Seventeen - Chapter One

The Immigrant Song was pounding loudly and I was totally immersed in Robert Plant’s soaring, sexual voice, combined with Jimmy Page’s mind-blowing riffs. I was responding totally to the lyrics and the rhythm of that music as I danced myself into a frenzy. I was oblivious to the gyrating human audience beneath me at ankle level on the disco floor. I was a Go - Go girl wearing a fringed white bikini, experiencing a oneness with the music that I hadn’t realised existed until then at seventeen years. This feeling precipitated a newfound sense of euphoria that appeared and disappeared with tempting elusiveness in the forthcoming years. I found it to be as addictive and exhilarating as any substances or lovers I was to experience as I grew older. The gaze of a scopophiliac audience contributed to the intoxication I felt.

I danced with bare feet for security and to add to my sense of abandonment. The ‘cage’ was only a small confined circular space on a podium level built high up for improved spectatorship. I reigned supreme above the disco dance floor with floating silver, metal chains for walls that could not be relied upon to save if you were to lose your balance. I could feel my waist long blonde hair sticking to my skin in places under the hot, strobe lights that were pulsating. They contributed to the feeling of vertigo, the UV making anything white look surreal and occasionally ghost-like. Some would interpret this as an unorthodox way of spending my youth and my Friday nights, but it was my own choice. It foreshadowed a love of theatre that embraced me for the rest of my life. Though intrinsically shy as a person, for some reason the idea of gyrating in front of an audience barely clothed, appealed to me then. One of my earliest introductions to life’s great contradictions.

The music was a lot to blame. It was authentic sixties music of Led Zeppelin, Cream and Jimi Hendrix that drove me to the point of asphyxiation. I loved it loud enough to make the walls vibrate. My sightline and horizon was blocked by the ever-present revolving, mirrored silver disco ball that span across the dance floor like Venus in her orbit above the sea of heads. The scarlet exit sign was etched in sharp relief behind the ball next to the silhouetted bar in the far corner as I glanced out over the heads occasionally, between songs. We dancers, would put in our requests for various favourites with the DJ at that club, there was no live band playing, it was only recorded music but it was sufficient to send us into rapture.

On this particular night, finally the dance numbers receded and it was time for a break after a twenty minute bracket. I turned my back on the disco dancers and stepped from my cage onto the wooden stage and swept through the curtains to the miniscule dressing room. It was cramped and busy with the two other girls, Abigail and Barbara casually checking themselves in the mirrors, wiping their brows and finding a small place to sit and rest. We joked about the heat and laughed about some of the ogling dancers on the floor we had briefly scanned as we worked. To all of us, dancing was fun and bore no relation to our day jobs, I was a Law Clerk at the time. Dancing was something we would be doing anyway on a Friday night if we weren’t professionals. Admittedly, we would not be seen dancing in such scanty clothing. But there we were, every Friday, dancing in chained cages above the crowds, cages that resembled the bell shape of a parrot’s cage. We were happy in our work and it was just another Friday night in Auckland at ‘John’s Place’ in Newmarket.

I pulled on a light cotton poncho that we wore as a uniform on our breaks, so that I could go and find a drink from the servery up the back. Auckland in the 1960s was very stringent with its licensing laws so we drank water or juice, no alcohol in that disco.We considered this normal practice since it was the same everywhere in town in those days. My elder sister, Jill was also a dancer in a club as well as a professional dancer on the ‘C’Mon’ show on television in New Zealand so I was familiar with the rules of this vocation. Customers would sometimes be apprehended trying to sneak in small bottles of rum or vodka to mix with the cola or juice they could buy from the bar. A voice called me over, it was our boss, John,
“Hey Sue, I’d like you to meet some visitors from Australia if you have a minute?”
“Sure’, I replied “Hi, I’m Sue, pleased to meet you”.
A tallish man stood up and made room for me to sit down next to them in the six-person booth. John Blackwell, was a young witty fellow with a knack for entrepeneuring. Several years later he was to meet with a tragic car accident that left him a quadriplegic for life. On this occasion, he was sitting with some people I’d never seen before. The first person I was introduced to was the tall, unfamiliar, darkish man with an intense stare that I didn’t immediately take to. He was with a couple of girls probably in their late twenties or early thirties. The first girl was smiling and friendly, quite petite with layered blonde hair and the other girl similar to the man in appearance, which was unsurprising since she turned out to be his sister. She was somewhat solid and quiet with long black hair parted in the middle in that sixties fashion that was so popular then. They looked like singers in a band and they were except that Lionel was a drummer. John introduced me to Lionel Troy, Mary and Dianne. They were Australian entertainers who were looking for two dancers from New Zealand to take to Vietnam on tour with their band, the Alpha Omega from Sydney.I’m not sure why they were so keen to have New Zealand girls rather than Australians when I reflect, but that was what they wanted at the time.
Evidently, their band, had a brass section as well as the rhythm, with the two girls and a male singer so it was quite a large sound altogether. Not my favourite music but exciting nevertheless. The idea was that they would be entertaining the troupes in Saigon and other major military bases in Vietnam on tour. It sounded rather exciting to me and not totally unheard of since there was a war on at the time. Entertainers from Auckland were regularly heading off to the Vietnam War to bring some joy into the lives of the troops over there. It was a war that should never have happened I felt, and many New Zealand entertainers were sympathetic towards the cause. This was 1970 after all. I discovered however, that on being presented with the reality of the situation in my own life for the first time, I was caught off guard momentarily. I just wasn’t expecting the war in Vietnam and its harsh parallel universe to be infiltrating a small local disco like this one. Suddenly the casual Friday night took on a feeling of cold apprehension.

They stayed for another hour or so and watched us dance.At the same time we pretended we were amused with the knowledge that we were being involuntarily auditioned for something we had not expected or imagined earlier in the night. It seemed unlikely then that any of us would consider going on such a dangerous assignment. We shrugged it all off when they left and didn’t talk about the idea that night. John joked about us being abducted and plainly didn’t want to lose any of us to a distant show though total strangers were often coming in and checking us out. We were well aware that we were being objectified, it was our choice and our preference, and we were exhibitionists. Had anyone asked me then, I would have admitted that the idea of touring Vietnam as a showgirl was both thrilling and daunting.

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