Ungrateful children go to shows

I distinctly remember sitting in the Opera House in Wellington as a child absolutely rigid with boredom while some fools in tights pranced around the stage. The problem was that I wasn't rigid at all I was wracked by the need to fidget. Terse whispered exchanges took place:

- Do you need to go to the toilet?

- No

- Are you sick?

- No

- Then sit still!

Sometimes it was hard work being eduacated in the arts with my mother.

Other times it was great. I can remember being transfixed by Marcel Marceau, Paco Pena, Nureyev, Nina Simone and Garth Fagin Bucket Dance.

My mother went to shows in the 1960s in Dunedin. She saw Ravi Shankar and Porgy and Bess (not at the same time) amongst others.

We went to see Nureyev at the Michael Fowler Centre. We were sitting right at the front. At one point Nureyev came right to the edge of the stage where we were sitting and I saw the strain in his arms, the sweat pouring down his body, the solidity of his feet on the ground. It made me realise the physicality of dance. From a distance it looks effortless, but it is the intense working of a body.

There was also Nina Simone. She was grumpy in a likeable way. At one moment, while the drums rolled and bass uncoiled beneath them, she rose from her piano stool and shimmyed to the front of the stage, provocatively and magnificently shaking her impressive bosom at the thousand odd grey-haired, white middleclass Wellingtonians sitting in the audience. Wonderful!