We know them

Had coffee this morning with K, my first host and inspired guide to the true, i.e., hidden Melbourne. She’s back for a few weeks from Germany, where she works, and I was reporting on my assignment in her absence, which was to find a fabulous café or bar she didn’t know. The one I wanted to show her — the tiny Café au Soleil in a glassed-over alleyway reminiscent of the less frequented Parisian passages — is closed for the holidays, so we went instead to a little café in Degraves Street. Degraves is one of the cosy, atmospheric and half-hidden “arcades, alleys and laneways” where Melbourne downtown comes to life. (I can’t believe I never got around to posting this map of the self-guided walk of that name; Degraves is bottom left.)

Compared to K the people I see nowadays are recent arrivals in Melbourne, so it was fun once again to experience (however vicariously) the city’s whole cultural life as not more than three degrees of separation away. Well, just the parts of the city worth knowing, needless to say! Several bright and popular places I found back in September were dismissed with “we would never go there” or even (my favorite) “nobody goes there.” This morning I asked her advice on books, since I have yet to find the great Melburnian novel (if there is one). The State Library of Victoria had put together a list of books about Melbourne and she went through it, as often as not saying of authors or their subjects “we know them.”

But I was the one who knew someone in the café. After racking my brain a little I recognized our squinty and slightly shady-looking waiter as having been the male lead in the production of Brecht and Weil’s “Happy End,” the misbegotten sequel to the “Dreigroschenoper” I saw at the Victoria College of the Arts two months ago. Not that he looked remotely shady-looking in light blue shorts and short-sleeve shirt on a sunny morning, even in the shadow of Degraves Street, but I remembered him as a gangster with what passed for a heart of gold in Weimar, swaggering and drawling, spitting and snarling his way through songs like “Bilbao.” I recall thinking he had the perfect mug for the part (he appears to be missing one of his front teeth), so perfect I couldn’t imagine him in anything else. Are you acting in anything right now, I asked? We only just graduated, he said, and now it’s all about going to auditions… He has an agent. But most of the time he’s right here, in the Degraves Espresso.