Dangerous Ideas - A Conversation between Dean Mayes & Alice Fraser

I had the opportunity to catch up with one of my favorite people recently. Alice Fraser is a comedian, writer, podcaster and fascinating interlocutor. Alice is performing her new comedy show "Ethos" across Australia and during her run in Adelaide, we sat down in a little teahouse in the back streets of Adelaide's CBD and recorded an hour of really valuable conversation for her podcast "Tea With Alice".

 

We wrestled with some dangerous ideas that were a little hard to coax from me initially but eventually we got into a flow where I was able to articulate some thoughts I had about the #MeToo movement - my perceived exclusivity of the movement and how, as a male who has experienced sexual violence from a female perpetrator, the movement seems unable to handle the lived experience of those who don't fit an accepted narrative.

From there, we ventured into more philosophical territory, exploring how the modern discourse can be overwhelming to someone who is trying to understand and extend their understanding of the world beyond their simple origins. think I made the point at one stage that, as I get older, the less I feel I understand of the world and how to navigate my way through it.

We also talked about my adventures with botox and how it is keeping my throat from killing me. Oh - and my adventures in writing romance...as a man. 

 

Alice Fraser is a rare individual with a lightning intellect, a worldly outlook and a huge heart and I always treasure our catch ups. As I said, she is touring her show throughout 2018 here in Australia and the UK so if you're a fan of thought provoking comedy, I highly recommend you catch her show. 

Download & Listen to our conversation here. 

Visit Alice Fraser here. 

Tweet with Alice here. 

DFA.

Ground (Snore) Zero.

It's a damp Tuesday morning and I sit here, in the study, my mind swirling - literally. 

When I woke from my otherwise broken sleep at 6.30 this morning, the first thing I did was prepare my morning cocktail of medications. I'm currently on a regimen of pain killers including Celebrex, Tramadol, Panadol, an anti-inflammatory called Dexamethasone, a drug to prevent bleeding called Tranexamic Acid, an antibiotic called Amoxycillin and an antiseptic mouth wash called Difflam. Through out the day, I have to dose these out, interchanging the pain tablets with the others, so I can get a balance of effect that lasts.

Remember that scene in Prascilla - Queen of the Desert when Terrance Stamp's Ralph sat preparing his morning hormone pills by simply tipping them into a breakfast bowl and pouring milk over them? 

Yeah - that.

(I was seeing orange unicorns here.)

The downside of all of this is that it sends me loopy. My head is spinning, my balance is shot and my mind is foggy. Oh - and I'm having some awesome hallucinations. It's either that or endure a constant feeling of razor blades slicing at the back of my throat. I'm also experiencing a neuralgic pain that shoots up into my ears from either side of my jaw. I have to time the taking of these painkillers right so that the analgesic effect kicks in before I even contemplate eating anything. 

Eating. 

Everything I am eating presently is either soft or pureed. Which isn't actually as bad as it sounds. When I was in hospital, they brought me a little tub of pureed apple on my breakfast tray which actually tasted really nice so when I came home and Emily asked me what I would like from the shops, I made sure to write that one down. I've started pairing it with some Greek yoghurt and for the time being, it's a little treat to myself. I look forward to that one. I'm also sharpening my vegetable soup making skills. A soup pack from the shops containing a couple of carrots, celery, an onion, a turnip, a parsnip, a sweet potato costs like a couple of dollars. I add to that half a butternut pumpkin and slow cook the lot in some stock until it's all ready to be zipped into a puree. At the moment, I love this soup but I fear that I may tire of it quickly. I can drink cold tea - a Twinings earl grey. It's a bit pedestrian but, even cold, it's okay. 

My swallowing function, while it's affected by the post operative swelling and inflammation, is serviceable - so long as I don't have anything remotely solid. I tried some banana the yesterday. It sent my throat into a spasm that had my eyes bulging out of my head. 

I can't speak. My voice has been reduced to barely functional whisper and when I have tested it, it bloody hurts. I knew this was going to be the case but it now that the reality has set in, so has my depression. Trying to communicate with my family has proved challenging with me trying some rudimentary signing for obvious things and mouthing words in the hope that they will understand me. It works about fifty percent of the time but it has been bloody frustrating. 

So, I'm here alone in the house. Trying to keep my mind busy with reading and counting down the time to my next lot of pain killers. I have plenty of movies and a PS4 - I watched Deadpool yesterday. What piece of shit that was. 2 hours of my life I won't get back. Gaming is good for short periods but the games send me even more loopy and they make me feel sick. 

(Lucy makes the best Get Well cards.)

In all of this, there may be some light to look forward to. The surgery went well - very well in fact, and while the surgeon had to remove the bone from my voice box as was planned, he was able to preserve the anchor point between that bone and the right hand vocal cord. It's in a precarious state right now so I am forced to rest it completely - at least until the healing process is complete. 

So there's a chance that I can salvage some of my voice. A little one - but I'll take that right now.

DFA.

Listen to my interview with Alice Fraser, recorded before all of this malarkey.

At The Fringe with Alice Fraser's The Resistance.

Melbourne based comedian Alice Fraser first came to my attention in 2015 when she featured on Wil Anderson's Wilosophy podcast. Over the course of a couple of hours Wil and Alice explored her life growing up in a Buddhist household in Sydney and how the influence of her paternal Jewish and maternal Catholic family informed and shaped her as-yet-to-be-fully-explored philosophy on life and how she fits into it. I was immediately taken by how Alice recalled the important people in her life, not the least of which was her grandmother - a Holocaust survivor - and I was equally moved by her experience of growing up with a chronically ill mother (who had M.S. and later cancer) and how her family had journeyed through that experience. 

Alice's appearance on Wilosophy lead me in the direction of her own podcast, "Tea With Alice", a weekly conversational in which Alice interviews her contemporaries, often in relaxed settings - be it her Melbourne flat, or a local cafe or even a back garden - the centerpiece of which is a nice cup of tea, of their own choosing. Each episode is a conversation about life and where each guest is in it. Sometimes comedic, often reflective and always satisfying, I always come away from an episode feeling as though I have learned something. Additionally, I find myself shedding previous orthodoxies of thought around beliefs and opinions I have held and I see things from different perspectives. 

That, to me is a powerful thing.

Alice Fraser - The Resistance (image credit; Alice Fraser).

Last night, I got to spend an hour watching Alice Fraser perform her new show "The Resistance" for the Adelaide Fringe. Going into the show, I had a little bit of an idea of what to expect from the conversations Alice has had around her comedy on her podcast but I didn't seek out her previous material because I wanted to watch her show with a fresh set of eyes. 

The Resistance starts subtly, with a warm introduction that brings the audience into her sphere and encourages them to be a participant rather than an observer. Alice regaled the audience with song either played on a stubby little electric piano or strummed deftly on a banjo. And then Alice dropped an observation about the association between comedy and tragedy. It was a subtle one but it intrigued me.

  

Alice Fraser (image credit; Alice Fraser).

Over the course of the first half of the show, Alice took us on a conversational walk through her growing up in Sydney. It centered around her Jewish grandmother - an apparently wonderful and horrible woman who owned a block of flats in Sydney and who referred to a group of locals with varying degrees of derision and affection. Alice recalls one instance where a group of gays found themselves homeless after a fire burnt their house down. Her grandmother observed that the faggots were now homeless, but I must make them a lasagna! She apparently proceeded to house them until they were able to get back on their feet. 

Alice then recalls three key characters from the block of flats, a bi-polar Chilean gardener, an illiterate Hungarian woman who always wore a head scarf and twenty dresses and an Indian woman who donned luxurious, brightly colored dresses and espoused the need to make oneself attractive to men - but who always wore a veil to hide her face. How her grandmother and these three figures informed Alice's childhood and adolescence is hilariously sweet and breathtakingly inappropriate all at the same time and there wasn't a moment in that first half where the audience wasn't laughing or chuckling or appreciating the irony of these characters. 

And then the show took a turn. 

I'm unsure as to how much I should reveal here so, in respect to Alice, I'll keep it brief. The turn that came punched me in the gut. 

Alice's grandmother. The Chilean gardener. The illiterate Hungarian woman. The Indian woman. All of them came to circle in each others orbit through circumstances that are achingly powerful and emotionally bitter sweet. All of them had resisted in some way and it is this Resistance that salvaged them from particularly dark experiences in their lives. At one point, you could have heard a pin drop from the audience as Alice Fraser revealed to us all the powerful notion that the link between comedy and tragedy is such a small one - and indeed, even within tragedy, there lies comedy. And sometimes comedy is the only thing that preserves our sanity. 

At the conclusion, I felt privileged to be able to meet Alice briefly and thank her for such a wonderful performance and I left the theater feeling as though I'd learnt something about being human.

See. This. Show.     

Alice Fraser is an award winning writer, broadcaster, performer and comedian.

She's also an ex academic, ex-corporate ex-Lawyer and terrible banjo player (her words - not mine!).

Alice returned from her debut Edinburgh Fringe run last year with her critically acclaimed solo show Savage, which received four and five star reviews, as well as packed out audiences in Edinburgh after a run at the Sydney Comedy Store. Her weekly podcast "Tea With Alice" welcomes an eclectic group of like minds, artists, comedians and writers to discuss life over a cup of tea. Alice also contributes regularly to SBS Comedy.

Book tickets to The Resistance here. 

Visit Alice Fraser here. 

Tweet with Alice Fraser here. 

DFA.