The Blue Fairy

One of the highlights of my life.

As close as I have ever come to the big lights!

I was asked to model the blue fairy's costume for the pantomime Pinocchio. It was before the role was cast and they needed someone tiny and fairylike to fit into the costume and Mandy, my friend and millinery mentor suggested me. I was 22 or 23 and I loved all things whimsy and she said she thought it would delight me. So there I was, wearing a wooden mask, on a billboard above Flinder's St Station, Melbourne. And I got to see this projection of myself, as The Blue Fairy - the guiding light - one of my childhood loves, when I went up to work with Mandy Murphy in her studio in the Nicholas building for a good few weeks. I am certain I still have a flyer somewhere among my treasured bits and pieces. The pantomime industry was closing down in Melbourne at this time. I think it had been my dream, always, to work on old-fashioned pantomimes. I have, pinned to my dressing table, The Blue Fairy's tiny prototype wings.... a gift from Mel, the costume maker and a kind and wise friend.

Back then, around the turn of the Milenium, I would pack up my busking kit 0n weekends - a gold costume for Titania Queen of the Fairies (from Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’) and stand in the Bourke St Mall, playing a Living Statue. I loved that life! I traveled, once, as an adult to Europe and stood on La Strada in Barcelona amid my performing kinfolk. On my last night there I got offered a home, a bar job, and a group of beautiful friends. I thought about it - how easily I could make a costume. But the winds were calling me home.

One month later I fell pregnant with my son, Ariel Gray - and life changed forever. Knowing him and loving him is the greatest fairytale I could ever live. And everyone told me not to! Told me not to "go through with it" but something moved deep within my heart, a deep knowing, a deepest love. So I held my own hand, and I leapt, and I did the bravest thing I know how to do in this world - I brought forth life. There are many ways to walk in this world and many paths to lead us… what is right for us may not be that way for others but it is that uniqueness and the wonderful difference. that - rainbow of diversities - that paints this world all the beautiful colours it is.