Merry Christmas from "Dame Edna Everage"

Barry Humphries (the Australian comedian and creator of the awful "Dame Edna Everage") on San Francisco:

I am in San Francisco where I began an American theatrical adventure ten years ago. It is a beautiful and stylish town but it is impossible to enjoy a stroll in the city centre without being pestered by beggars. Not seldom hostile, these pungent tatterdemalions seem to be accepted by the locals as though they existed, like the cable cars, Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge, in order to lend their city its special identity, as did the flower children of the Sixties. During the big sales last week, the walk from Saks to Neimen Markus was like struggling through a crowd scene in Les Misérables. Marie Antoinette populated her park with faux milk maids, shepherds and picturesque peasants, and a whimsical 18th-century grandee — was it Beckford? — liked to decorate his estate with peasants, banditti and beggars who would slip into their habiliments before dawn, and take up their assigned positions in grottos and follies. Perhaps the beggars of San Francisco are really actors employed by the city to enliven its pavements, or perhaps they are former hedge-fund managers and stockmarket brokers, America’s nouveaux pauvres.

[...]

At a Thanksgiving dinner here the other night a woman on my left, whose name may have been Shirlee-Anne, told me how much she adored a French singer called Edith Pilaf. She may have been a close relation of a woman I know who called the Greek singer Nana Moussaka and the New Zealand diva Piri Piri Te Kanawa, or the lady I heard in a London restaurant ordering, rather loudly and confidently, a caftan of wine. During the meal, which featured delicious dishes incorporating pumpkin in various disguises, I became fascinated by Shirlee-Anne. She wore a strange knitted A-line smock of fawn and grey wool which descended in scallops to the middle of her sturdy calves, giving her the appearance of a dusty lampshade from which no light would ever be diffused.

[...]

We have decided to invite this lady to my present show, should a seat in the middle of the front row still be procurable, and then entice her on to the stage where Dame Edna will no doubt take care of her.

I have just ordered an interesting book called The Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers. It may well appear in my next Best Books of the Year entry in the Sunday Telegraph. On second thoughts it won’t, because I have given away the joke, but it would look funny in such a sedate context.

A very jolly woman called Charzelle, whom Edna besought to come on stage last week, explained that she was a writer of children’s books, especially books of a cautionary nature. What was her latest offering? Charzelle explained that it was bound to be a bestseller and would help children resist the vile importunings of the predatory paedophile. Proudly Charzelle announced its title, Don’t Touch My Botty Where I Go Potty. It seemed a worthy enterprise and certainly a title which would leap from the page in any Books of the Year list. In recommending this book to the audience Oprah-style, the Dame suggested that a sequel could be undertaken addressed to young adults, where the title would remain the same, except for the substitution of Please for Don’t.

[...]

And to all of those politically correct Americans who beam at me next week and say ‘Happy Holidays’, I will defiantly respond, ‘And a Merry Christmas to you too!’