August 22, 2005

Hello Possums,

It will be a miracle if anyone reads this caringly crafted posting, since my zillions of fans have probably given up all hope of hearing from me ever again. I apologize Possums. Since my lovely show made its triumphant departure from Broadway I have been busy in Australia doing a lot of charitable chores. My late husband’s obelisk in the Melbourne Cemetery had been horribly disfigured by Neo Nazis who had squirted their spray cans all over it in that horrible fat writing they all seem to have in common. Isn’t it funny - and sad – that these dysfunctional drop outs who can’t read or write love writing all over other people’s things. Pretending to write is really what they do, and I am glad the ones that desecrated Lord Norm’s tomb were illiterate because I would hate to understand some of the yucky words they used.

I have decided to replace this obelisk anyway with a beautiful sculpture and I am holding a worldwide competition for something spray-proof as a tribute to the human prostate. Already a few famous sculptors have submitted ideas and my old chum Fernando Botero who specializes in doing fat people is already chiselling an enlarged prostate in red-veined marble. Lets face it possums, everything old Ferdy touches is enlarged perse. I have also been struggling to get a tad more international recognition for the deviated septum. A Cinderella ailment if ever there was one. I had arranged an international DS conference last week in a Middle Eastern venue called Gaza but it clashed with some other activity that seems to be going on in that part of the world so we might have to reconvene in Tasmania.

I will be back in London soon to be honoured with a star in the new walk of fame at Covent Garden. I don’t know who else is being honoured but I am pretty sure I will be in very good company. There’s nothing worse than finding yourself clutching some ugly little statue next to a couple of nonentities. I was at dinner in Sydney not long ago and a silly woman next to me said, “Dame Edna I can’t believe it. I am sitting at a table with two icons”. “Where’s the other one?”, I snapped jet-lagged. The feather brain pointed across the table at some stupid female flash in the pan pop singer using her knife and fork like an American. That word icon is a worn out epithet.

I was a bit cross with the new pope, not because he isn’t perfectly nice but because he is zooming around Europe in the popemobile, which darling old Pope John Paul II had promised to me. He knew I adored it and it would have been the perfect vehicle for travelling around the United States on my next big tour.

That adorable old Polish pontiff obviously didn’t dot all the I’s or cross all the T ’s when he wrote his will, and some sneaky old cardinal must have told the Benedict the Something that the popemobile was his. When I read a history book like the Da Vinci Code (my copy a gift from Laura Bush), I begin to feel quite worried about some of those types in the Vatican. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that Albino Monk Silas hadn’t been busy in the dirty tricks department sabotaging my travel arrangements.

Talking of Laura Bush I hear that she has removed all paintings from the White House which are not by American artists. Is that meant to make her seem patriotic, artistic or both? Could foreign paintings be a threat to national security? I wonder who advised her as to which were American and which were not? Or indeed which were paintings. With these and other burning questions on my mind I say farewell for the moment darlings.

A Joyous heart always

Dame Edna