As mentioned in a previous post, much of December was spent exploring local beaches to see the many different personalities they have…and to just plain beat the heat. Interesting for me to write that beaches have personalities, and they do as I tried to point out here.
But, there are so MANY beautiful beaches in Western Australia that you can almost get desensitized…you find yourself saying “It’s just another beach…” until you realize what you are uttering and realize how many times in the middle of a Midwest winter you would kill for just 10 minutes on the very least of these.
But, one day during December…the day after there had been a shark sighting at Cottesloe Beach just hours after we had been there…we were a little wigged out and decided to take our kids and their friends to Point Walter, which is actually on the Swan River. As a swimming place and a place for the kids to play it was just okay. But, for me it was a fantastic place to look at birds. Particularly there was a pair of pelicans…unfortunately way off in the distance, but I have tried to capture their image here.
And, an extra special treat for me for some reason, a large number of black swans. The black swan is somewhat iconic in Western Australia. It appears on their state flag.
For me, the black swan is not only something I don’t see every day in the Midwest, but it conjures up memories of annual trips to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that I would take with my high school AP English class and drama groups. The OSF is held in Ashland Oregon and started from pretty modest beginnings to grow into a prestigious event. It was probably extra meaningful to me because my stepmother had family in Ashland—her sister, my step-aunt Nancy—had married a guy (Uncle Ron) who was a psychology professor at Southern Oregon State College and the family would hold huge reunions (like, 30-40 people) at Thanksgiving time.
Anyway, during the time that I was in high school, and the trip to Ashland was synonymous with a special time spent watching Shakespeare and enjoying theatre, the OSF had a small, black box theatre that it called The Black Swan. It used to be a car dealership, if I remember correctly, and isn’t in existence any more. But back then it was some of the most powerful theatre that I have ever seen. It only sat about 75 people if I remember right…and the audience was less than 5 feet way from the faces of the actors. Incredible. I saw a show there called The Entertainer which was tremendously dark and disturbing for a high school audience. Although some might say I remember it so vividly because it was about a burlesque show owner/host and had several brief bits of female frontal nudity in it…actually the more interesting memory was the fantastic debates a group of high schoolers got into about whether artistic works that are dark & disturbing could also be defined as entertaining/pleasurable. Looking back on it now I recognize a bit of the scholarly debate that surrounds mood management and entertainment theory in communication—particularly the work of Mary Beth Oliver at Penn State University.
So, I thank the trip to Point Walter for this trip down memory lane. The black swans here are beautiful, majestic, and likely because of people feed them junk food—fairly aggressive. My son got his finger nipped by one several times both because he invaded the swan’s space and because the swan was fearless! He’s fine… found it exciting, in fact. And, I was able to get on the OSF mailing list. Maybe someday I’ll take the family to see the great acting I experienced as a young man.
