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You thought it would never end, but while it might still be some years away; end it will.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KODZtjOIPg

I remember those first memories as if it was yesterday. That of holding my mother’s hand, except it wasn’t mum but a strange lady in the soup kitchen of Rotterdam 1944.  In the confusion of many mums and many children with metal buckets waiting to be filled, I had taken a mum’s hand which wasn’t my mother’s. This was my first moment of total panic and of freaking out.  It was resolved within seconds but the forgetting of this, never. How odd, that links to mothers are so important that the comfort of holding a hand can leave such lasting impressions. I mean, I was holding someone’s hand and it was only when looking upwards I became aware of the hand not being my mother’s. So what was the big deal? Perhaps during those war years with cold winters and gnawing hunger, filling buckets with soup was the primary concern by mothers with skinny children. I am sure my mother hadn’t deliberately let go of her skinny son’s hand. The metal bucket that my mother carried was green as was the little kerosene cooking stove that she used to prime by pumping. It was my right hand that my mother had let go off.

The years rushed by and then we married, we had our first, our second, our third child…. Vasectomy…. Enough now of pro-creation. Dr.Barbara Simcock of the Australian Family Planning Association performed the operation. ‘Make sure you keep using condoms for at least the next 6 weeks,” was her sage advice.  Here take some, they are multi coloured and they glow in the dark, she added before tending to the next man who I had briefly met in the waiting room. He had a beard and looked a bit anxious and pale, but he also had four children. Then after six weeks I had to take a sample to the ‘semen expert’ who would try and detect if any life ones survived since the operation and the use of those coloured condoms (glowing under the bed sheets). The butcher who had watched a channel 9 TV segment on my vasectomy said triumphantly;” I saw you on the Telly yesterday, you had it cut off”, ha-ha ha…” Your usual two kilo of sausages?”

Those were the days, forever and for more. Those were also the days of the tribal rock musical ‘Hair’ with its’ Age of Aquarius’ with long hair and tentative first bong trials and errors. We rolled the bong and felt real ‘with it’ especially after having, for the first time ‘ever’ in public, seen the lineup of nudes at the Hair musical at Kings Cross theatre. The first display of pubic hair IN PUBLIC!  It had trouble getting through the sensors. One condition of allowing the nudity was that the actors were to stand frozen. Nothing would be allowed to move or dangle. Police on horse-back with batons drawn were outside the theatre.  Any body part moving and hell would break out. The actors were also not allowed to undress on the stage. The problem was resolved by the actors getting undressed under a huge canvas sheet. When the moment arrived that the whole audience had waited for, (with baited breath) you could hear a pin drop. The canvas sheet would be hoisted up, et voila, real live nudes. Standing, in situ, like a set from Madame Tussauds Wax museum. Eroticism came in modest form during those times.

The show was hugely popular and went on even longer than ‘The Sound of Music,’ which was not quite as erotic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9oq_IskRIg