Monogamy Shbedogamy,

do you mind if I bring a friend with me

two is nice but its healthier with three

Monogamy Shbedogamy!!

Read more lyrics here.

It was the mid 70s I’d gone travelling to Mexico and the U.S. and ended up in the counterculture capital of the world — Eugene, Oregon. Located just south of Portland, Eugene was a college town, teeming with hippies, back to the land pioneers, treeplanting collectives, whole food cafes, artists, artisans, dancers and musicians.The sexual revolution was in full swing, the women’s movement was taking off, queer and left politics were leading the anti-couple, anti-monogamy, anti-capitalism, anti-everything charge into a redefinition of the romantic love myth.

Actually how I ended up in Eugene is another good story. A few months earlier while hitching up the west coast of the U.S. from L.A. to Vancouver, my travelling buddy Ruth Maddison and I were invited on numerous occasions to women’s communes and festivals. Full moon drumming circles with a few hundred naked women, wimmins workshops, forest fasting. Everyone had names like Rainbow, Forest and Crow and it was difficult to extract ourselves and get back on the road. We hitched across Canada to Montreal and after some time there, travelled in a big diagonal back across the midwest of the US and down to Mexico. Through the wimmins network we’d heard about a commune outside Oaxaca run by the Mexican poet Margarita Dalton. You could have free board and food in exchange for working on the farm. Margarita’s hacienda was huge, partly renovated and partly still in ruins.  It was there I met a woman from Oregon who gave me an address of a women’s commune in Wolf Creek, near Eugene, who she said would for sure help me find cash in hand work. A few months later after Ruth returned to Australia, I did just that.

I planted trees for a while with a crew called the Hoedads but it was hard yakka, and soon found myself in town sharing a house right next door to the Womens Centre with fellow crew member  Simone. We became lifelong friends and spent our days writing, drawing, cycling, dancing, playing music and listening to great latin bands at The WOW Hall.

Against that backdrop this song was born.( Have a listen here) I used to sing it with three chords on a guitar, as I did for my try out for the all girl latin jazz band Baba Yaga. They were looking for a drummer and I’d just started learning the conga drums. They took me on in good faith that I would improve and thought my songs added a novel touch. We recorded the original version on our album On The Edge which is now a collector’s item.

I arrived back in Australia in 1979 with a backpack full of songs. Many of them ended up in the musical I wrote the following year, Failing In Love Again.

Come and hear them on Feb 21 & 22 at Gingers Cabaret, the Oxford Hotel, Darlinghurst. Tix on sale here.

Poster by Bob Daly

The posters above were part of an exhibition at Sedition Festival’s Paper Tigers Exhibition in Sept 2019. See more here

There’s been some wonderful stories and people turning up since we decided to bring back our eighties cabaret show Failing In Love Again. Like the small group of Melbourne women who travelled all the way from Melb to the Cellblock Concert, Girls In Our Town at Sedition Festival in Sydney last Sept. I could see them from the stage, half out of their seats, singing along to every word of every song Elizabeth Drake and I performed. It was thrilling to meet them afterwards and share the memories.

For years they’d been singing along to the cassette tape we recorded in 1980 at the ABC studios in Forbes St, Sydney for the Coming Out Show (thanks Roz Cheney!). Lucky, for without it we would have no record of it at all. I’ve heard from lots of people who told me their tape still worked, like one guy who had never seen the show but had the tape out in Central Australia where he worked on a remote community and used to run it regularly while they were making prints.

The Melb crew reminded me of how when we started performing the original musical at The Pram Factory with a band and five singers, word spread like wildfire and the Sydney Gay Community chartered a bus to bring people down to the show. How fabulous is that! The characters in the musical were: a gay man, a lesbian, a bisexual woman and a hetero couple. All were thwarted casualties of love, searching for answers with songs like: On The Beat, Gotta Get Outa The Ghetto, Rubbing Our Rubbers Together, My Mother Wore the Pants (it ruined my chance for romance). There were around 20 songs, some of which didn’t make it into the cabaret which currently sits at fourteen songs, including: Better Than Het, Sad Masochist, the Vibrator Song and of course the old favourite Monogamy Shbedogamy.

But one of the best stories turned up on FB recently when Kenneth Lyons replied to a post by Gail Austin of Curved Radio.

He wrote:

I love how memories of some performances never leave. A few of us went to see JC and ED up here (79/80? – Schonell Theatre Uni of Q?) and one of the songs was a helluva catchy number about ‘idiosyncrasies’ – the chorus is still in my head to this day! – “my idio idio idio idiosyncrasies are gonna be gonna be gonna be gonna be the death of me!” – so catchy in fact we kept singing it all the way home while raving about the show. We then hit up my parents bar at home and decided to mix a cocktail in the song and the night’s honour and called it an ‘Idiosyncrasy’! What was in it was a bit of this and that – it was fabulous and we could never repeat it again! 😂 One of our crew who went that night still remembers the it fabulous performance, that song and the post show cocktails knees up we had into the wee hours!

We hope to get the bar staff at Gingers Cabaret to create some new cocktail recipes when we perform two shows only on Feb 21 and 22. Arrive at 8pm for a good seat and a FILA cocktail. Show starts at 8.30 sharp and runs round 80 mins with interval. Stick around afterwards for a drink and a chat. We’d love to hear some more stories!

Get your tix here