My Nephew Got into My Knickers

"Even I can't believe that Tamara thought the show was racist and politically incorrect," Cody said.

I could well believe it. Tamara looked for and found examples of racism everywhere. I apparently was racist because I had once referred to Uluru by its old name of Ayers Rock, while Paul and Lisa were bigots because they committed the terrible crime of referring to Australian Grasstrees as Blackboys. The TV show as a whole apparently was racist, as the kids plus the hosts were all white and there was a lack of required cultural diversity. But some specific things were far worse, according to my niece.

We had an Australiana day to celebrate the Bicentennial in 1988, and I was wearing a green and gold tee-shirt that read 'Australia - Established 1788', the other kids wearing similar Australian clothes. In a lot of the song and dance numbers we dressed up of course in colonial style clothes, and I could sympathize with women in that era wearing these clothes every day in the Australian heat. In Tamara's opinion however, I might as well have been wearing a white hood and robe of the Ku Klux Klan, waving a Confederate flag and making 'Heil Hitler' salutes.

Similarly, a Wild West theme show was seemingly insensitive to Native Americans. When some of the boys dressed up like Mexicans and teamed with girls wearing Latina clothes to perform a medley of dances to Spanish/Latin American songs in another episode it was bigotry at its worst. However it was a seemingly innocent 1960s theme show that caused my niece the most angst.

With my two friends Jess and Holly, we were teamed as a threesome to sing a showcase of songs by American girl groups of the early 1960s, with all of us dressed accordingly. I thought we did a good job creating the famous 'wall of sound' effect but Tamara did not. She was horrified that some of the songs we covered had been performed by African-American performers. None of us were in blackface - there was never blackface at all on the show even when a group of the boys performed a Village People routine in another show - and in fact the focus was on emphasizing that Jess was brunette, Holly blonde and me a redhead, Tamara thought that three white girls singing songs that had been recorded by black artists was just pure racism, and made us worse than neo Nazis.

Cody and I were now nearly back on the shore. "I liked the 1960s show that upset Tamara so much, and not just because of that," he said. "It's up on Youtube, some clips of it anyway, and I put a comment saying that the red-haired girl Emily is my aunt."

Again, I was flattered. "Thanks Cody, I'm really pleased you can enjoy something from back then."

Cody grinned. "Just don't tell my sister, she'd probably try and have the clips taken down."

"Yeah, she probably would," I agreed.

"I know Mum would," said Cody. He looked at me as we began to walk towards the tram stop. "Even when Grandma and Grandpa showed us those collection of clips that time I couldn't help notice that Mum left the room and went out into the garden, and she was in a really bad mood for the rest of the day. I've tried to talk to her about the show and she didn't want to know, it's the same when I try to talk about Uncle Paul playing football, she just shuts off."

I thought back to that day, how Paul, Lisa and I were laughing at the show with Mum and Dad, me all embarrassed and blushing at some of the clothes I was wearing and how cheesy some things looked decades later. Soy-boy Sven just sat there in his chair saying nothing, I think he was low on soy and lacking energy. I theorized given the dynamic of their relationship that my sister administered soy to her husband by inserting a tube up his anus and pumping it up there, but Rhonda was not there to do it, as she had already made her exit and was sulking on the patio.

However, I didn't want to speak negatively about my sister to her son, so said, "Cody, sometimes when there's a kid who is an actor, singer and dancer at a high level or good at sport it can be very difficult for a sibling who isn't a performer or isn't into sports. They can feel left out, and at times it was hard for your Mum when we were growing up."

"Mum's not a jealous child or teenager anymore, she's a married middle-aged woman and it's time she got over it," said Cody. "Me, I like looking at it and I wish I'd been around back then. The 1980s seemed like an awesome time to live. I bet you had a lot of fun on the show?"

"Oh yes, heaps of fun. I got to work with great people and had an experience that few people are lucky enough to have in their lives. I'll always be grateful."

"There's only one thing I wouldn't have liked if I was on the show, and that was that clown," joked Cody. "Clowns are so creepy, I'm like WTF is that clown doing there? Hunting for children to capture and eat?"

"Hey, Jim the guy who played him was a really nice guy and a great magician, I never knew how he managed to do those tricks," I said. "It was sad when he passed on, I went to his funeral."

Cody looked apologetic. "Sorry, I didn't know he died, I didn't mean to be disrespectful."

"That's okay, you weren't to know. He died young, a freak accident back in 2001. He fell off his roof while cleaning out the gutters, landed the wrong way and that was it."

"I see that the two hosts of the show Phil and Jenny died too when I looked it up online," said Cody. "That was sad, they seemed really nice from what I saw."

"Yeah they were really nice, they died just weeks apart back in 2016, I went to their funerals too," I said. "Jenny got sick with skin cancer and passed away, and Phil just went downhill and died six weeks after from a heart attack. Probably more a broken heart, it was really sad, they'd been together since forever and were so close, real childhood sweethearts. Sometimes that happens, one spouse dies and the other can't go on without them. They were such nice people, helped all the kids on their show me included, and produced some really talented people over the years."

"Did any of them become really successful in the entertainment business?"

I nodded in affirmation. "Yes. One of the boys Robbie was a great dancer, he ended up in New York working on Broadway choreographing shows. Michelle was a girl about my age and she has done musical theater all over Australia often in the lead roles. Tanya, she was that really tall blonde girl a few years older than me got a job on a children's television show called 'Don't Sleep In On Saturdays' up in Queensland in the early 1990s and then she went on to work as a VJ and do other hosting roles on national television. And my friend Holly got a role on that old soap opera 'Sea Breeze' - it was a bit before your time - in 1993 and 1994. She worked with that really famous actress Chloe Connors. I met Chloe a few times. Really nice girl."

Cody was very impressed that I had met Chloe Connors, the well-known Australian actress who had filmed movies not only here but in England and America too. "Wow, Chloe Connors, that's incredible that you got to meet her. She's a great actress, she's really talented and has won lots of awards both here and overseas."

"Chloe left the show in 1994 to concentrate on movies, but unfortunately for Holly her role got cut later that year and her acting career sort of fizzled after that. Oh well, that's show business. But still, a role on a soap opera is a role on a soap opera and Holly never complains. We're still friends now along with Jess, still catch up and reminisce about the fun times we had, how we would get in trouble sometimes."

Cody looked surprised. "Trouble? Really? I thought you were all professional, well-behaved kids, always did what you were told."

We had reached the tram stop now and were waiting for the tram that would take us to South Melbourne. I smiled and laughed. "Most of the time, yes, when we were rehearsing or learning dance routines or how to sing certain songs. But we were kids, we would muck around at times, especially when we went away into the country to do shows on location or concerts. Like that time in Traralgon, oh my God." I shook my head.

"What happened in Traralgon?"

"We were doing two concerts one weekend in Gippsland," I said. "It just seemed to be one of those occasions where things went wrong, I think we'd had too much red cordial or too many cupcakes with blue icing, and were going a bit hypo. Anyway, we get to the hotel and there's this fat guy staying there, a really fat guy, about 180 kilograms and things get even worse. Some of the girls made a snide joke that they thought the Hindenburg blew up in 1937 and he overheard it, then at dinner some of the boys joked when they saw him in the restaurant that the food was probably all gone by now. He wasn't impressed, and then one of the younger boys jumped out from behind a corner roaring to scare some of girls only he got it wrong and scared the fat man instead, and he nearly choked on his beer. That wasn't the worst of it though."

Cody was laughing. "What happened next?"

"The next morning, we were running around playing silly buggers on the balcony, and three of the boys had filled a bucket with ice cold water and threw it at some of us girls. We screamed and ducked and the water went over the balcony and all over the fat guy as he was walking by the pool, the shock causes him to lose balance and fall in with a splash like tidal wave. He'd seen us do it, and we were like, 'Oh shit!'"

Cody was now doubled over with laughter. "Did you get in trouble?"

"Big time. The fat guy complained to hotel management, Phil, Jenny and the mothers chaperoning us were notified and had to sort it all out and made all of us who were involved call our parents to tell them what we'd done and why we were in trouble. When I got home your Grandma and Grandpa grounded me for two weeks apart from school and filming commitments. On the show we used to get fan mail, and one day not long after Phil and Jenny showed us a different sort of letter that had come in. It was an official complaint from the fat man, saying about what brats we were and how we should be in school not causing trouble at hotels and harassing him. Phil had said, 'You see kids, this is why I'm going grey early.' We were better behaved when we next did concerts in Ballarat and Bendigo."

The tram arrived and we stepped aboard, Cody asking, "So Aunty Emily, one thing I couldn't work out was were you singing live on the show, or did you record it first and then lip synch?"

"About half and half," I said. "If it was simple enough choreography, or just pure singing, then we would sing live. If the choreography was more complicated, we would record first in the studio then lip synch."

"You had to learn a lot of different dances," observed Cody. "Were there any that were really hard?"

"Some were more challenging than others, like swing dance or jive from the 1940s and 1950s shows," I said. "One time the moves weren't hard, we were doing some numbers from famous musicals and I was to play Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. It seemed simple enough, all I had to do was skip along some yellow carpet with three boys playing the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion re-enacting a song and dance number I'd seen a hundred times. I'd practiced the choreography with a soft toy dog and that was all well and good, but on the day we filmed it they sprung a surprise on me. Instead of the toy dog, I was going to have to do the sequence with an actual dog, a silky terrier in a basket. The dog was terrified of the boy in the lion costume, he kept growling at him and snapping and snarling and wouldn't stay still. I was worried about losing a finger if my hand went too close to the dog's mouth."

"I saw that on Grandma and Grandpa's DVD, you could never tell, I thought it went well," said Cody.

"Looks can be deceiving," I said. "We worked with animals on the show heaps of times, either in the studio like the time a wildlife park brought in snakes, lizards, frogs and even a baby crocodile or out on location such as a wildlife sanctuary with kangaroos, koalas, emus, dingos and possums, but having to dance with a snappy dog in a basket getting angrier and angrier by the second? Um, no thanks. Never work with children or animals, they say."

"Talking about animals, I felt so sorry for that boy in the rooster costume in one of your dance routines for a party show I think it was. Did he draw the short straw that day?"

I laughed at the recollection. "No, are you crazy? He won that day easily. He got to do the chicken dance wearing a rooster costume where nobody could see his face. We on the other hand had to do the chicken dance with our faces fully visible, with everyone in the studio audience or on TV able to see us. Talk about embarrassing."

Cody and I continued to talk and laugh as our tram reached its stop in South Melbourne and we alighted and made our way to the markets, a flock of ducks, four geese and a number of ibises flying overhead all making their way to the nearby Albert Park Lake.

Outside the markets some buskers were performing, and Cody and I put some coins in their collection plate before entering the markets, where I was going to buy some fruit and vegetables and it was always a good place for a browse around.

"It would have been great being in a band," said Cody. "I remember you saying that you were a band's lead singer when you were at university."

"That's right," I affirmed. "We weren't that good, just a garage band really. My friend Jess from the show, she was in a more professional band. They actually got on the music charts."

"Oh come on, I bet you were really good," said Cody. "You're too modest Aunty Emily."

"The football supporters at the pub in Coburg didn't agree that time."

"Football supporters?" Cody asked.

"Yeah, they didn't like us at all. We were booked to play a gig at this pub where they were hanging out and they made it clear pretty quickly that they didn't want us there. Well unless booing, jeering, yelling at us to 'get off' and chucking beer and food at us was some sort of compliment and we got it wrong, then they absolutely hated us."

Cody laughed. "Did you meet lots of strange people when you were in the band?"

"Sometimes," I said. "One time we were playing this venue in Prahran which was pretty up market and where you'd think they would be more civilized. It seemed to be going okay, and we took a break and I went to the toilet. I was just getting back from the ladies when this psycho girl confronts me and pushes me into a corner. She said she'd caught her boyfriend checking me out and that I was flirting with her boyfriend all night; that I was a home-wrecking slut and if I didn't stop then she would be waiting for me in the car park at the end of the night. She never said so openly but she implied she had a knife in her bag."

"Jesus, that must have been scary," said Cody.

"Yeah, it was," I admitted. "Funny thing was I didn't even know who her boyfriend was, I never noticed him at all. I had the guys from the band and security walk me out just in case but fortunately I never saw her again. She was probably some sort of nutcase who wanted to scare me. She succeeded, I have to say."

"You said that Katie worries that you might turn into a stage mother with her, but when you were younger did you meet any stage mothers?" Cody laughed.

"Oh yeah, met a few of them," I said. "Not as bad as the child beauty pageant mothers you see in America, but still pretty pushy. And there were heaps of mums and dads with ugly parent syndrome at your Uncle Paul's football matches. I'll always remember one guy, this Italian man, he had the loudest voice I've ever heard and his son Dino played in the next age group down from Paul. The father used to yell at his son all the time, calling him a spastic, a retard, a pansy and a sissy and telling him how useless and hopeless he was and that the team would be better off without him."

Cody looked sympathetic. "Poor kid. Did he end up quitting?"

"Yeah, one day they simply never came back. I think everyone at the club was relieved. And I wouldn't feel too sorry for the kid. The father was a real pain in the arse, but so was Dino. I wonder why with a dad like that?"

This morning had been going really well. The outing with Cody was just what I needed, we were having a great time reminiscing about the past and talking, and not a single weird thought about Cody like last night and this morning. All was good, until I was in a fruit and vegetable stall with Cody, and some older teenagers passed by. They looked at us, and I overheard one of them say to his mates, "Check out that hot cougar, that guy is one lucky guy."

I don't think Cody heard the comment, but I sure did and it immediately had an effect upon my heart, my brain and my vagina. The blood began to pump harder through my circulatory system, secretly delighted that these guys had thought that Cody and I were lovers rather than aunt and nephew. Between my legs, I felt my clitoris tingle and the double cotton saddle of my white knickers got damp.

Cody and I continued walking around the markets, one of the ladies at one of the stalls clearly thinking that Cody and I were a couple, and I found myself thinking how great it would be if Cody and I were holding hands, my mind immediately reprimanding me for thinking such things.

Leaving the markets, Cody and I jumped back on the tram from South Melbourne to the city, and alighted at Southbank, walking along the Yarra River through the busy crowds and keeping a watch for the bicycles flying past. Across the muddy river waters, the rays of sunlight reflected off the blue Rialto buildings and a ferry was setting off for its journey through the Docklands for Williamstown. We walked past all the casino, shopping malls, restaurants and bars found there heading for the Princes Bridge, where a tram could be seen gliding across.

There were two ways to exit Southbank to get onto the bridge. One was to go under the bridge and walk up a non-steep path, the other was to walk up a very steep flight of stairs. I might have chosen the former option had it not been for several young guys who went running by a few moments before and regarded Cody and I as a cougar and her much younger boyfriend rather than an aunt and nephew.

This had an effect on me in my knickers so I quickly made my way up the steep stairs at fast pace. One time years earlier when I was an 18-year-old VCE student and wearing my school uniform I had been up-skirted by a fat, leering, older pervy chain-smoking guy old enough to be my grandfather on these very stairs. His shrill, skinny wife saw what her husband was up to and had yelled out loud enough for people in Werribee, Sunshine or Frankston to hear, "Merv Tyler, if you're going to spend our holiday in Melbourne looking up young girls' dresses, we'll be right back on the next plane to Sydney!"

I had been embarrassed by this at the time but now, many years later, I was thinking very differently. I knew I had good legs for my age, and wearing such a short loose skirt I knew Cody wouldn't have been able to avoid seeing glimpses of my white cotton panties as he made his way up the stairs behind me. That my nephew could see my knickers made me so hot between my legs.

On Princes Bridge itself we saw a horse and carriage go by, these rides popular in Melbourne with tourists, and we stopped near one of the ornate, antique lights which was a place where many people posed for selfies with the Yarra River and Melbourne's attractive skyline behind them and today was no exception.

"How about we get a selfie too?" I suggested. "A memento of a fun, political correctness free day?"

"Sure," said Cody. He came and stood beside me, but as I took out my phone it rang, indicating that I had a video call from my kids.