Guest Writer - A Night At the Phoenician with a Dash Extra

Some creative writing from Albert....

Here’s full account just as it happened, nothing more, nothing less. Well, perhaps I exaggerated a little, perhaps I made up most of the story, you the reader get to decide.
Last week I was at a restaurant called “The Phoenician”, with a group of friends. To be sure the food wasn’t all together intolerable. In fact it was quite adequate, one might even say it was tasty if one’s palates didn’t know better. However, one’s palates by no means gave an inkling to the sort of warped twilight zone one was about to make a wrong turn into. Suddenly, the music got louder. It sounded like the dance of the seven veils from the ancient royal courts of Jerusalem. The lighting dimmed, and in the back of my mind, I expected Salomé the daughter of king Herod Antipas to materialise from nowhere and start to provocatively sweep the dance floor. I was at least part right, for a Salomé look alike did indeed appear, followed closely by a male belly dancer, dressed in florescent green bikini-like top, and what looked like either a very large belt or a tiny skirt made entirely of golden tassels. He also had a green head garb, bejewelled with imitation rubies and emeralds, bestowing upon the observer many a far flashing, thus dazzlingly confounding.
“Keep an open mind”, I thought to myself, “for this is bound to be outlandishly entertaining”. The voice in my head was right on the money, no sooner had it stopped, the male belly dancer burst into serious dance, shaking his hip machinegun style. Had he artificially motorised his arse, it still wouldn’t have gone far enough to explain this unsightly scene. The hip oscillating at no less than 1000 RPMs, the stomach rippling like a pile of jelly on top of a jackhammer.

The last time I found myself in such surreal scene was at John Samaha’s party at Vaucluse Bowling club. We started by watching the sunset across the bay, that red fire goblet dips beyond the blue, indicating that the time was ripe for the loonies to make their appearance. Yes, I lucidly recall the provocative jazz singer named Edwina, dressed in a cat suit, swinging her tail left and right, all the time confessing to the beauty and simplicity of self-administered pleasures. So much was she into her theme that she may well have been a short 3 verses away from reaching for a cigarette.

Meanwhile, I stood across the room, with one martini in hand, totally immersed in her music. That voice, pure yet smouldering, like a nun with a shadowy past. It soaked the pleasure centres of the soul like a long shot of morphine into a fresh vein. What an indelent partie de plaisir she is, perhaps a tête-a-tête would be in order (the overuse of these French clichés could not be helped), by Jingo, yes, let’s do precisely that!

After some lapses and loses common to such dreamlike sequence, I fast-forwarded back to the present time, where the maitre d’ of the Phoenician had just brought us a complimentary dip. He proceeded to recite to us a certain legend about the Sumerian hero Galgamesh , that when he sought the bull of heaven, Humbaba, in the cedar forest of Ballabek, he consumed this very dip to gain miraculous powers, and thus triumph over his prey. I tried this “Hocus-Pocus” dip, it was rather good.
Given that it was so delicious, I thought I’d follow in my ancestral hero’s footsteps, and consume generous amounts of the stuff, in the hope of experiencing miraculous transformations myself. Alas, there was nothing to speak of, no overflowing reserves of wit, no superhuman strength. Perhaps the bowel movement the next morning was remarkably pale and coherent, like squeezing toothpaste out of a tube, now that’s hardly a miracle. All the same, pray to the good god this madness will never end.