SHAUN MICALLEF'S ONLINE WORLD AROUND HIM                                      Back        Home
		Nothing exceeds like success Author: Shaun Micallef Date: 16/11/2002 Words: 787 Publication: The Age Section: Saturday Extra Page: 2 As a rule I don't attend society weddings, but as I was invited this time I thought I'd make an exception. Plus there was nothing on television; even the ABC had let me down, scheduling yet another thing with Pauline Quirk in it. Rather than spend the evening pointing at the screen and sputtering incredulously, I thought I may as well whack on the monkey-suit and angle-grind some padded shoulders at this shindig. I am nothing if not discreet, so I won't name names - although I will say the happy couple were so spectacularly ugly that Diane Arbus had been hired to do the wedding photos. I'd been waiting years to use that joke and was so grateful for the opportunity that I was almost sincere when I wished the newlyweds the best and handed over the re-wrapped cake stand I'd had in the presents cupboard for the past 12 years. I had managed to buff off most of the engraving, and would have to rely on either my mother's good grace or her dementia not to ask after the fate of what was such a thoughtless 21st gift. They sat me next to one of those inexplicably popular Sydney radio presenters. I'm too young to remember what it was Colin Pringle originally did to justify his reputed sway over the vast concord of Australia's elderly who hang on his every honeyed word. A spruiker with a shop-worn line in the aural equivalent of kicking in windows, he has made millions bagging major corporations on-air until they agree to employ his services. Obviously, I sat up like a target in a shooting gallery when he swung his airbrushed physiognomy in my direction and asked if I wanted some financial advice. ``Sue your tailor," he intoned flicking ash on to my admittedly less than natty dinner jacket. The table erupted in a gush of sycophantic chortling as he broke into an expensive porcelain smile, his dead eyes twinkling in a way that somehow reminded me of a distant galaxy being extinguished, and rose like a Golem from his chair. Ever the showman, he cocked an eyebrow so high it disappeared under his toupee and re-appeared fleetingly as it slid down the back of his neck and into his shirt collar. God knows where it ended up (although I later saw an usher belting something with a broom near the hors d'oeuvres). You had to give it to him; he knew how to be wry. As polite laughter filled the air, he turned on his Algerian heel and was off to put the scarers on some bank chiefs. Later that night, I would be rung at home by Pringle and taken to task for using his name in this column. ``We've never met at all let alone at a wedding reception," he rightly complained. I pointed out that I often used historical figures in a fictitious context and that he should be flattered - and, in any case, as he was an amalgam, I had used a pseudonym. I also expressed surprise that he should be prescient enough to phone me before the piece had actually been written. He rang off angrily threatening to sue my arse off; a pointless exercise as my arse is currently in liquidation. The wedding party left as the Donner party had, in a blizzard of white and with no thought of cannibalism. My partner in the guard of honour turned out to be another influential Sydney deejay, Ronnie Gradgrind. Gradgrind's purported influence as a king-maker was nothing short of inscrutable. That he had lined up with Pringle, Laws and Jones for caning with an emu-plume over the cash-for-comment scandal was quadruply bamboozling in his case as his stilted and amateurish reads could only be mistaken for spontaneous bursts of opinion by only the most backward of his listeners who, it seemed, numbered in their millions. Ronnie invited me on to the dance floor and started whispering financial advice in my ear in that distinctive, grating, nasal, monotone lilt of his. Doing the macarena while my flesh was creeping was awkward, so I sat it out and left Ronnie, darling of the twin set, gyrating awkwardly by himself as an ever widening gap grew around him. Being bald, fat and irredeemably stupid would normally prove an impediment to a career in media, but Gradgrind had confounded his critics, and quite a few members of the constabulary. More power to him. Colin Pringle, Ronnie Gradgrind and Pauline Quirk - an unlikely troika in my Bizarro pantheon, but an enduring one.