floatykatja - @ 20six.co.uk

Au Revoir

Right, I'm off on me 'ols. I don't actually fly until Monday morning, but I'm going to be pretty busy having a 30th birthday party and recovering from the resultant hangover until then, so I don't think I'll be logging on much. I've left keys with Ciggie, Doctor Tripswitch, JimmyPanic*, Lady Olivier and Sketches and they'll be popping in from time to time to dust the ornaments and keep the rest of you entertained. There's plenty of wine in the rack and not very much food in the fridge, so you should all have a high old time.
See you in a couple of weeks' time...
Katja xxx

* Sorry! Ok, I forgot JimmyPanic in that list at first!

15.9.06 08:50

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Reminiscences of Floatykatja [Pt 1]

I first met Katja in the Summer of 1994. The Shoreditch Youth Amateur Non-Professional Unskilled Players were putting on a production of Macbeth, and I was there trying to bribe the director to slip me in as Birnam Wood’s fourth tree from the left.
Katja was backstage, waiting for her call. She was playing one of the three witches. She had blackened teeth, wild grey hair, a hunchback and hooked nose. Clearly, she wouldn’t be needing any make-up.
We had time for a quick chat about the vagaries of the actor’s life, the kipping on friends’ floors, the weeks of waiting, that unfortunate business with the guinea pig and the garlic press. Then her call came, and she was off to ply her craft. I shouted after her to ‘break a leg!’.
I visited her in hospital the next day. Her leg was hoisted up to the ceiling and all the blood had run to her head. ‘You match your grapes,’ I said. ‘You blend in like a true thespian. I thought you were that fellow’s piles for a sec.’. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
by jimmypanic

20.9.06 16:29

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She (capitalised for emphasis)

In honour of our host Ms Floaty Katja, I present a retooled and reinvigorated short story.
Cheers,
Cigs

She (capitalised for emphasis)
A short story for the benefit of Ms FK

In the cold night air, his cracked tooth reverberated like a tuning fork, sending stabbing pains racing like drunk drviers round the base of his skull. Life for him was all in the metaphor, the similies, the words you twist around to make it seem sweeter for all its ridiculousness.

Brittle like an aspirin, he struggled down the road, his scarf flapping in the wind, his eyes red and puffy from the previous night, standing hopelessly with flyers for a club that no one wanted to visit on a road that no one could possibly chance upon. Friday night gushed over him like a blessed relief despite the ranging tides of bulldog boys and tittering tarts swarming around him.

As he rushed down the hill, the neon glow of the club sign beckoned him like a high class hooker, all dolled up and nowhere to go. He slung himself with unconcealed desperation. Inside old 45s crackled out fifties rock'n'roll. The boy with the Morrissey hairdo was tending bar, throwing shapes to himself in the backlit mirrors, studying his face in the optics.

In the corner, She (capitalised for emphasis) was sat with her coeterie of bright eyed accolytes. She was wearing her rockstar sunglasses and Monroe pink stilettos, laughing ostentatiously while she smoked French cigarettes that were all about the theory and nothing about the taste.

Perching himself at the bar, he (lower case denoting defernce) shot her meaningful glances and half talked with Jock, the perennial stereotype, caught up in his whiskey and his fractured memories of Fife. She (upper case and upper class but slumming it) stared beatifically at him and turned away to laugh at some sarcastic quip shot out by a kid with a white boy afro.

The bar began to fill, office workers chameleon spun into tight jeans and battered converse, studded belts and profance hoodies, sweeping into every spare space. He stared over past the optics at his reflection and imagined himself into a noir dream world, the banalities of a Friday night collapsing into tight line melodrama, a detective film monologue racing through his head as he pulled his hat down and reimagined her as Ingrid Bergman.

She (upper case to denote a beauty who doesn't give a shit) was dancing now, spinning like a figure in a broken music box, inspiring devotion, a circle of space around her like a divine streetlight that the mediocre moth boys could flit around but were to scared to touch, afraid they might get their wings burnt. Their entreaties were batted away with grace, a slight smile and a flutter of her eyelashes.

He looked on with admiration but remained rooted, more beer flowing towards him with easy inevitability, cold and pure in its bottles, perfect as it slipped down but darker as the night went on, harder to swallow, the condensation covered capsules ever more intimidating. Soon he was drunk, swaying to the sound of the Who and the Kinks, emboldened by mod fictions, revelling in his button down collar and the shine on the tips of his winklepickers.

Without thinking, he was up and sashaying across no man's land, beyond the no fly zone and into the centre, beside her. She (upper case and upper tax bracket) was devoid of sweat somehow, still moving, ever moving with the perpetual motion of the beautiful view. He circled her, she circled him, the game was afoot as it had been a hundred times before. Anthony twisting with Cleopatra, afraid to put their hands out in case the magic would go, the circuit would short out.

Another week of tension after months of locking eyes, spinning around each other their head laden with stupid questions, filled to the brim with the same music their mothers had played in bedrooms before they were even idle thoughts in a daydream, ratcheting their hearts to the beat. A perfect couple in the eyes of the passersby, perfect strangers in the daylight, exchanging nothing but the glances of desperate youth

25.9.06 11:59

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Reminiscences of Floatykatja [Pt 2]

My next meeting with Katja was in 1996, in a production of Thoroughly Modern Millie at the Eddie Royle Out Of Eastenders Memorial Theatre on the Old Kent Road. I was playing James Fox and she was playing Mrs Meers, by day the proprietress of a hotel for young ladies, by, erm, day as well an evil white slaver, drugging the young ladies for sale to the Eastern markets. Katja made this part her own.
A busy girl, she had the hots for Robert de Niro, Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, James Dean, Marlon Brando and Al Pacino. As a consequence, she studied the Lee Strasberg Method, immersing herself in her role, becoming the mysterious Mrs Meers.
Not only did this lead to a highly successful and critically acclaimed performance, but also, by February 1997, Katja had sold 44 girls aged between 17 and 25 into slavery in Bangkok, Seoul, Beijing and Kyoto. A further 121 were reported to have been sedated and kidnapped, but escaped when a cargo ship chartered by Katja ran aground off the coast of Madagascar. Furthermore, a staggering 1,007 girls were found in seven laundry trucks parked around the back of the theatre on the day she was finally arrested.
She got off on a technicality.
by jimmypanic

26.9.06 16:51

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A poem

As an antidote to the more mopey musings on my blog, here's my attempt at a love poem. FK's blog is a better setting because she's much more optimistic than me.
Won't you be...
the mystery i can unravel
the reason for me to conquer time travel
the pin that drops when we ache in silence
the flower in the barrel that holds back the violence
the music that plays when i'm in the lift
the thought in my head that I can't seem to shift
the beat of my heart that changes the rhythm
the present I get that's the best i've been given
the tick of the clock when the work day is finished
the love of my life that won't be diminished?

29.9.06 10:16

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