Loredana's Funky Tour of Brisbane!

"It's like the past 25 years never happened!" Andrew said at the end of a long and surprisingly lovely evening.

That's Loredana for you!  She always had that effect; whooshing away every other consideration and clearing the path for a damn fine time.

 Loredana and Andrew reminiscing!

We were all at uni together, more years ago than I care to remember:  Andrew hulking about campus in his khaki army greatcoat, chips on both his hunched shoulders, hands thrust deep in his pockets, a sneer on his face, a knee-jerk "I'm for the proletariat" response on every occasion; yet another Angry Young Man hiding a dark secret: that he was a well-brought-up middle-class charmer with exceptionally lovely parents and a very nice home out there in the suburbs.

Me?  Yeah! Yeah! Pretty much the same! All scruffy jeans, big black coat, wild hair under my latest hat-de-jour, a sneering hard-arse feminist, knee-jerk for social justice, bristling with opinions, ready to instantly "go the stosh" for my various causes, and similarly hiding a middle-class background of a white house atop a hill.

Yeah, man! We were dark.  We were dangerous.  We were angry.  Yeah, man, we were PUNKS and we were proud of it.

But then there was Loredana: a chic little pocket Venus, dressed like Audrey Hepburn, and always out for a good time.

 The Lovely Loredana!

Today!

We originally came together because of FILM: because we all shared the dream of making films; Loredana to make them, Andrew to act in them, and me to write them! 

We shouldn't logically have been friends with her, we hard-arsed Socialists, what with our constant "That's sooo bourgeois!" refrain, because Lovely Loredana was the epitome of Them, the Bourgeoisie.", a Fluffy-Bunny Trendoid into Hot and Chic and "The Latest on the Scene!"

But we loved her, the little sweetheart, because she was just so different from "The Others of Her Ilk".  She was hilarious and, much more importantly, took it all with a grain of salt; like no one else around she was able to laugh at herself and all she stood for.  Loredana always was who she was: a Little Italian Princess raised within her migrant parents' Great Australian Dream and not even remotely ashamed of it.

She was warm and funny and I regret to say around her "Trendy" made a lot of sense, and yes, when she was around we ignored the latest plight of the whales in the Antarctic and just did fun stuff together.  How many times did we skive off class to drink wine-coolers ("Wine Coolers? How bourgeois!") for hours in The Normandy Hotel, writing scripts for the films we planned to make?  And we made them too, I have to add.  It wasn't just talk, you know!  Out there, somewhere in the wilderness of our past,  lies a little cache of films we made together ... and which no one thought to keep for our records.

And so there we are, twenty five years later, and Loredana suggests we meet up in the very trendy The Valley at the very trendy Rick's Cafe:

Loredana and Andrew!

Andrew is so large and Loredana so winsy,

we once cast them both as rag doll puppets

in our film about how girls are treated by boys

in the education system.

It was meant to be an artsy-fartsy 

symbolic representation of

what regularly happens in a school's playground.

With Andrew so looming and Loredana so cute,

it worked so well on screen,

and was so instantly powerful,

even scary to watch,

we made our point so easily and so well,

it felt like we'd somehow cheated.

We chat for a while, catching up on a great many years, drinking muggachino ("Muggachino?  How Bourgeois!") and watching Them, the passing Trendoids, when Loredana suggests we check out the hot new DJ at the hot New Cloudlands.

Say what?  

I mean ... DJ????  Who was ever into DJs!  It was live or nothing for we Angry Young Men types!

And the NEW Cloudlands?  The old Cloudlands was a WWII-era ballroom that was hi-jacked by we Lefties back in the 80s as a live venue for local and visiting PUNK bands.  Oh yes, many a night we spent there jumping up and down on the spot in the punk facsimile of dancing, getting off on the latest band-de-jour ... and sometimes even to Real Bands. The Split Enz Concert, folks?  Who else was there that amazing night? But shortly afterwards the REAL Cloudlands was torn down, amid our outraged howling protests, by Queensland's FASCIST DICTATOR, the evil Joh Bjelke-Petersen.  (And who else is cheering that, as it turns out, history tells us he was indeed the corrupt evil man we always claimed he was!)

So there was no way on earth we'd sully our memories of the glorious REAL Cloudlands by visiting some shonky name-stealing modern fake-up!

"Come on. It'll be fun." says Loredana.

And, would you credit it?, suddenly it made sense and, yes indeed, we went off to hear the latest new hot DJ at The New Cloudlands.

Yup, that's Our Loredana, forever whooshing away every other consideration and clearing the path for a damn fine time.

THE NEW CLOUDLANDS 

 

The New Cloudlands, The Valley, 

Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

 

The new hot DJ!

The scene!

And you've got to LOVE the decor, folks!  Downstairs, it's all dangling ferns and funky-arse lighting!

 

While upstairs, it's all Byzantine and deliciously decadent private booths ...

... with the seriously BEST bathrooms ever ...

...  unisex upstairs - or at least there were a lot of men hanging around in the Ladies - and single sex downstairs:

 

 And special mention must be made of the smoking room:

Cool or wot?

Damn!  Phone call! Got to go out now, but I will come back tomorrow to finish this post!  A LOT more to come!

No, no more to come because my photo program has started to seriously play up and I really can't tell this story without the photos. I'll find out what's happening here first and THEN get back to it.