Diary – 18 December 2004

New York

In Brisbane there was, and may yet be, an old-fashioned shopping arcade with a little tea shop on an upper gallery. There you could sit at a table with a cup of tea, a lamington or perhaps an asparagus roll (two Queensland staples) and, having drained your teacup and inverted it over the saucer, receive a ‘reading’ from one of the psychic ladies who shuffle from table to table ministering to the credulous. You may assume that I am a regular patron of astrologers, palmists, tarot readers and assorted sibyls. I can’t resist a glimpse, however occluded, into the future. At Byron Bay, a famous New South Wales beach and hippie time-warp, where barefoot and patchouli-scented odalisques still loiter, I found an authentic Irish witch who has converted the ramshackle tool shed in her garden into a spooky consulting room. It was there, in Sidonie’s tenebrous grotto, that I learnt, several months in advance, of the success of my present Broadway show, thus sparing myself the torments of self-doubt and first-night jitters other artistes experience as they wait up till dawn to read the reviews.