve done anything like that. I did, however, see some rather nice-looking specs that I’ll consider for the next time I need new glasses.
I left work just before five this afternoon, a minor miracle given how busy I’ve been over the last few weeks. The election, another project I’m working on, and covering a few absences, and the last month, in particular, has been uber-busy. But there’s now light at the end of the tunnel, and so this afternoon I left work a little early and went on a window shopping adventure.
