I met up with John-John at Liverpool Street in the afternoon, and off we went to the "Simply Madonna" exhibition in Brick Lane. [Having recovered from the sight of so many cute "suits" gathered in one place, that is! I love the City...]
The exhibition is a wonderful and comprehensive assemblage of costumes - including that pointy bra, and outfits from Like A Virgin, Material Girl, Evita and from her tours - together with magazine covers, her entire back catalogue of albums, Madge dolls and case after case of souvenirs, autographs and awards. Well worth seeing, in spite of the grim warehouse-like exhibition space of the old Truman Brewery.
Read more about the exhibition
Then it was onwards to Polari. Especially for "Boyz Night", I had a t-shirt printed featuring a great pic of Bowie with William Burroughs, which I thought appropriate. Freedom Bar looked like an advertising campaign for the similarly-named magazine, however... They are "official sponsors" so I suppose it's only fair.
As always, the lovely Dom Agius provided a suitably-themed and eclectic mix of tunes (not often you'll hear Bessie Smith and Lindsey DePaul in the same playlist!), before the readings began with the very first Polari Night unpublished author - John Joseph Bibby (who we had previously seen doing a most unusual "striptease" at the Quentin Crispmas event in December). He proved to be a talented writer, too, with a bizarre tale of a gay drifter and his encounter with a fortune-teller ("The Oracle").
After a short hiatus, we were entertained by Drew Gummerson (above) reading from his new novel Me and Mickie James, a quirky tale about the adventures, life and loves of an aspiring pair of musicians. The fact that Mickie just "happens" to be a hunchback, the boys "happen" to be lovers, and they "happen" to end up in a hotel room in Ho Chi Minh City with a compulsive masturbator might give you an inkling of quite how quirky this tale is!
But this was not half as much of a spectacle as the arrival on stage of the fabulous (and also, surprisingly unsigned) Williams Sisters! I can't really describe this act in its full glory, so here is a little taster...
How can you follow an act of that magnitude? Well, writer and columnist Adam Mars-Jones (below) certainly gave it a try. He began with a fantastic piece from his new book Pilcrow. Written from the perspective of a small boy, it accurately summed up how small boys think about things - in this particular case the "argument between a man and a lady about making pies" (his interpretation of the classic song Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better)).
Then he treated us to one of his unpublished works, a much more graphic tale about a sexual encounter between a closeted youth and a biker in the scrubland of Box Hill. It is a shame this fab story has never yet been seen in print (for family reasons, apparently), but hopefully one day it will get the exposure (oo-er) it deserves.
Yet another in a succession of excellent nights courtesy of Paul, Rupert and Dom, and as always they managed to pack out the sizeable Freedom function room - not bad for a midweek cultural event!
Not content with leaving it there (as is our wont) we ended up till the wee small hours in the fabulosa Players' Theatre piano bar - drinking Port of all things... No wonder I've been feeling slightly fragile today.
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