December 10, 2011

Swapped At Birth

The day I finished high school my fellow classmates headed to the nearest beach to get royally stoned, but I decided to celebrate in a more elegant fashion. By lining up at Hoyts George Street cinemas to see Lily Tomlin and Bette Midler in ‘Big Business’.
The anticipated joy was that these sassy comediennes were about to play two characters at the same time.
A screwball comedy with a double helping of mouthy twins? Yes, ma'ams!













My popcorn was popping, my Sprite was spritzing, and as I settled into my seat I thought of my unfortunate classmates who would just at that moment be extracting sand from their arse cracks while arguing about which Doors song made the best sex soundtrack. (“Riders On The Storm? Are you fucking with me dude?”)
The lights in the half empty cinema started to dim but as the film started I began to feel a growing sense of discomfort. The plot was classic diva slapstick but involved a twist that was a little too close to the bone for me: within the first five minutes Baby Bette and Baby Lily somehow got swapped in the maternity ward which led to a further 92 minutes of *hilarious* nature versus nurture jokes.
“I don't see how it is that you, my own sister, can stuff your face and nothing happens and I subsist on 60 calories a day or else blow up like a Macy's Day float!”
Side splitting. But also unnerving because a few decades ago I had almost suffered the same mix’n’match fate.
Flashback to Tim Denoon’s first day on earth: my mother’s waters had decided to break on a sunny afternoon in June, but after arriving at the hospital and waiting hours for the first contraction the doctor who examined her had a grim, unamused face.
“If nothing happens by sundown we’re going to have to take steps,” he informed her.
Oxytocin, anyone?
When there was still no sign that I wanted to leave the womb my mother did what any practical, nightie-clad woman in the seventies would do. She headed straight for the car park and started jumping on the asphalt like a spring-loaded watermelon.
Which was annoying for a foetus that had already lost its amniotic cushion.
Christ almighty woman, I get the hint!
So after the nurses had cleaned me up and swaddled me in a non-Egyptian cotton blanket I was taken to the ‘holding room’ where all the other newborn babes were being kept until their mothers had recovered their dignity.
The only problem was that my father’s cousin had just given birth to a daughter that same evening and both babies’ plastic bracelets were casually inscribed with the same surname. Cue the comedy of errors: it took my mother at least four hours before struggling clear of the painkiller haze to insist to the nurses that her baby had been born with a penis.
Oy, vey.
Thank God there was something like that to tell us apart or I’d now be a divorced Garnier sales rep with a fondness for macarons and toddler pageants.

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