Masked and dangerous

School fundraisers are a bugger to organise. I take my hat off to the amazing women who made ours happen last night. Freaking awesome dedication. I got exhausted just watching them transform our local pub into a Venetian palazzo. My paltry contribution was to tie endless knots in endless helium balloons and eat free hot chips, before popping home to shave my legs and polish my old ballet flats (which have holes in the soles and were my chook-pen footwear, but got pressed back into service as evening attire when I couldn’t find anything suitably cheap at Westfield).

The dress code for the night was “masked”, so I wore the gorgeous number in the photo. Despite costing the princely sum of $20, it kept sliding up into my eyes and forming really unattractive sausages of skin between the edge and my mouth whenever I smiled so it lasted all of five minutes on my face.

I am not the most visually canny person – I don’t notice things like new haircuts, weight loss, illness – so the addition of masks to my fellow school parents’ faces was quite stressful. All these strange people saying hello. But it had its entertaining moments, like seeing my ex-brother-in-law’s mask he’d made from a Venetian biscuit packet. When my sister – and fellow school mum – told me her ex-husband was wearing a Venetian biscuit mask, I thought she meant he’d glued actual Venetian biscuits to his mask and I was quite tempted to hunt him down to nibble his eyewear. Luckily for him he was just wearing the wrapper. Not quite as creative as the bloke dressed as a Venetian blind. Or the guy who’d spray-painted himself silver – face, jacket, boots and all. I was getting quite high on the fumes as I chatted to him. There were also a few glamorous Marie Antonette lookalikes sweeping around the room. Plus a couple who’d interpreted Venetian cocktail attire to mean the matching blanket-style jackets they got on their Inca trail holiday.

Being elderly, I lit out of the place at 10.30pm when I got offered a lift home by a school mum’s brother who’d come to pick her up (geez, I wish I had a relative like that on call). I was all excited about getting to bed relatively early and having a nice kip. But IT WAS NOT TO BE.

First, Husband insisted on showing me The Great Gatsby trailer again and wanted me to play Guess That Tune with the soundtrack. He’s a bit obsessed. As I sat there marvelling at its extravagent splendour I noticed there was lots of yelling and doof-doofing not normally associated with the Baz Lurhmann production. I was like fark me drunk, you are not telling me the Not So Neighbourly Neighbours are at it again? If I’d have known they’d be at it again I’d have stayed at the pub and spent obscene amounts of money on the “crocodile encounter” silent auction item for Sprog 1, whatever the hell that is. Somehow I think the $20 bid I wrote down wouldn’t have cut it at midnight when spirits were high and pockets were bottomless.

I was half-tempted to stalk over to the Not So Neighbourly Neighbours Zorro style and give them another stern talking to/fishwife screech. But I decided to leave it to the police, who were bound to arrive shortly. This is middle-class suburbia after all. We don’t tolerate that sort of nonsense for long.

So I sought oblivion in a Unisom instead and found it. As I drifted off, I imagined all the places I’d hide those raw prawns in their front yard. Heaps more fun than counting sheep. Sweet dreams.