Best Australian Comedy Writing

by Luke Ryan

  Yet instead of singing my praises, she guffawed and turned to the desks behind us. ‘Get this,’ she stage-whispered, ‘Monica wants to do work experience as a nun!’ The E’s through H’s delivered a stinging chorus of scorn, raining down blasphemous ‘Oh My Gods!’ and sneering at me as if I’d just announced my plan to join some crazy religious cult that regularly harboured serial paedophiles and was run by a super-rich, charismatic leader in a distant tax haven.

  Like one of the martyrs of old, I bore their taunts without complaint. Never mind them, I thought to myself. I’ll be the one laughing when I’m kicking back in Paradise with my new best friend Jesus, while you E’s to H’s are stuck in limbo for a few millennia. (It seemed ungodly for one who aspired to holy orders to wish anyone eternal damnation, so a brief purgatorial stretch was the worst curse I could conjure.)

  Still, after that unpleasant experience I kept my nunnish ambitions to myself, assuming that I was alone in my desire for the be-wimpled life. It was only years later that I realised how mistaken I was. In talking to other former Catholic schoolgirls of my generation, I have discovered that a huge number of them harboured the very same desire at one time or another. Of course, there are always exceptions, like White King Sharon, but my friend Kathleen put them in context. ‘All the dumb girls wanted to be beauticians, or hairdressers,’ Kathleen explained. ‘It was the smart girls who wanted to be nuns.’

  It’s easy to understand why nunning had been popular in medieval times, for it is a thoroughly medieval institution. But what possible attraction could it have had for a healthy, well-adjusted 20th-century teenager? Cynics might put it down to simple brainwashing, and it’s true there was no shortage of old-fashioned mind-control practised by Catholic educators at the time. But I don’t believe it’s as simple as that. While I did have Jesus and Mary relentlessly hammered into my impressionable little brain, I honestly feel that the nun thing was an idea that I cooked up largely by myself.

  Once upon a time, nuns were publicly celebrated for their self-sacrifice and lionised for their Good Works, but this had already become a rarity by the time I reached adolescence. In popular culture, they were more likely to be parodied than praised. We now tend to think of nuns as funny, and in a sense they are funny, in that they willingly make themselves antithetical to everything that the modern world values. Hey, girls, here’s a chance to de-sex yourself, work for free, get up ridiculously early each and every day, and wear sensible shoes for the rest of your life! Who wouldn’t jump at that offer?

  The more I’ve thought about this, the weirder it seems. Why did the nun racket still appeal to so many of us, even in the debauched, materialistic, Madonna-saturated 1980s? Stranger still, why were all the cleverest girls attracted to something that seems like such a thoroughly crappy deal? What were we all thinking?

  I’ve occasionally read dedications in books written by successful, convent-educated women and been surprised to find them declaring their deep gratitude to the nuns who taught them. These wonderful and devoted sisters apparently inspired the authors to follow their dreams, strive for excellence, and to be all that they could be.

  I wrestle with such sentiments, because the nuns who taught me were not so much inspirational as violent, cruel or flat-out weird. Even looking back now, through more sympathetic, adult eyes, the best I could say is that most of them were sad, or angry, or both.

  Only much later did it occur to me that the mismatch between my own experiences and those of these highly successful Catholic author women might have had something to do with the sort of school I attended. Sure, my school, like theirs, was Catholic. But it was what my mother optimistically called a ‘regional school’, known by everyone else as a ‘rundown dump’. Low fees, low standards, and subpar nuns.

  Even as a child I knew that envy was a sin, yet still I coveted the luxuries afforded by the fancier Catholic schools. I longed to attend an institution equipped with ponies, regulation hair ribbons and smart, pressed uniforms that everyone wore below their knees. What I didn’t understand at the time was that I might also have encountered a better class of nun there. The type who I might later gushingly thank when I’d become world-conqueringly successful and had published an inspiring account of my entirely fabulous, and thoroughly secular, life.

  Still, when I look back on the nuns of my own childhood there are a few who stand out from the pack.

  There was the young Sister Therese, who at least managed to scandalise the parents by wearing a miniskirt to the school sports carnival. Therese seemed far too racy to be doing God’s work, and the general sentiment among the grown-ups was that if she wanted to be young and good-looking she should have chosen another profession. Eventually she did just that. The rumour was that she renounced her vows in order to run off with Father Anthony, a priest who everybody thought was ‘lovely’, even though he too was young, good-looking and, apparently, using the nunnery as a dating service.

  On the other end of the spectrum was the dour Sister Maria. She was Irish, but her eyes consistently failed to smile, and she certainly never dallied inappropriately with any priests. Yet she did have one thing in common with Sister Therese, in that I remember her not for her piety, her dedication to Jesus, or even her charmingly 19th-century morality, but for her questionable fashion choices.

  In a way, you can blame the Vatican II reforms for both women’s problems. For in freeing nuns from the tyranny of the habit, the Pope was also setting them up for sartorial disaster. In Sister Maria’s case, this manifested in a series of adventurously colourful shirts, which made it look as if the pattern fairy had vomited on her bosom.

  There were, of course, some nuns who bitterly resisted any such modernising, and the least modern of them all was Sister Josephine. I know that Josephine also managed to leave an impression on many of her other students, although I hope that most of those ‘impressions’ eventually healed. She was my primary school’s singing teacher, but she didn’t so much teach as terrorise. Her persistently foul mood, coupled with the onset of dementia, left her wandering the convent hallways, ‘disciplining’ children left and right, then frequently forgetting that she had disciplined them and whacking them all over again for doing the very thing that she’d set them as punishment. My friend Michael was once dragged from his chair and slapped about the head by her for a minor misdemeanour, then told to wait outside class. Half an hour later, when the poor boy knocked on the door to ask if he could come back in, Josephine fell on him again, giving him an even fiercer beating for being late.

  Suffice to say that when news of Josephine’s death reached the school, some years after her retirement, it was greeted with the kind of cheering usually reserved for goals in the soccer World Cup.

  Yet of all the nuns I knew, the most memorable, and the only one I regard with real affection, was Sister Loretta, who taught me high school science. Unlike the other distant, disengaged nuns, Loretta attempted to connect with us young folk, mostly by talking about sex. Nuns are meant to be more concerned with Jesus than with carnal pleasures, yet Loretta seemed particularly fascinated by God’s naughtier gifts, using the fact that she taught biology as a convenient cover for her digressions. She was the first person to enlighten me about masturbation, although I don’t think that was her intention, and she certainly didn’t use the word. The revelation came when she gave our class a stern talk about the dangers of being too vigorous while washing ourselves ‘down there’. If you were in the shower and started enjoying yourself too much you should stop whatever you were doing immediately, she warned, as Jesus most definitely did not approve.

  I’m sure this warning triggered dozens of long, curious showers that evening, and in that respect I can honestly say that Sister Loretta did bring a great deal of pleasure into her students’ lives.

  During another one of our sex talks, she explained to us that we, as women, were like irons – slow to heat up, but also slow to cool down. A man, by comparison, was a light switch. On-off-on-off. How these two wond
ers of modern electricity came together in a loving embrace, I never fully understood, but the lesson was clear. We must be very careful not to fondle any light switches, lest we accidentally turn them on before we were ready to do the ironing.

  In case we suspected that her views on these matters were purely theoretical, Loretta told us about a passionate interlude that had taken place when she was a novice, involving a priest whose hugs felt more special than any others. As Loretta slowly heated up, this priest’s light flicked on, and he decided that a life of celibacy was not for him. He did eventually run off with a nun, although sadly it was not Sister Loretta. She was left alone with only her special showers for comfort.

  Youngsters are highly impressionable, so if you were lucky enough to be taught by inspirational nuns, then it’s not hard to see how you might have been swayed by their example and wanted to follow in their footsteps. But the example set by my lot was not so much calculated to inspire as designed to have you running in fear. I’m not alone in this. When I asked my friends about exactly why they’d wanted to marry Jesus, none of them mentioned inspirational nuns. In fact, most of them gave answers that were vague and heavily qualified, as if they themselves weren’t exactly sure why they’d once thought nunning was a good idea.

  Of course, most people nurse a wide range of half-arsed career ambitions when they are young, dreams that are never more than a passing fancy. Brain surgeon, actor and President of the United States were all on my list at one time or another. Indeed, just before I decided that I was going to become a nun, my ambition was to be a Jedi Knight. In Year 6, I enjoyed vivid fantasies of turning up to school with Luke Skywalker at my side, strutting around the yard as my friends gasped in jealousy. Luke would inform my teachers that, yes, it was true, The Force was strong in this one, which was why he was whisking me away to join the Rebel Alliance. This fantasy also involved me giving Luke lots of cuddles that made me feel all dizzy between my thighs, but that was only part of the appeal. The scenario was attractive mostly because I wanted to be a superhero, at a time when there were precious few models of hero-dom available to young girls.

  By the time I started high school, becoming a nun seemed like a more achievable version of my Star Wars fantasy. And, in many ways, the switch from Jedi to Jesus required relatively little adjustment. After all, Star Wars reads very much as a metaphor for Catholicism. Consider Darth Vader who, even after all that he’s done, blowing up Alderaan and all that, is still deemed capable of redemption simply on the basis of his deathbed repentance. Which is so Catholic it’s ridiculous.

  As for nuns, they exert mystery, otherworldliness and spirituality, just like Jedi Knights. They too call upon a powerful, invisible, omnipresent Force and have a penchant for loose, robe-like garments. And, just like Luke Skywalker, a nun’s primary aim is to defeat the powers of darkness, while not having intercourse with the only member of the opposite sex in the building.

  Of course, the greatest Catholic heroes are those who suffer abysmally for Jesus. To me, as a child, the perfect example of this ideal was Saint Bernadette, the girl who kick-started pilgrimages to Lourdes in France, a sort of Disneyland for the holy. Her story was brought to life by Hollywood in The Song of Bernadette, a cheesy old-school biopic that included numerous soft-focus visions of the Virgin Mary, replete with angelic soundtrack and a glowing aura, a bit like Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz.

  The Song of Bernadette won an Academy Award, but the real-life Bernadette was also a big success story, in that she died a horrible, agonising death with tuberculosis in her bones, yet accepted it with grace and charm. Indeed, in the film version, Bernadette hides her painful affliction as long as she can, because Catholics must not only suffer, but suffer in silence. Now that’s a role model for a twelve-year-old girl if ever there was one.

  None of this seemed sick and twisted to me at the time, because I’d been raised on a steady diet of stories about people whose greatest achievement in life was being killed gruesomely for Christ. While reading my illustrated Saints of the World book, I would comfort myself in the knowledge that, while martyrdom did sound unpleasant, the saints in the pictures always managed to keep both their composure and their youthful bloom, even as their eyes were being gouged out, or their flesh crisped at the stake. And why not? They were about to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, which made all the suffering worthwhile. A little like that wave of relief that comes over you as your plane starts descending at the end of a long-haul economy flight to Paris. Sure, after twenty-four hours the cramped conditions and smell of your fellow passengers’ farts are almost unbearable, but the knowledge that you’ll soon be gorging on croissants in Le Marais serves to dull the pain considerably.

  However, at the time it was hard to find anyone who was actually dying for Jesus, at least in suburban Sydney. Given that martyrdom didn’t seem to be an option, I figured that my best chance of Catholic heroism would instead lie in a lifetime of piety, humility and single-minded devotion; all things that were synonymous with nun-dom.

  For high-achieving girls such as myself, this ideal of extreme self-denial and sacrifice offered a blueprint for a kind of perfection, albeit one with lashings of metaphorical lashings. Forget ridiculous aspirations towards joining the UN or Médecins Sans Frontières. Jesus had already saved the world, so continuing His work was the perfect way for an impressionable girl to get in on the world-saving act.

  I don’t know many contemporary Catholic schoolgirls, but I suspect that in the 21st century, very few twelve-year-olds aspire to be nuns, even briefly. Certainly, the world has changed a lot since the 1980s, but the real turn-off is the fact that the nun business has changed, and now so much of the drama and theatre that once marked the holiest of professions has been lost. Once again, it was the liberalising influence of Vatican II that did it, forcing nuns to be less extreme and less weird, but also a whole lot less heroic.

  Today I’m rather ambivalent about the Catholic Church. Well, ambivalent is probably not a strong enough word. Fury might better describe my current state of mind. Yet, oddly, I do experience a twinge of sadness about the fact that nuns are going extinct – at least in the developed world. Perhaps it’s just nostalgia for my youthful idealism, or maybe it’s because convents were, in some respects, oddly feminist spaces, where women mixed and mingled with other women while avoiding the ever-present gaze of the patriarchy. But I think the real, deeper reason is that my childhood was happy partly because, and not in spite of, Jesus. Jesus and his gang provided a fairy story that gave many layers of focus, meaning and warmth to my youthful existence. By the time I hit my teens, all that make-believe began to unravel and soon became suffocating. But before that fall from grace, Catholicism was the glue that bound my family and my life together, and nuns, flawed as they were, played a big part in that.

  Wherever my nostalgia might come from, it is just a distant twinge. By the time I finally reached Year 10 and got my chance to do work experience, I had long since given up on the nun idea. Instead I wanted to be an actor. So I spent a working week sitting in on rehearsals for an all-female musical being produced at the Sydney Theatre Company. For those five days I got to watch a group of women dressed up in exotic costumes, singing songs and repeating their well-rehearsed lines, over and over again. In a way, it was a bit like the nun business, except nobody got TB and at the end of the day they could all go home and take a nice, long, guilt-free shower.

  LEE LIN CHIN & CHRIS LEBEN

  The Tweets of Lee Lin Chin

  ❛There’s no point in acting your age. If I did I wouldn’t be at the pub right now with two 25-year-old models.❜

  4:50 PM - 2 May 2015

  I’m going to the Logies for the first time tonight, which one of the @HomeandAwayTV boys is most likely to put out?

  9:39 PM - 9 Jun 2015

  If we ever meet, you will remember it for the rest of your life. I will forget the moment you exit my gaze.

  5:36 PM - 1 Jun 2015

  Sometimes t
he thug life chooses you, sometimes you choose the thug life. Either way you’ll never be a thug like me.

  7:23 PM - 16 Dec 2014

  There’s no point in acting your age. If I did I wouldn’t be at the pub right now with two 25-year-old models.

  12:08 AM - 3 May 2015

  For those asking, I’m not nominated tonight. I don’t read the news for awards, I do it for the money, fame & babes #tvweeklogie

  12:15 AM - 17 Apr 2015

  If you say ‘Lee Lin Chin’ in the mirror three times I’ll come and drink with you.

  3:24 AM - 22 Jan 2015

  I’m not vain, the song is about me.

  9:17 PM - 19 Mar 2015

  I’m the voice of a generation, it’s just a shame that generation hasn’t been born yet.

  10:42 PM - 10 Mar 2015

  ‘Hey Lee Lin what are you doing tonight?’ ‘Your Mum!’ #burn

  9:24 PM - 7 Mar 2015

  Thank god #MardiGras is over. It’s the only time of year anyone comes close to competing with my wardrobe.

  5:59 PM - 12 Feb 2015

  #ValentinesDayAdvice you don’t need anyone, you’re amazing & no one can compete. Drink a beer in the park by yourself & judge everyone else.