So. It has come to this. 

Stew and I are leaving tomorrow for Arthur Boyd's farm. We're doing a four day road trip and we're packing pretty much every camera ever invented (Stew) and several pairs of tracksuit pants (me) into a red ford laser. 

Rita Walsh, who is (see below) galavanting in the US of A, will join us in a few weeks. It will be a case of culture meeting nature and may the best man win. 

Seriously. This is getting exciting. To see more about our artist residency and where we're going and what the people who've been there appear to have done (worn boxes on their heads by the looks of things! HUZZAH! ONE OF MY ABSOLUTE FAVOURITE THINGS!)... please go here.

You will, on the whole and there are some notable exceptions and you know who you are, be greatly missed and thought of often. So long!

Sometimes having three different jobs means they're in competition with each other. Sometimes though, when you're in regional Victoria organising a free legal information program, you meet the head of a local community group and you've just met a character who's going in a play.

I'm in Wangaratta. There's a character storm over here. Clearing late this afternoon.

In both my "day jobs", I have excellent views. Not of the sea, or the mountains, or the city, but of other people. Something I know about people: they never look up.   It's amazing what people will do when they think nobody is watching them. They will, I happen to know:   1. Pick their noses. 2. Engage in the purchase and/or supply of quantities of drugs and/or totally innocent goods in small packages that require sales to be made on street corners from old Ford Falcons. 3. Yank their undies out of uncomfortable places. 4. Argue. 5. Talk to themselves.   It's this last one that's my favourite. I do that. Look up, people.   I promise, a writer is buiding you into a script.

Some people I know are grown-ups. They have proper jobs and pay tax on time and donate blood regularly and know about superannuation.

They presumably have tidy bedrooms and clean cars and they enjoy cooking and plan things on weekends and go to gym regularly. They do their washing and FOLD THE CLOTHES IMMEDIATELY AFTERWARDS, and, probably they are all wearing two socks right now that are the same.

I am wearing, so far as anyone can tell, a skirt with stockings. This is a trick. I dislike stockings. they make me feel like I'm not who I am. Like I'm sitting an exam for a subject I didn't attend the classes for. Like I'm a size twenty wearing a size four. Like I'm a Bloodhound pretending to be a poodle. So the plan was to avoid wearing stockings and instead to wear nice leggings with warm socks and still look semi respectable while at work. This went very well. For a time.

However, due to the fact that I did not do my washing and fold the clothes immediately afterwards and in fact the clothes remain in a huge pile on my floor, it was a miracle that I found any socks this morning, let alone two that were the same colour. Having two socks that are the same colour is a poor substitute for having your life in order, though. I have thus been walking around with two black socks, one of which is knee-high and one of which PRETENDS to be kne--high and then slips back down as soon as you start walking. Walking has been a bit of a feature of my day.

Hence: girl with two black legs stands up, takes a few steps thus revealing one black leg and one leg sporting a huge white band of luminscent skin (satellite images reveal that you can in fact see my legs from the moon). Girl stops, yanks up recalcitrant sock, continues on. Stops. Repeats.

My attempts to cheat at being a grown-up have failed. One should never pretend to be someone one is not, which is why I was trying not to wear stockings in the first place. Perhaps I should wear a tracksuit everywhere and just be honest about it. At least then I'd be totally hot.

There is something nice about day jobs. Other people, a sense of routine, and, in the case of my day job, an endless supply of earl grey tea.

Not to be shirked, my friends, not to be shirked. Shirketh ye not.

So Rita, one third of the weekly Standing There Productions meeting conglomerate (just three coffees thanks, and do you do freshly squeezed orange juice?) is going overseas.

One of her films, a short film called Hugo, has made it into the Palm Springs film festival and the Rhode Island film festival.

This means she is going to New York and LA. Anybody who has any interesting friends/multi-billion-dollar philanthropist buddies/recommendations re: best hot dog stand or most exciting interpretation of the words "fresh coffee", please do let me know because I am attempting to be the authority on all things American since I lived there for nine months in 1999 and therefore I am obviously almost a citizen of the place and am hip to the groove regarding Best And Most Exciting Things To Do. For example, I remember:

- A stationery shop in New York City. I can picture it now but cannot for the life of me remember where it is or why it was so exciting. I simply recall contemplating ways to hide oneself in there overnight.

- The galleries. O! The galleries! New York of course but also LA, where one is driven up an enormous hill in a small tram to the Paul Getty museum with its cactus garden overlooking the piano-shaped pools of the brat pack.

- The smell. (Not very helpful to Rita)

- Soho..

- Dean and Deluca. Omogod etc.

- 5th Avenue.

- Central Park.

- Pollution (sorry LA but honestly).

All of which leads me to believe perhaps I should do a "scoping visit" to LA and New York just in order to better equip Rita for her foray into the unknown.

Now, if I could just find a philanthropist in my size...

Rita, Stewart and I are the three central members of Standing There Productions. This means we meet regularly, drink tea, argue over the layout and tardiness of meeting minutes, and have ideas about what Standing There Productions wants to do next.

We have quite a bit of trouble explaining to other people exactly what it is we all do. I write things, that much is clear. But then, so does Rita (see The Receptionist for example, although there is more where that came from and in fact she has won script awards and has directed things and has a cameo or twelve in I Could Be Anybody). Also, I direct things like our comedy festival show this year, none of which I do without the help of Rita as casting co-director and Stew, whose withering gaze is cast over all things visual, and who also takes all our photos and does all our technical work.

To confuse things further, we met Stew when he performed in our play, People Watching in 2003. He has, as he delights in reminding me, never been on stage since. Even that isn't quite true because Stew stage-manages most of our projects. Rita handles the financial direction of the company, with Stewart and I asking her once a week to tell us what the budget means, and she generally has her ear to the ground and knows about funding opportunities which I completely fail to write proposals for.

What I think all this means is that we are all, according to a loose definition, producers. Or maybe Rita is our executive producer and we are all producers with various different roles. The problem with any of these definitions is that nobody knows what any of them mean.

For example. Please tell me what any of these mean (thanks to Wikipedia for your enlightening descriptions):

A film producer, or filmmaker, is a person who creates the conditions for making movies.

The primary role of a television producer is to coordinate and control all aspects of production.

A theatrical producer is the person ultimately responsible for overseeing all aspects of mounting a theatre production.  

According to these descriptions, a producer is a control freak who does everything. Ergo, I suspect we are all producers, in some way or another. Having said that, the definition "control freak who does everything" is perhaps too broad, because if this is the case, the following people are also producers:

1. My grandma

2. The woman at the Smith Street post office

3. The Australian Prime Minister

In fact, that's not a bad point. You'd be mad not to give my grandma funding. I might give her a call.