No drama how South Yarra gave Alan Cumming a new lens on Australia

By Alan Cumming November 12, 2021 â€" 4.04pm

I found the perfect glasses one day on Venice Beach during that summer of 1996, though, to this untrained eye, it was always summer in Los Angeles. I am told there are indeed different seasons in LA, but they don’t really change, they glide into one another, effortlessly, nigh invisible to all but the most hardened Angeleno, who, almost as imperceptibly as the season’s changing, will introduce fleece to their wardrobe at the first metaphorical leaf drop.

I say metaphorical because fall, in most other parts of the world, is indeed signalled by falling leaves. In LA, it would appear the leaves fall all year round, for why else would I have been awakened nearly every morning I have spent in that city by LA’s white noise â€" the dull yet omnipresent drone of leaf blowers, strapped to the backs of gardeners? If there really are seasons in LA, why don’t the leaves fall in autumn, like everywhere else? And if they do fall in autumn, why do we hear the leaf blowers all year round? And if they fall all the year round, why don’t they just rake up their leaves quietly as in every other city in the world, and let us sleep in peace?

I wasn’t even looking for glasses. I had lunched with a group of friends and was waiting for them to gather on the footpath outside the restaurant before heading down onto the beach. I was idly browsing a sunglasses stall in that way you do when you don’t really want or need anything, but you’re open to the possibility of finding something magical. Kind of a nonchalant alertness. The instant I saw them I knew I had found my look.

“I had found my look”: Alan Cumming in Los Angeles in 2017.Credit:Getty Images

The frames were black and round, Where’s Wally meets European arthouse director or avant-garde musician. Geeky but sexy, which had kind of become my thing at the time. They weren’t really sunglasses at all, as their lenses were clear and they were obviously hanging on the rack for novelty value, to attract the dorks like me not enthused by the shiny, the mirrored, or the sporty. They were ten dollars â€" the best ten dollars I ever spent because they gave me my look. And as Maria Callas said â€" or at least as Terrence McNally in his play Master Class imagined she might have said â€" “You must have a look!”

Soon after, I flew to Melbourne to visit my fiancée, who was there shooting a movie. One day, I took a walk down Toorak Road in South Yarra and walked into an optometrist’s office. A short â€" in all senses â€" saleslady looked up at me over the rims of her bifocals, which were attached to a very elegant chain, and gave me the once-over.

“Yeis?” she asked. “Hello,” I said cheerily. Crickets.

“I wonder if you can help me? I have these frames...” I pulled from my pocket the recently acquired wonder specs. The lady glanced at them noncommittally.

“... and I have this prescription for my lenses.“

Another glance from behind the bifocals, another wave of condescension washed over me. “And so, I was wondering if you could put my lenses into these frames...”

Credit:

She said nothing, but if there were a language of eyebrows, she would have clearly signalled the word “duh” by the ever so slight, yet withering, raise of her left one. I struggled on, knowing I still held my trump card.

“But I am only in Australia for the next five days. Do you think you can make it happen in time?“
There was a silence as she sized me up, reassessing me in the light of this revelation. I could tell she felt she had been wrong to dismiss me as a dopey foreigner so quickly. Our eyes met. I held her gaze. Finally, she looked away, and almost under her breath, in a languorous Aussie drawl, replied, “Shouldn’t be a drama!“

And thus, I learned my favorite Australian phrase, which sits alongside several others, including “Not my circus, not my monkeys” (Poland) and “You eat a ton of shite before you die” (Scotland).

Because it shouldn’t be a drama, should it?! Not much should, to be honest. And it wasn’t. I went back the day before I left and picked up my new, perfect, drama-free glasses, and seriously my life has been better ever since.

Extract from Baggage by Alan Cumming, published by Canongate on November 19.

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.

Share this post