source : the age
“Oh! The thrill of all these glimpses of the famous (C8),” enthuses Margaret Bellingham Holle of Woollahra. “As a teen I played hide-and-seek with Johnny O’Keefe among the furniture in his dad’s store in the city. Heady stuff! As an adult living with my family in the US Virgin Islands, I got to entertain John Wayne as a dinner guest. He was visiting his good friend Maureen O’Hara and her husband Charles Blair. Unfortunately, the menu was a little disastrous as it was only about two hours beforehand that Maureen informed me ‘The Duke doesn’t eat seafood’.”
Dominic Staun of Campbell (ACT) is well aware of the celebrity encounter of the negative kind: “I was in Malta in 1986 with premier Wran and another businessman, discussing an upcoming meeting with the government when Jill Hickson Wran walked into the room. We stood up and Neville said: ‘Darling, have you met these gentlemen?’ ‘No’ she replied, and walked past us. I refer to this as my brush-off with fame.”
In a case of “hold my Guinness”, Dermot Perry of Mount Keira supposes his having a meal with Liam Neeson in the dining room at Queen’s University, Belfast in the early seventies will not be taken seriously.
We’re hoping Stein Boddington of St Clair’s contribution to the street-side urination (C8) debate is an urban myth when he says, “My mother told me to avoid lumps in sugar, as they formed when dogs peed on the hessian bags of sugar stacked at the entrance to the grocer.”
“The list of the many cars abandoned at Sydney Airport, some from as far away as WA, includes Mercedes-Benz, Alfa Romeo, Lexus and Dodge,” notes Paul Duncan of Leura. “Seems that today it’s cheaper to abandon one’s car than to pay the parking fees.”
“Peter Pocock remembering only one German phrase (C8) reminded me of my attempt to wow some Germanic friends with the only phrase I could recall from three years of high school German,” recalls Greg Phillipson of Aranda (ACT). “I regaled them with: ‘My car has front-wheel drive’. Cue bewildered looks and nervous smiles.”
“I went to see the Mr Squiggle and Friends exhibition at the Newcastle Museum,” says Judy Archer of Nelson Bay. “Another visitor there told me that in the 1960s, her brother put a pencil up his nose and tried to draw. They were banned from watching Mr Squiggle.”
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