This year, my New Year's Resolution was to say Yes - to everything. No matter what the universe sent my way, I'd say "yes" to it. Highlights thus far including playing a corpse, pole dancing, and learning to love the skinny.
I See Dead People
I Survived a Zombie Holocaust was being filmed locally, would I be an extra?
Yes, I would. Clad in a blue winceyette dressing gown with a trailing tie, a pair of brushed cotton pyjamas and Nana's slippers, it wasn't all that difficult for me to ape the floppy, unco-ordinated gait of the undead. After all, I do live in Maitland St, no stranger to the Thorazine shuffle.
Make-up artist Brae Toia took the life out of my face. "Some people have great zombie cheekbones," she said, "they just naturally look like the living dead." "I do," boasted Ian. What was Ian's advice in the advent of a zombie pandemic?
"Be very careful."
Taken outside to be "mudded and blooded", we extras decided that, despite a lack of manners and Rubik Cube-solving abilities, zombies maintain a basic, cellular memory (cellular, not cellutronic? The one good thing to come out of the zombie apocalypse would be the end of Twitter).
I'd keep returning to my hairdressers, standing uselessly outside, clawing slowly at the glass.
The economist's zombie would obviously loiter about the commerce building with the rest of them. Forever stuck at morning tea.
The ghoul next to me received a message on his BlackBerry.
Could he babysit tonight?
"Sorry, I'm a zombie," he typed back. Genius.
Adventures at the pole
Tammy, the beer-drinking model and I wandered into the pole dancing studio completely by chance. Blondes in minuscule shorts dangled upside-down, attached by no more than a cocked knee, from the top of 15-foot poles, like Circus Barbies. "We should definitely do this," said Tammy.
Yes, we should.
"And the studio is somewhere out South Dunedin?" inquired Mother, immediately equating pole dancing with solo mothers and regrettable tattoos.
"Pole dancing is now a respectable form of exercise," I scolded, belatedly remembering that I was a single parent, and tattooed, though not regrettably.
The secret to pole dancing?
"Just effing do it," advised the instructor, draining a can of Speight's. At my look, she explained, "We endorse drinking here." Finally, a sensible sport, I thought. The class was an hour and a-half of physical torture. The only move I managed to successfully complete was one that involved going backwards.
"I have to laugh," said the economist that night, as I lay on the floor, moaning. "A man couldn't have dreamt of better.
"Nice middle-class women emulating sleazy hos." "It's not sleazy," I protested.
There's certainly not a hint of debauchery when I do it, more pathos. And watching long-legged Tammy pole dance is like watching a giraffe try to climb a tree.
"It's physically very demanding," I said defensively, "and actually it's not called 'pole dancing' any more, but Vertical Aerial Dance."
"Darling, are you sure you want to do this?"
The economist persevered, with a gentle, faux sensitivity. "I marched for your kind to have the right not to pole dance. I was a feminist once."
"Well, I'm taking back the pole!" I shouted. The economist laughed like a drain. It was five days before I could lift my arm to punch him.
Slim pickings
My most recent adventure with "yes" saw me confront a lifelong aversion to skinny women. It's always been my theory that the overly thin are a little bit mental, due to a lack of brain nutrition. Like comedian Michelle A'Court, I despise women who say, "No thank you," while I'm saying, "Yes please, I'll have five, and another glass of that chardonnay."
Thanks to my resolution to always say "yes", last week I reversed a deep commitment to avoid protruding clavicles and attended iD Dunedin Fashion Week. Skinny women were absolutely everywhere, but there were goody bags with Pinky bars inside, so it wasn't all bad.
Massively loud music made gimpy wee stick girls wobble on their way down the catwalk.
Ridiculously fashionable clothes caused dreadful wardrobe envy and rapid calculations of current account balances.
In the audience, black-clad mavens the width of folding chairs who hadn't eaten since 1984 teetered glamorously on the edge of fainting. It was all a bit fabulous. I felt thinner by association.
Watching the models stop, pose and pivot like robot fairies dressed in candyfloss, I had an epiphany: skinny women are just like you and I, only there's less of them. See, that's the power of the "yes" for you?
There's always a positive.
