It was a warm, balmy night for Marky Mark’s visit to Sydney. We rolled up to City Extra, which has great Harbour Bridge views, and got a top spot upstairs.
City Extra is a journalism-themed restaurant, open 24hrs, with a huge broadsheet newspaper menu with lots of journo-inspired foods, but during covid it closes at 12 and the menu has shrunk to fit on a hygienic, laminated A4.
Marky Mark wanted salt and pepper squid and the waiter put an asterisk next to his order so the Kitchen would make it super special. Thing is, Marky cooks for 500 people a day (with the help of just three others) – he does 2 weeks of non-stop 12-hr days, then a week off. He’s the best chef ever, I went over for Christmas dinner a few years ago and the turkey was moist, juicy and DIVINE!!!
David popped in quickly during his dinner break, looking HOT in his St John Ambulance uniform, freshly laden with deadly plague germs from his hotel quarantine job. But he’s had 2 Pfizer jabs, so – INVINCIBLE!!
Yol left early to go to her Opera singing group. Her gorge daughter Tam has an Insta account @cunningculling modelling amazing vintage clothes she sells.
Louise tried to convince us to all to go to No Lights, No Lycra where everyone dances around in the dark, no hassles, great for your mental health. She’s danced in the dark around the world and goes to as many as she can around Australia. Us, with our ageing bits and pieces, are only low-impact disco-ers now, and mostly stick to walking to places ABBA visited when they were in Sydney.
Marky teased us with his fandom story about Bananarama! Turns out he’d caught Siobhan’s eye and ended up on stage to shriek “I’m your Venus, I’m your fire!” (with hand chorry). He ended up over-staying and as he was being dragged off horizontally by Security, he managed to rip the songlist off one of the footlights and the Bananas screamed: “How will we know what’s next?”, laughing as he was tossed back into the crowd, TRIUMPHANT!
We all fell briefly silent in a moment of sombre reflection that, despite all of us being groupies and backstagers, NONE of us had ever had sex with one of our idols, or even a tribute cover band member! We’re so Someone Else’s Story — “I don’t see myself as taking part at all”!
Then we paid the bill with our covid-economic-recovery NSW Dine and Discover 25% off vouchers and scurried to the Opera House steps for night-time pics.
As we gazed over Luna Park, we talked about the Ghost Train fire there which killed 6 people in 1979 and Louise is linked to someone who knew someone who’d perished. There was a recent TV doco which suggested they were killed by an arson attack which went wrong and was covered up by corrupt NSW police, judges and politicians.
We mused that in only 20 years, we’d all be nearly 80! And the members of ABBA are 70-75yrs. Will we ever hear their new songs while they’re all still alive? Will we ever feel too old to take pix of ourselves in ABBA T-shirts and do crazy ABBA stuff?
No, NEVER!!
Cotton Ward 