~ Curious Charlie ~

‘Lists of Invisible Things’ @ The Butterfly Club @ Monday, July 16, 2012

Journey Planner is not your friend. On Saturday night we headed "towards" South Melb, to get there from Flinders JP told us to take the tram from Stop 13, right outside Flinders, and get off at Stop 24, "Clarendon St/Park St". And so we got off at stop 24, but we were still on St Kilda rd. Nice one JP, this isn't the first time it's messed up. Stop 24 is not anywhere remotely near Clarendon, it wasn't even on the same screen. Fortunately Freud had his phone and using his GPS we managed to get us there on time.

This is how to you really get to the Butterfly Club: from the tram stop outside Southern Cross, Stop 1-Spencer St/Collins St (Melbourne City), take 112 St Kilda and get off at stop 129-Park St/Clarendon St (South Melbourne) and walk. Make your starting point Southern Cross and not Flinders.

Arriving at 6.50pm we made it, and fortunately the show started a little later than anticipated. The location was the Butterfly Club, "an old Victorian shop and dwelling, [a] doll-house sized Windsor Castle of camp kitsch..." it's intriguing. There's stuff everywhere but in a sort of strange way organized in that it was all over the walls and shelves, messy, but not quite something on Hoarders - not yet anyway. :P The hallway is decorated with framed posters, adoring colourful fairy lights give them life, and colourful parasols hang from the ceiling. I'd love to have taken pictures, but didn't have the camera on me, plus it was too crowded. The next room, what looks like a living room had a real fireplace which gave the room a warm glow, and on the other wall was a huge shelf full of random things. Pictures. There's one thing that I find is a staple to a Victorian-esque theme: creepy porcelain dolls. I personally find them terrifying - and slept with the lights on that night. There's just something about them that creeps me out, perhaps it's their big glass eyes.

If my favourite colour is purple and your favourite colour is green, but I don’t see the same green as you, and when you see green you’re actually seeing what I call purple then aren’t we seeing the same colour and so then isn’t our favourite colour the same?! - Alice

Freud and I went to see Caity Fowler's List of Invisible Things, a play part of this year's Cabaret Festival, tickets thanks to Arts Victoria aka Theatre Alive. It was great, though I was and still am a bit confused. The main character is Alice, a 14yr old girl who has died, who keeps her thoughts and memories in mason jars. It's not like a typical play with a beginning, middle, and end. The play is a micro-musical, where Fowler plays six characters and we, the audience have to rearrange the bit and pieces to make it all fit. It was very good and I very much enjoyed it, though I'm still a bit dazed to what the actual sequence of events was. We end with a quote from Freud "An enjoyable, creatively philosophical emotional experience", who had a great time - even though he does not like plays, unless he plays a lead role, as a rule.

Here's another in-dept review of the play.