Harpur’s Bizarre! Life. Death. Pets.
Sarah Harpur @ The Tuxedo Cat – Green Room
11:00pm, Thu 3 Mar 2011
Well… what a conflicting experience that was.
Sarah Harpur is gorgeous. Beautiful, with a twinkle in her eye and an effervescent presence onstage. She has an ear for bizarre, off-the-wall humour, and she sings and plays guitar. She has a fabulous Kiwi accent. And her use of a cutesy “yay!” as a device to transition between jokes reminded me of The Amazing Drumming Monkeys, which is most definitely a Good Thing.
So – where’s the conflict? This sounds great so far.
Well, in the middle of the show – which largely deals with her travels through life, growing up in rural NZ and dealing with the traumas of youth – she launches into her establishment of the Dead Dad Club… you know, the Club for kids with Dead Dads. And, with my own father laying on a bed in hospital, who had looked the most physically frail I’d ever seen him when I visited him six hours earlier… well, that material made me a bit uneasy.
And that’s odd – because, at the time, I forgot about the real world a little, and just lapped up the way that Harpur had dealt with the death of her father; it’s only on the walk home after the show that I started to get a little bit of a queasy feeling.
But my circumstances are not her fault; in fact, it feels a little unfair to even mention those memories, because the rest of her show is really quite fun, with tales of childhood pets and her child (oh, my broken heart!) elevating the feel-good side of the coin, and plenty of gross-out content to keep the balance in check. Even the flat spots in her material are wallpapered over by Harpur’s infectious laughter.
But hey – this blog is all about recreating the feeling of the show from my memories. Sorry :}