Dedicated follower of fashion

When I was a child I thought ric rac and smocking were primitive forms of torture invented by my sewing teacher. When I was 18 I thought they were cooler than cool on my hippie smocks. When I was a child I donned my Mouseketeer ears every afternoon and when I was 18 I proudly wore a tight Mickey Mouse t-shirt tucked into my blue jeans. I'm not sure where this is going, but hopefully I'll find a thread.

I am not a natural sewer and my few creations have made me my own fashion victim: the skirt stitched across the bottom; the dress with a cobweb of threads inside that couldn't be cut in case it fell apart; and the shirt that did fall apart after being worn twice. Luckily I had reached home when the fragmentation occurred.

So, unlike my friend with nimble thimbled fingers (you know who you are), I rely on what the fashion world serves up, which might not necessarily be off the peg or on the pages of style bibles. It's undoubtedly bad timing to be talking about Woody Allen and I don't want to get into the whole she said, he said thing, but I do know that he has had an impact on my life. And who would have thought that one of his major influences was in the fashion stakes. I spent months if not years wearing oversized men's shirts and waistcoats with baggy belted trousers. La di da. La di da. How could you not want to follow in the footsteps of Annie Hall?

Did it matter to anyone else that I was sporting a Klute haircut or could forge my way past Meryl Streep's accent to don ankle-length linen skirts and dusters straight Out of Africa? Was I a dedicated follower of fashion or just someone with a desire to be someone else?

I know how to live a dog's life

Before we got a dog, I was living like one. This is no reflection on my family's circumstances, or the way I was treated. I just decided one day – aged about four – that I was going to be a dog.

My long-suffering mother made me a kennel out of an oversized cardboard box. She patted me fondly and patiently sat out the days until I chose to reclaim my human form.

It's hard to imagine what influenced me to take to the floor because it was years before we got a dog. Maybe I can lay it at the feet of Lady and the Tramp, 101 Dalmations, Rin Tin Tin or even Toto. Pause for thought. (As the man-son says, it's my blog and I'll pun if I want to.) It could have been Lassie, who got off so very lightly in the naming stakes in the eponymous 1950s program compared to Lt Rip Masters and Sgt Biff O'Hara.

Was it the instinct of a  precocious dog lover, or of an egalitarian? In fact, I was drawn by the thought of looking at everything from ankle height. I still over-identify, but now I can do it in a standing position. Those who know me well recognise Yusuf Islam's (formerly Cat Stevens') 'I love my dog as much as I love you' as my theme song.

Taffy was our first. The offspring of our cousins' Sonny, predictably, he was a Welsh Corgi, who less predictably battled the magpies over ownership of his bum fluff. Magpies know no boundaries when nesting. Then there was Sam the Afghan Hound. I don't know what we were doing with a 1960s fashion statement but I do remember his impossibly fine blond hair blowing in the wind when he rode in my mother's convertible.

My son and I were given Max, who was brought up by my German friend Barbara. He arrived with his best friend, a black cat called Panther and a dowry of a wooden armchair. The son quickly put Max's new-found disobedience down to my abysmal German accent. He said the poor dog couldn't understand a word I was saying. I suspect Max knew a soft touch when he saw one.

You gotta love 'em. It's more than the unconditional love and deep-seated loyalty; it's their indescribable joy of just waking each morning and embracing each day with as much enthusiasm as they can possibly muster.

Now, as Cooper the kind and gentle kelpie x heaves his arthritic spine up off the floor, I'm determined this is the last one. I know I've said it before – and I'll probably say it again.

The lost art of Pillow Talk?

I grew up in the country – maybe 'country' is a bit of a stretch. There were hard-working dairy and beef farmers, but we also lived among 'Pitt Street farmers' – city folk who liked to get a bit of dust on their moleskins and mud on their R.M. Williams boots on weekends.

When I was a child we had an operator connecting our telephone lines. We'd pick up the receiver of the black Bakelite handset and, miraculously, she'd speak: 'Number please?' Our phone numbers were a combination of alphabet letters and numbers and so short that forgetting one wasn't going to wash. My mother was convinced the operator was listening in to things that she shouldn't. Maybe it was a suspicious nature, but more likely a true understanding of how a small town works.

We lived in an old rambling house with a corridor of floor to ceiling cupboards. The corner one was set up as a phone booth, complete with a table and chair so you could settle in for a long 'mag' as my mother called it. One of her fortes was the long mag.

Needless to say, my relationship with the phone blossomed when I hit my teens. The corner cupboard was just the place to arrange a Saturday night date at the Empire Cinema and then phone girlfriends to revisit every detail of the making of the date. It wasn't exactly Pillow Talk, but I can remember a few relationships where there was more of a frisson over the phone line than in real life.

The phone experience began to change in the '60s and '70s when we graduated to an automatic exchange and colourful rotary dial handsets. The '80s were memorable for my infant son pulling a yellow model onto his head, which precipitated the first of a string of visits to the children's hospital. Then in the '90s a friend stumbled in my front door lugging a brick mobile Motorola and we just stood there in awe staring at it.

I love love love my iPhone but sometimes, I admit, I yearn for the privacy and secrecy of the corner cupboard and the thrill of not knowing where a conversation or a night at the cinema will lead.

Gearing down: tales from a colour-conscious rev head

Call me a slow starter, but I acquired my first automatic car in 2008. (I'm not counting my yellow, gearless pedal car with contrasting black wheels and steering wheel.) That's about 45 years after I started driving. I'm sounding like an early boomer, I know, but I got serious about driving grown-up  cars when I was 10. Around and around I'd go — on our circular driveway in my mother's emerald green VW Beetle, before advancing to my father's chartreuse Carmen Ghia.

I can see there's a green theme, because my first car was an olive green Fiat 850 Sports, followed by an altogether murkier green Morris, then a chartreuse Beetle. My last manual car was an emerald green Golf, so I haven't strayed far from my roots.

I can also see there's a gear theme, no doubt fuelled by my playmate who had a blue American pedal car with contrasting white wheels and steering wheel — and gears. Later, I would watch my parents moving smoothly through the gears — the column shift on my father's Vauxhall, the floor shift on my mother's Triumph Herald, the column shift on the Rover, and especially the funky rod on the Citroen DS (Deesse or 'goddess') sedans which shot out from beside the steering wheel and had a white ball on the end.

Only the French would marry the designs of an Italian sculptor and a French aeronautical engineer in an automobile, hence the DS's hydropneumatic suspension. It was semi-automatic with a gear stick but no clutch, and the gears still had to be shifted by hand. Our first DS will always hold a special place in heart because it ferried me through the rite of passage that formally made me a driver — the long-awaited L plates.

Even philosophers took note of the DS. Roland Barthes, in his essay 'The new Citroen 1957', described it as a "new Nautilus", and said it, "looked as though it had fallen from the sky … One is obviously turning from an alchemy of speed to a relish of driving."

And that's what I had — a relish of driving. You've guessed it, in my own quiet and colour-conscious way, I'm a rev head. 

All ears to I spy

Every afternoon when the Mouseketeers sang, 'So, proudly put on your Mouseke-ears,' I did as I was told. I'd sit with crossed legs on the floor in front of the television sporting my big, black ears. I was a member of the 'club that's made for you and me … MIC – KEY – MOUSE.'

That's one of the great things about television, you can sing and only annoy a handful of people. Some years later, on the other side of the Mickey Mouse Club, I tried singing along to South Pacific in a packed theatre and it didn't go down so well.

In the blink of an eye I was trading moth-eaten ears for a Man from U.N.C.L.E. membership card. I didn't play the part as demonstrably as I had under the spell of the mouse, I think I just needed the card to prove I was a member of the Illya Kuryakin club. And, I was an adolescent and a member of a spy ring, so I didn't sing, I smouldered.

A Russian-born American spy who went to the Sorbonne, did a PhD in quantum mechanics at Cambridge and wore turtleneck sweaters was about as exotic as a girl in country NSW could get. I wasn't alone; David McCallum, who played Kuryakin, received more fan mail than any actor in the history of MGM.

Illya's partner, the charming Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughan), wasn't my type. He was too debonair and too conventional. That is, if you call entering your skyscraper headquarters through a tailor shop fitting room and (in the early 1960s) using ballpoint 'communicators' conventional.

Being a true Renaissance man, Kuryakin left U.N.C.L.E. after a disastrous love affair in Yugoslavia and became a fashion designer. It wouldn't have worked out between us anyway – he was a Scorpio.

You can buy The Man from U.N.C.L.E.: The Complete Series on Amazon.

Drive-ins: the marriage of the modern automobile and Cinemascope

It's said that the drive-in grew out of the drive-in restaurant business, extending the in-your-car convenience to include the silver screen. The first was opened in Camden, New Jersey, in 1933 by Richard Hollingshead Jr, who saw it as a way of expanding sales for his auto products business. A kooky entrepreneurial idea maybe, but no more so than Michelin's 'road map' of restaurants.

My first drive-in experience was the Southline in Fairy Meadow, that wonderfully whimsical name for one of Wollongong's northern suburbs. Located on swampland at the corner of Balgownie Road and the Princes Highway, Southline's construction was delayed because the police were concerned about traffic congestion. With 682 cars arriving and leaving for every session, you can understand why.

The Southline finally opened in Ocotber 1957 with an invitation-only screening of the award-winning Picnic starring Kim Novak and William Holden. The screen was 33 x 14.6 metres and the complex had a restaurant, buffet, light refreshment and confectionary bars as well as a children's playground. Admission was 5 shillings per adult and 1 shilling per child.

We were hot on the heels of opening night in our Vauxhall Velox saloon. Not only was I going out at night, I was experiencing the magical marriage of the modern automobile and Cinemascope. We pretty much followed the ritual of queuing endlessly to get in, finding our parking spot, stocking up on food and drinks and attaching our speaker to the car window before settling back for the evening's entertainment. We broke with ritual when my father drove off with the speaker still attached.

Clientele seemed to divide neatly into parents with young kids and older kids wanting to make out. Which leads me to my last drive-in experience in the 1970s in the Canberra suburb of Watson, where both the film and a budding romance were cut short by a pea-soup fog.

Drive-ins were at their peak in 1958 (who wasn't?) and many closed in the 1980s. Since the 1990s there's been a revival, with old ones reopening and new ones being built. You can find out more about drive-ins in Australia at driveinmovie.com

If you're interested in the history of Australian cinemas, drive-ins and theatres look into Cinema and Theatres of Australia (CATHS)

Many thanks to David Kilderry's Drive-ins downunder: a tribute site for info and the pic of the speakers.

Too cool for school

On Friday 19 June 1964 I had what we Australians so charmingly call a 'sickie'. The truth is, I wasn't sick. I was too excited by the prospect of my first pop concert that very night to go to school. I have always been a little partial to excitement but seeing my favourite group at the Sydney Stadium must have been more than I could bear.

I was very fortunate to have a mother who recognised the state I was in and how the Beatles were affecting me. Some months before the concert was even a possibility, she had her dressmaker run up an emerald-green velvet Beatle suit – a cropped jacket with round neck and a straight skirt – which I wore with fetching lace stockings.

My first-ever and most cherished albums were Please, Please Me and It's a Hard Day's Night, which were on high rotation. As was the favourite Beatle debate. Our mother gave my sister and me a weekly 'reading' allowance at the local newsagency and by 1964 I had graduated from an English comic to Fabulous, which had the advantage of at least one Beatles pin-up in every issue for two years. Needless to say, those posters were all over my bedroom walls. I could spend hours in my oasis eating jelly babies.

With a daughter my age, my godparents also understood the significance of a Beatles concert. They took their mentoring role seriously and not only had the foresight to buy the tickets, they took us. We drove from our country town to Kings Cross, where my godfather swung by the Chevron Hotel so we could glimpse where the fab four were staying.

Showing the kind of wisdom that only comes with age, they booked rooms for the night at the Ruschcutters Bay Travelodge, within walking distance of the Stadium. And they sat right there beside us – surrounded by screaming girls two rows from the front.

Paul turned 22 the day before and Ringo had passed out drunk at 3am after all their partying. And in good rock 'n' roll style, they got up and did it all again.

Getting in early, this week the Powerhouse Museum opens an exhibition to celebrate the Beatles' 1964 Australian tour. Be there or be square.