ONE FLU OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST Just another Corona jab.

    I’ve eaten moose. Sat naked in a sauna. Sung ABBA to Abbanians. Gate-crashed a funeral. I must have been to Sweden.
    The moose tasted like cow. The sauna smelt like pine. The Abbanians cheered like mad. And the dead guy left the building. The building being S:t Petri Kyrka. (St Peter’s Church for the Svenska challenged and aren’t we all even if we hide it?) It’s been around since the early 1300s, which pre-dates the Reformation and also Sherbet. Sherbet representing both Australia and my age bracket. It was also the name of that seminal pop quintet who created such ageless hymns as Howzat!, Summer Love, and who could forget Winnipeg Sidestep? Songs that reside in that part of the Australian heart which accurately mirrors the nostalgia ventricle of the Swedish, a small red room which pumps a little more fervently when they hear Fernando or Dancing Queen and who could omit Dum Dum Diddle from Side One of Arrival? But let’s go back to church…
    I was taking a long walk in the big, fat, cliché’d snow and happened upon a very old kyrka I had been hoping to find. And inadvertently became the last person to see some dear soul carried away in his coffin. I have no proof that the person inside was a man, but I guessed it in my gut the way I guessed that much of the building’s Renaissance ornamentation had been swept away after the Reformation, and then again during a restoration around 1850. His coffin was beige and simple and had possibly come in a flat box with instructions. All the mourners had left. Nonetheless, the leading player was still on and I’m sure he didn’t consider the show over just yet. I sat in a pew behind a pillar as white and simple as the snow outside. (I’m describing the pillar people.) Even from here, I managed to see the Recently De-sweded trundled out on a small, two-wheeled trolley which refused to mount the slightly raised door-sill the first time. He didn’t want to go. ‘Just one more hymn!’ I imagined him calling out through the beige and/or ether. ‘247! I love that one!’ But with a good Lutheran shove, he was trundled over the restored lip of wood and out into the falling snow to be packed into the back of a very un-hearselike van like Bjorn’s amp after a late-night gig. And I wondered what the departed would make of his last exit from a building being witnessed by an Australian turn from Mamma Mia. Perhaps he was an Abba fan and I was brought by the Eurovision gods who have their very own gaudy nave in Valhalla…
    I stood and continued my small, solo tour. To one side was a chapel dedicated to Peter, Paul and Mary’s mother, St Anna. I’ve never heard of Anna, and I’m an ex-Christian. Which was the name of the truck-seller I met in Deep on Amiralsgatan. I think I just segued like there was no morgondag.
    There are a few ‘mos among the cast and we were up for some drinking and dancing and flirting. I went online and found a night called Club Divine at the aforementioned Deep and off we went with hands in our pockets, scarves on our necks and hope in our pants. Malmö is not the most cosmopolitan of cities so expectations were about as high as the canals we walked over. Nonetheless, when we arrived there were coloured lights and over-sized silver couches and a big, big drag queen doing the DJ-ing and beer on tap and some cute men. You know. Gayness. We had fun although no-one had sex. Although I did bluntly introduce myself to said truck seller to cupidly introduce him to one of the lads who later reported that the truck seller got a semi-on (sic), after which I suggested the lad’s nickname become Chardonnay. Semi-on. Chardonnay. Geddit? Neither did anyone else and he is still called by his usual handle. Me? I danced like there was nobody watching and loved my beer like I’d never been hurt by it.
    We had our last Malmö show the next day, a Sunday, at 3pm. Civilised. Which brings me to something I’ve not really talked about in 3.7 blogs. The show. May I say right now that doing this particular piece of theatre in Sweden is similar to a group of Swedes doing a musical based on the songs of Sherbet in Adelaide? So wrong it’s a little bit right. To sum up, they loved it. We were in Malmö’s new ice-hockey stadium and played to 3000 people per show. Backstage has never been half a stadium before and it managed to make this huge and complicated collection of costumes and sound stacks and power lines seem like a deaf school’s production of Oklahoma. But get on stage and glance across this swollen number of people and you quickly realise you are part of a rather large enterprise. Get on stage in silver platform heels and a red spangly jumpsuit for the finale singing and dancing to Waterloo and you quickly realise you are in Mamma Mia. With a slight hangover. Things could be worse.
    And so, like the missionaries bringing Christianity in the 9th century, I, an Australian, have helped bring a musical based on Swedish pop songs about English people in Greece to the pre-converted in Malmö. It ain’t Lutheranism, but it encouraged some congregational singing all the same. I hope the dead guy got to see it from that badly-decorated corner of Valhalla. Next to Thor on a big silver couch.
    Hasta Manana ‘til we meet again.