Mandy Nolan is running a comedy gala and fundraiser  in Mullumbimby – ‘Bosom Buddies’.

Six breast beatingly funny women comedians come together for a very special fundraiser to help their friends in need. Bosom Buddies is a comedy Gala and fundraiser for two women who are recovering from breast cancer. It was an idea Mandy Nolan had when speaking to a friend about the ‘cancer recovery journey’.

As a single mother her friend had not only undergone the trauma of a cancer diagnosis and treatment, for a significant period of time she incurred medical costs and was unable to work and earn money. Then a few months later another friend of Nolan’s was diagnosed with breast cancer and told her of the hardship of being the primary wage earner in her household.

Mandy Nolan believes as an individual this is where she and her comedy buddies can make a difference. ‘While Pink Ribbon does an amazing job of raising money for Research Funding, there’s not a lot out there to assist women trying to get by once they’ve had a diagnosis and they are coping with the reality of treatment and recovery. Obviously we can’t help everyone, but I wanted to do at least one of these a year to target women in need to raise some money for them to help them get their lives back on track. It could happen to any of us at any time, and it’s not just the health implication, it’s the financial implications for middle aged women who generally have dependents who are suddenly unable to work for a period of time.’

Comedian and cabaret performer and force of nature Jenny Wynter

When Nolan invited her fellow women comedians to join her for the fundraiser she was overwhelmed by the support. ‘Everyone said YES! We have Bev Killick coming from Melbourne and Jenny Wynter and Tiny Lim coming from Brisbane. Fiona McGary drops in from the Goldie and our own gorgeous Mullum mother of mirth Ellen Briggs will also be popping up for some comedy gold!’

Hosted by Mandy Nolan, the night is a comedy gala featuring some of the hottest women comics on the circuit.

Bold and Brassy Bev Killick has been getting her boobs out for comedy every since she landed a role in the much aired Berlei Ad for the Uplifting Tour of Australia. As a result ofthis she was asked to perform in Busting Out making audiences across the globe laugh as she got her tits out! Bev Killick is from the bold and brassy school of stand up, delivering a non-stop energetic comedy every time.  Bev’s ability to get a crowd laughing non-stop each and every-time, came to the attention of the Producer’s of the worldwide sensation Puppetry of the Penis. They offered Bev the opportunity to travel with the show as their opening act. Bev jumped at the offer and travelled around Australia performing to more than 250,000 people.

Bev has worked with Weird Al Yankovic, Wayne Brady, Gina Riley and Jane Turner as a guest cameo on Kath and Kim. She was a panel member on Beauty and the Beast, featured comic on Stand Up Australia, a special guest on the hit show Pizza, married her Lighting Guy on Surprise Wedding, beat the blokes on Joker Poker, performed three solo shows at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (Sic Women earned her a Green Room Award Nomination), was selected to perform in the prestigious female only “Up Front” gala and this year makes her Melbourne Comedy Festival Road Show debut.

Jenny Wynter is a force of nature. Comedian and cabaret performer, this energetic mother of three is known for her spontaneous and often very interactive style of comedy. Jenny doesn’t like to pick on her audience, when she chats its about making them feel like a star – with this very clever musical improviser making up comedy songs on the spot based on their input. From a Love song, to a tribute to their occupation, no two shows are ever the same, leaving the audience united and excited by their one off special performance.

Jenny honed her skills in the US where she toured her stand up throughout Canada and was invited to be a MainStage cast member with the world renowned improv company Loose Moose Theatre. In 2011 she was supported by the Ian Potter Cultural Trust to train in solo and musical improv in LA with renowned experts Gary Austin and Michael Pollock. Jenny’s award wining solo varied show was directed by Austin who is an LA comedy Legend known for launching comedy greats like Will Ferrell and Lisa Kudrow.

Fiona Mc Gary has performed as a standup comedian for over nationally and internationally for well over a decade. She has performed in every comedy venue in the country along side comedy legends such as Jim Oin, Adam Hills, Arj Barker, Judith Lucy, Will Anderson, Dave Hughes and many more. She has appeared on the ABC, Channel Seven’s Comedy Series FMVTV and The Comedy Channel’s Stand Up Australia. In 2006 she was one of only a dozen comics throughout the country to be chosen to audition for The David Letterman Show.

Ellen Briggs

Mother of Twins, Ellen Briggs made a name for herself on the comedy circuit as the woman Trevor Hendy refers to as ‘The funniest comedian I have ever seen’. A natural born story teller Ellen has the knack of weaving a twisted tale, always delivered with a surprising sting in it’s tail!

Bosom Buddies also welcomes Ting Lim to the stage. Ting got a taste for stand up comedy doing open mic spots around Brisbane in mid 2009. She got hooked and ever since has performed at venues across Brisbane, Canberra and Melbourne, honing her craft and winning over people with her quick-wit and absurdist sense of humour. Representing QLD in the RAW Finals in Melbourne in 2010, Ting is shaping up to be a one of the more interesting upcoming stand up comedians on the circuit, winning accolades from peers and critics alike.

Hosted by Mandy Nolan, Bosom Buddies will have a charity auction and raffles and lots and lots of laughs!

Saturday 1 August at the Mullum Ex Services.

Doors from 6pm. Show at 7pm.

$20/25

Bookings to 66190529

Or tix at the club or on the door on the night if not sold out.

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To be honest, I’m not sure how Mandy Nolan finds time to do everything she does. She’s had three books out in less than two years; she makes regular comedy appearances around the country; she writes for the Byron Shire Echo, and she keeps a clean and tidy house.

I know this last for a fact from visiting her to interview her about her last book, Boyfriends We’ve All Had (But Shouldn’t Have), but it’s handy information to have whilst reviewing her latest comedic memoir, Home Truths, because Nolan’s line from her childhood home to the light and airy Mullumbimby house where she lives with her husband and more than several children, has been anything but straight.

In fact it’s hard to imagine that the young woman in a squalid shared house in Brisbane where they didn’t train the cat to use the kitty litter because it was ‘too much trouble’, where people drank until dawn, and slept where they fell, is the same house-proud somewhat OCD Mumma Bear juggling multiple careers that Nolan has blossomed into over the years.

One wonderful recollection of the shared house was their attitude to locking it up – they didn’t. But coming home one night from a Nick Cave concert, they found a male intruder leaving the house…The stranger wasn’t remotely apologetic. Instead he looked at the bunch of mismatched punk, new romantic and swampy girls and snarled, “You don’t even have tea.’ He was right.’

Comedian, author and proud house-owner Mandy Nolan outside her Tallowood Ridge home, at Mullumbimby.

The book follows the trajectory of homes Nolan has known from childhood to now, shattering a few misty-eyed myths along the way. The idea, for instance, that we think fondly (mostly) of where we grew up, is given short shrift by Nolan, who lambasts the little Queensland town of Wondai, and in her frank and forthright fashion labels it simply a ‘shithole’, although, in the kindest sentence she has towards where she grew up she adds: Sure it’s a shithole. But it’s my shithole. (When Nolan wrote her first anti-Wondai piece she was bombarded with angry letters, emails and facebook comments. You should be ashammed of yourself, wrote one woman. Nolan, of course, couldn’t help herself, she wrote back correcting her critic’s spelling.)

But Wondai, in a sense, did lay the foundation for this book, because according to Nolan it was responsible for leaving her with a very specific syndrome – The Fear of Missing Out on Living Somewhere Better. It’s that sense of endless questing for ‘home’ whatever it means, which raises the book from simply a funny memoir to a philosophical look at what ‘home’ means to all of us, as the place that helps form our personalities and behaviours – for better or worse – and the kinds of homes we grow out of, and into, during our lives.

Not unnaturally a lot of the book is devoted to the house she lives in now, which was purpose-built, and took over three years to complete. The process allows Nolan to be at her rampant best as she writes about the endless frustrations of building – and the strange obsessions of a home-builder. Taps, for instance, cornices and decks all get a good workout.

There’s a great chapter on what Nolan calls ‘Feng Shite’ – and I’ll leave you to work out Nolan’s position on that particular philosophy yourself.  It’s almost impossible when reading this book, not to give a (wry) smile of acknowledgement at the familiar family topics she covers. Pet ownership and houses, for instance – the differences between cats and dogs, the sadness of losing pets, the happiness of getting new ones and whether pets should be ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ pets is familiar territory to many of us, as is much else in the book, including a long treatise on the Single Sock Syndrome – a subject which has mystified those in charge of the family washing for decades.

Sensibly perhaps, Nolan doesn’t take many digs at her adopted hometown of Mullumbimby. (After all this is the town that tried to fight off an invading Woolworths grocery store with a T-shirt that said ‘It’s Ground Zero all over again’, so I personally wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of Mullumbytes, as they’re affectionately known.) And the most moving part – in the emotional rather than the locomotive sense – of the book is Nolan’s description of how she came to realise that this area of the Northern Rivers was ‘home’ to her, and that home is quite definitely where the heart is.

Nolan, as usual, strikes a delicate between outright rudeness, a light-comic touch and a broad humanitarian take on the domestic issues that affect us all. And as we know, there’s no place like emoh ruo.

Mandy Nolan’s Home Truths is published by Finch Publishing.  RRP $24.99, e-book $9.99 available from bookstores and online: finch.com.au/books/home-truths

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Zom Osborne, Beetledance, pen on paper, 59cm x 64cm

Nadine Abensur, of the beautiful Art Piece Gallery in Mullumbimby has gathered together a new exhibition, Playing on the Edge, with three Northern Rivers artists whose drawings are both intriguing and mysterious, writes Candida Baker. Abensur has also put together a superb menu for anyone wanting to attend her upcoming Spring Supper to celebrate the opening of the exhibition this week.

Sometimes in life you meet someone – and you know, absolutely, that they are heading in the right direction, that everything is pointing towards a destiny that they are imagining and creating for themselves.

Artist Oksana Waterfall is one of those people. I had the privilege of meeting her at Lismore TAFE some years ago when she was studying visual art, and it was obvious from her fierce determination and talent that she was heading for a lifetime career in the arts. Since then Waterfall has been widely exhibited, and has won numerous awards for her quirky and original drawings. In her current work Waterfall delves deep into the objects of childhood memories.

When I think of Mandy Nolan’s art, it’s her vivid paintings that spring to mind, but in this exhibition, Playing on the Edge, the Byron shire based comedian shows us not only her more whimsical side, but her politer side, with endearing illustrations that could easily grace a children’s book. In her drawings Nolan allows herself the rare luxury of allowing her hand to roam freely in a kind of “unconscious doodling or fiddling” when she feels she has something a little more whimsical or softer to say. Or unusually for the normally raucous Nolan, because there are (believe it or not) occasions when she doesn’t want to say anything at all.

Zom Osborne lives in the rainforest, and her connection to and love of nature is obvious in all her work.  Osborne’s work has that great artistic skill of being both appealing and unsettling at the same time. While she is intrigued by the connections we make with each other and the objects we acquire during our lives, Osborne is touched by the energies she senses in the unseen and the immaterial.

Art Piece Gallery, Mullumbimby

Playing on the Edge: Oksana Waterfall, Zom Osborne and Mandy Nolan

Thursday 9^th October

Open to the public 6.00 pm – 7.00pm

Then

Sit down dinner with the artists from 7.30 pm

$68.00 per head

Bookings essential

6684 3446

 Spring Supper Menu

 The fresh flavours of spring brought to you from Nadine Abensur’s kitchen and garden

Antipasti on the table to start

Asparagus Tart with roasted cherry tomatoes

Market fish with roasted fennel and black olive salsa

Rosemary roasted potatoes

Chargrilled vegetables with an orange and pistachio salsa

Rocket and Pecan Salad with Goat’s cheese and rosebud infused dressing

A berry meringue

and a chocolate surprise

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