Lindsay Perigo
solopassion.com
Fifty years ago, at the age of 18, I was a music student at Victoria University (latterly notorious for its endorsement of the terrorist group Only Black Lives Matter). As such, I was ensconced in Weir House, at that time an all-male hostel restricted to the intellectual elite as determined by School Certificate results.
I have been ridiculously naive all my life. Among my naivetes fifty years ago was that the intellectual elite among my peers would share my musical values, including my equally naive love for the great Romantic hero, Mario Lanza.
As it happened, about six of them did—if not for Mario, at least for Romanticism overall—and I, in my naivete, fell in love with all of them. We gathered in my room every night, in true Epicurean and Platonic (Symposium) tradition (without knowing that), and celebrated our love of conversation and life.
In falling in love with these beautiful, intelligent young men, I found my life derailed, at least temporarily. All of them went on to lead boringly conformity-driven, heterosexual group-think lives. I just went on being myself, and somehow, mysteriously, eventually had quite a conventionally successful career in broadcasting. That might have had something to do with the fact that my outlandish views, when the time came to unleash them, were at least not dull.
We six at Weir were, in our imaginings at least, la creme de la creme de la creme. That impression was brought home to me one morning when I popped onto my turntable Mario Lanza Sings Caruso Favorites. Recorded four months before he died, this doesn’t sound like the Mario we know and love, but it is deeply transcendent all the same. Mere seconds in, a moron law student from along the way came to my door and bellowed, “Turn that bullshit off!”
I should have realised then what I still only feebly realise now: the world is f**ked! Here is the “bullshit”:
