alluminati

Coffee with Serafina in the Whitewater Centre.
She's just back from France.
"I met a friend of yours while I was over there," quoth she.
I shook my handsome preraphaelite head.
"I don't think so," sez I. "I don't have any friends in France."
Serafina leaned across the table.
"He knew you anyway," she said deliberately. "A certain Michael Appourchaux. Ring any bells?"
The noble Heelers paled.
Appourchaux by gad.
Left ham of the devil.
Of course I knew him.
Back in the old days when I was Ireland's greatest living theatre producer, I used to call him Michael Appershocks.
He was one of my allumni.
That is to say he was one of the stars of a production of my play Vampires Of Dublin which ran for two weeks in Dublin during the dulcet Summer of 1996.
He played Francois the French vampire hunter.
I gave im ze role because he ad, ow you say, a Fransh ackson.
(A French accent. - Maurice Chevalier note.)
Ingenious casting, what!
By the way, this was the same production of The Vamps that featured a debut performance from a then unknown actor called Reggie McGroarity. He portrayed a character called the Hero Type who used to burst in every time Dracula was about to despatch a victim, and shout: "Stop you foul fiend of hell."
Ah.
Sheer art.
But I digress.
So Serafina had met Appershocks.
I wondered should I enquire about his career.
Did I really want to know?
I couldn't take it if another of my students had achieved success surpassing my own.
I'm quirky that way.
You all know the aforementioned McGroarity has enjoyed quite prodigious acclaim in the past year. He's played in a television soap opera, as well as doing a turn in some insufferable ads for Amstel lagar, and then filling the lead role in a production of Look Back In Anger, for which he won a national theatre award.
I'm telling you folks I looked back in anger myself when I heard about that swine getting a national theatre award.
Envious, moi?
I think it gave me gout.
Now listen.
It's not that I resent people who've starred in my plays going on to bigger things than me, it's just that I resent people who've starred in my plays going on to bigger things than me.
Anyhoo.
What about Appershocks...
"How's he been doing?" I asked cautiously.
Serafina's face was lit with a strange spiritual fervour.
She is always at her happiest proclaiming some news she knows I'll hate.
"James you wouldn't believe it," she cried. "He's amazing. In France they're calling him the new Depardieu. He's getting television work and film work. He owns a travelling theatre company with five shows in production. And his wife has just presented him with a second child."
"Presumably his own?" I wondered drily.
Brown Eyes of the Gazelle shot me a warning look.
"Shhh," she admonished. "He had only good things to say about you."
This tweaked my curiosity.
"What did he say about me?"
Serafina grinned.
When she spoke next, her words came like a damburst of enthusiasm breaking through her grin.
"He said he used to call you Jamie Hellish," she crowed triumphantly. "Something to do with the fraught nature of your productions. I can't imagine what he meant. Fraught, you, the words just don't fit, do they! He said The Vampires was the theatrical equivalent of Dante's Inferno with blazing rows, and actors getting fired a day before the show opened, and the ceiling of the theatre falling in, and the theatre getting flooded, and Independent Newspapers reporting you to the police for sending their theatre critics blood soaked threatening letters intended as teaser ads for the play, and generally all hell breaking loose and you wandering around in the middle of the chaos waving your arms like Basil Fawlty."
Well bold readers.
No jury in the western world could convict Appershocks for these statements.
On the other hand with any luck a merciful deity may yet give him a good hard smiting in the balls.