Pitch Bitch gets charitable
Far out! I’ve just had the gayest weekend in all of my 28 years. I feel positively stained in rainbow colours.
It all started on Friday night with a trip to the Paddington RSL for Queer Screen’s annual film trivia night, accompanied by a pack of rabid popular culture enthusiasts from the Star. We came second behind the table full of Queer Screen board members -“ although our success could have been due to our ability to translate Miss Dolly Wood’s questions rather than our deep understanding of film. I think most of the people there would agree our Dolly’s had better nights, especially Mardi Gras co-chair Steph Sands’ table of dykes who copped a fair bit of abuse from the hostess.
Anyways, the quiz night was pretty low rent -“ we came second and left with a movie ticket, a pack of floating candles and a few cheap RSL beers in our stomachs. It’s all for charity, we told ourselves.
That it’s all for charity speech became something of a mantra for my girlfriend and me over the weekend, as we bashed our BGF Bake-Off cake into shape while trying to make some headway into our cross-city house move.
The cake making won in the end -“ the move put off until next weekend -“ and we managed to make a delivery to the Shift’s upstairs judging room at the last minute. We felt a bit sad leaving it behind -“ it might have been all the work my girlfriend had put in, or it could have been the chain-smoking guy who chose to stand over the cake after we dropped it off.
The Shift is no place for a sober lesbian on a sunny afternoon, so we packed off to the park to read the papers. By the time we got back the venue was in a state of absolute cake-selling going-offness, packed with buyers, drinkers and increasingly charitable souls.
Our cake sold hours later for $450, which demonstrated Mitzi Macintosh and Portia Turbo’s selling skills -“ who else could get a room full of blokes to pay that much for a cake covered in vaginas?
A quick T-shirt change later and we all returned to Paddington, this time to Town Hall, for the surprisingly glamorous and surprisingly fast-finishing Pride Week awards ceremony. Portia Turbo was an inspiration -“ running down from the Shift (where she was earlier seen getting changed on the footpath outside), to perform a high-energy act sandwiched between two fierce dancers and co-host the awards with Gillian Minervini. The different tables were diverse and so were the winners -“ and even though the sandwiches were pretty terrible and cost heaps they sold out by the end of the night, and most of the punters maintained their enthusiasm even when their mates didn’t win. Now that’s community.
