Busytown by Jolisa Gracewood

Talk about déjà vu. It seems like just yesterday that I sat down to write my first bulletin from Busytown. In one of those highly auspicious meteorological effects, it was snowing -- first real snowfall of the season -- the city looked gorgeous, and Busytot was bumbling about in a snowsuit, walking, talking and generally being a fount of blog material.

Fast forward a whole year, and I might as well swipe the first paragraph of that first blog to start off this one.

It's snowing in New York City today -- first snow of the season -- and there's a picture-book view from my fifth floor apartment. It's just like being inside a snow-globe, only without the plastic Statue of Liberty. The snow swirls up and around the brick buildings over the road with their ornate fire escapes, and obscures the water-towers on the rooftops beyond. Down on 112th Street, every third car is a yellow cab, as usual, but the parked cars have a good three or four inches of snow on the roof, with "total expected accumulation of six to eight inches."

Spookily, nothing’s changed, right down to the total expected accumulation. Except for Busytot. This time last year he was in laconic, declarative mode -- "Snoooooooh!"-- and taking a few preliminary steps towards walking about under his own steam. This year, he can describe in a sentence the particular urban treat of "Garbage truck with a bulldozer on it, pushing the snow!" and tell you exactly what he plans to do with the snow, from "I squash Mummy with a big big snowball" to "I making snow go boof! off top of cars!" And he can run like Rokocoko at the first hint of a move to drag him inside out of the cold.

The language explosion is enormous fun. It comes along with the classic two year old stutter, a completely normal speech effect that will disappear with time. As a sometime stress-stutterer myself I’m being careful not to make a big deal out of it. But it’s hard not to smile when the poor wee lad, who has no trouble at all with a verbose sentence along the lines of "Daddy want to hold the green Volkswagen Beetle car?", takes a full minute to get to the end of a three word request like "Wa wa wa wa wa wa wa wa wa wa wa want want want want want wantsome wantsome wantsome wantsome wantsome MULK?"

Funnily enough, the hesitation doesn’t kick in when he’s talking to himself. The other night I eavesdropped on him playing with a small plastic baby fur-seal he had liberated from a friend’s toybox. "It’s got a white head," he mused, "White feet, and a white tail, white tummy, white bottom, heh heh, white bottom…and it’s got a black nose…and too many eyes…"

Dunno where that too many eyes business comes from; probably he meant to say two eyes, but you never know. The other day in the lift he pointed at a tall, handsome undergrad and said "Look mummy! He he he he he he he he he he he’s got a got a got a got a he’s got a HEAD!" The guy in question looked a bit startled. "Oh, you wouldn’t believe some of the things we see in this lift," I told him, reassuringly, just in case he was new to the city.

Musical appreciation has kicked up a notch, too. Not only does Busytot know most of the words to No!, the new classic by They Might be Giants (yes, most of the words are in fact "no"), but he’s started making requests. "Sing the concrete mixer song," he demands, like I’m a jukebox or a particularly hard-up busker. It took me a while to figure out that you can wing it as long as you know a couple of standard tunes. The song about Flick the Little Fire Engine is endlessly reworkable for the gamut of vehicles, even if you occasionally have to jam in a couple of extra syllables in the first line (concrete mixer, front-end loader and garbage truck scan nicely; double-decker bus is a bit trickier) and get creative about what it is that said vehicle is not allowed to do ("someday I'll be big and strong and er... seal every lane"?).

But this morning it was "Sing the tree song." Hmmm. Hmmm. Oak tree? Willow tree? Is there a tree song? Don’t sit under the apple tree? Then it hit me: the perfect song for the season. "O Christmas Tree"! Their branches green are currently delighting us on every other corner, as the seasonal tree sellers stack up their goods under strings of coloured lights and giant inflatable snowmen. These street-corner Christmas tree stands spring up overnight like enchanted forests in a fairy tale, and they make for a welcoming whiff of pine scent as you exit the supermarket and brush past the wall of trees.

Speaking of whiffs, I was fascinated to see that the production team for the whole Lord of the Rings premiere hoo-ha included something to appeal to the most neglected of the senses. Not Helen Clark’s nifty chain-mail shawl -- which I wouldn't mind having a fondle of -- but the specially commissioned eau de New Zealand fragrance assembled by a New York based perfume company to go with the New York launch of the film.

It's true: thanks to the parfumier Christopher Brosius of Demeter Fragrances, you can now purchase the smell of New Zealand in convenient pick-me-up cologne or room freshener form. Brosius mentioned the last-minute New Zealand commission briefly in an interview on public radio show Studio 360 this weekend (listenable online for free, this week only). Alas, he didn’t go into detail about how he went about constructing the fragrance, or whether he’d actually smelt New Zealand himself before bottling it.

But this isn't just any old perfume repackaged with silver ferns on the label: Mr Brosius is the olfactory genius responsible for an astonishing range of nostalgic and unusual scents that include Dirt, Thunderstorm, Paperback, Wet Garden, Gin and Tonic, Condensed Milk, and my favourite, Playdough (under development).

So what does New Zealand smell like, then? What do you reckon? Wet sheep? Grilled sausages? Hangi kai? Gumboot? Car exhaust? Freshly mown grass? Freshly smoked grass? I haven’t been able to get my hands on a bottle of the stuff yet, but reading between the lines of the various descriptions I’ve hunted down, the answer might just be: All of the above. Here’s some pungent ad copy to get you in the mood:

A fresh and exhilarating blend of the mystical New Zealand landscapes.  Top notes of tangy kiwi and refreshing lime give way to a clean and crisp ozone accord.

Aaah, those mystical landscapes. Puhinui Rd. The Mount. Hoon Hay. And mmm, yes, love that tangy kiwi (they mean the fruit, I guess, not the bird) but what on earth is an ozone accord? Something to do with the Kyoto agreement?

Fortunately, a bunch of slightly more detailed and largely enthusiastic consumer reviews can be found here. "Sweet green grass with sunlight and running water" does sound awfully tempting, but the poor sap who wound up "smelling like a goat" (not a sheep?) probably won’t be booking a trip to our fair country any time soon. Still, according to that website, 75% of those who tried New Zealand would buy it again, which is flattering indeed.

So far, New Zealand is the only nationally inspired scent in Demeter's cult-favourite range, and it sits a little oddly among the food and mood-based titles on offer, like a tourism booth at a craft fair. But it could be just the right gift for the homesick long-distance New Zealander on your list. Tired of smelling like the Underground, or Bangkok? Spritz a bit of New Zealand about your person and you'll be fresh as a Mt Cook lily, or possibly redolent of the top paddock. Whichever, you'll be one tangy kiwi.

And think of the niche market spin-offs if it really catches on. I’d kill for a Proustian bottle of Old Papatoetoe 1987: top notes of creek, op-shop, boot polish, and bike oil, with faint hints of pink Chardon, giving way to a clean and crisp pina colada-flavoured sunscreen accord. Mon dieu. Sniff it and weep...

There's a migratory songbird that, every year when migration time comes around, has to forget how to sing in order to remember how to get where it’s going. Talk about traveling light: its tiny birdbrain can only handle one task at a time. Happily, once it gets where it’s going, it forgets all about windspeeds and aerial maps, and learns how to sing again. A quick chorus of “I do like to be beside the seaside," perhaps, while it unpacks the suitcases.

(On a tangential ornithological note: the godwit – avian metaphor of choice for travelling New Zealanders -- is a whole different bundle of feathers. Everyone knows that, like its human counterparts, the godwit crosses the globe to work in a pub and find a mate it probably went to primary school with, after which they fly home together to have babies. But you might not know that this industrious little flapper spends the months before the big OE completely gorging itself, laying down reserves for the trip to Siberia, and shrinking its organs to make more space for all that carbo-loading. When it finally waddles down the runway for take-off, it is -- for one brief shining moment -- proportionately the fattest little birdie in the whole world.)

Anyway, what I was working my way up to saying is that the parental brain is a bit like that of the amnesiac little songbird. It fills up with tricks for negotiating a toddler into and out of clothes, bed, bath, potty, and trouble, at the expense of all the clever things you used to know about what makes six-month-olds tick, or how to soothe a newborn.

I never thought this would happen to me. I remember being horrified by the vagueness of more experienced friends, the ones I thought of as parenting experts. They’d peel their five year old off the top of the piano, deftly funnel food down the throat of a Tasmanian devil of a two year old, then furrow their brows at precious little brand new Busybaby and say “I forget, do they smile at six weeks or was it three months? Can he hold his head up? What does he eat these days?”

I thought this spectacular ignorance was some kind of ironic, detached pose. Or that they were feigning idiocy, to make the new mother feel more in charge. Could they really not tell the utter and distinct difference between a six week old and an eight week old? “Oh, it’s all a blur from this distance,” they’d laugh, flapping their hands, while I sat there, alert as never before, my whole world in sharp and steady focus as if someone had finally fixed the horizontal hold or I’d taken a truckload of Ritalin. My brain was a whizzing computer full of data on the minute variations of the infant, and every day was a vividly etched day in the lab that I’d never forget, so I didn’t need to write it down in the lab-book.

Er, yes. So here I am, two years down the track, gearing myself up for impending aunty-hood by trying to reactivate the baby-savvy part of my brain. By way of practice, I’m struggling to advise local friends with a brand new baby. I foist helpful books on them; the funny and user-friendly Kidwrangling, the genial and calming Touchpoints, the comprehensive and reassuring Baby Love. (And I warn them off the ones that gave me the willies, like the deceptively soft-spoken Baby Book, which I eventually had to hide in the wardrobe because it gave me guilt-ridden nightmares about being stalked by a baby the size of Godzilla, and I swear if you read it backwards you can hear Mrs Sears saying "Help me!". Then there's the whole What to Expectorate bunch of ptooey, the very covers of which make me want to barf).

But they want it from the horse’s mouth, from an old hand, someone who’s seen action. To my alarm, that’s me. “The baby does this, she does that,” they say, “what should we do?” And all I can think is “Oh, does she? That’s nice. Aren’t babies the darlingest little things.” Given a moment to register the strain on the mother’s face, I can dredge up something slightly more helpful, like “Poor old you, that sounds like a hard day. Well, here’s some things I seem to remember that we might have tried.” If I can get my actual hands on the baby, I can demonstrate a few useful holds, maybe pass on some nursing tricks.

With further thought I even manage helpful, grandmotherly wisdom like “You know, sometimes there are days when nothing works. But every day is a new day and tomorrow will be a bit better.” And “At this stage, it’s not necessarily what you do, it’s that you’re doing anything at all. That baby’s job is to teach you to listen to her, which she will do by cunningly changing her response every day until she’s got your full attention, if necessary.” And, finally, “If nothing works, try doing nothing. Feed her, change her, and make sure she’s not suffering, and then just let the poor wee sausage have a good cry. Have one yourself, while you’re at it. It’s remarkably satisfying.”

Those early weeks are hard. Not so much a learning curve as a vertical climbing wall, and you with your fingers and toes wedged into whatever crevice you can find, every muscle taut, every nerve vibrating at a frequency only dogs can hear. Amidst the tension and sheer hard work, there are daily moments of unexpected serenity and beauty, when you weep with delirious love for this grimacing, squirming, jaundiced, bleary bundle of chaos and think, what astonishing thing have I created? (The thing in your arms, I mean -- not the one in the mirror, which takes a little longer to come to terms with).

Under it all is a constant feeling of just managing to keep your balance. You get it together, then it falls apart. You get into a groove, then something bumps and you veer off the road with a screech. Something that worked yesterday doesn’t even raise a whisper of response today. The whole set-up is both crudely simplistic -- feed, change, sleep, repeat -- and wildly anarchic. The growth spurts (i.e. shark-like feeding frenzies) were what took me by surprise. Feed, feed, what? still hungry? feed, feed, feed, frigging feed that voracious black hole till your nipples threaten to fall off and your bottom is welded to the couch.

These days when you spend all day in the milking shed never announce themselves in advance, but are always followed by a belated morning-after “aha!” when the baby in your arms suddenly pops all the buttons off its suit and has a whole new chuckling grown-up face on. Or sometimes the epiphany occurs when you take the hundredth photo of the day of the adorable little mite – and suddenly notice that your tiny infant who used to more or less disappear inside those sweet little cotton nighties now looks like a truck-driver in a frock, beefy arms bulging out of the tight wee sleeves. Time to move up a size, and while you’re at it, check the calendar to find out what month it is.

Speak, memory. I’m loving the current stage, the way Busytot dashes into the room and demands “What what what what what what’s going on?” or pronounces himself a tow-truck “picking up a broken-down Mummy,” or, when asked how old he is, proclaims “I’m two boys!” But I miss those psychedelic baby days, when day blurred into night, and I felt simultaneously stunned into moon-walk slow motion and vibrating with preternatural alertness.

Never have I been filled with such manic energy. For the one-week post-birth check-up, I baked a double-layer coconut passionfruit thank you cake for the midwives and nurses, who politely picked off the black seeds while they ate, and suggested I take it easy. I was unstoppable. I felt like I had eyes all over my body and that I was seeing things that no-one had ever seen before. I hovered about a foot off the ground, for weeks.

Crazy days. I knew everything, and I knew nothing. I’d flown a long way, and my tiny little brain was overflowing with new songs I barely understood but had to sing. I’ve forgotten most of them, but if you hum it, I might just be able to sing it.

Every now and then I get homesick for Japan, particularly Tokyo where I lived before moving to the States. Tokyo is not a pretty city but it is a strangely beautiful one. If Paris is belle, Tokyo is a classic jolie-laide. It really does look like all those cyberpunk anime backdrops, like Bladerunner, like Metropolis with kanji.

In my mind it's always night-time, late autumn, and I'm somewhere above ground level – on the roof, or hovering through the streets like a ghost. Glittering towers topped with clusters of odd angles stand silent and idle, great robots made of grey lego blocks. Video screens and neon signs with messages for everyone and no-one in particular, beseeching attention like the namecards brandished by limousine-drivers at the airport. Trains snaking through the tangle of buildings like luminescent zippers pulling the city together. And at ground level, bright little seven-eleven shops that smell fishily of steaming oden, snuggled up to dark wooden houses with tiled roofs curling up at the edges and metal shutters closed against the night air.

Sofia Coppola at least gets some of this right in her critically admired film Lost in Translation (which is, by the way, about Japan in the same way that, say, Shortland Street is about current medical practice). In the film, Tokyo is rainy, it's dark, it's ineffable. We get a lot of aerial night views as the jet-lagged Scarlett Johansson character gazes through a hotel window darkly. Coppola's script keeps the same ironic distance from the city and its people, which is all fine -- until she starts trafficking in perilous clichés that may have been mildly amusing to total knuckleheads, say forty years ago in You Only Live Twice, or twenty years ago on Clive James. By crikey, those Japanese people bow a lot! Heavens to Murgatroyd, their television shows are wacky! Pssst, the men occasionally read pornographic newspapers on the train. Their exercise machines are (no!) labeled in Japanese. And get this: when they speak English, they mix up the letters R and L! How we all laughed.

It's annoying, because the film has moments of beauty. The appealing dishevelled Bill Murray becomes more like Baudelaire every day, our version of modernity's sleazy, sexy, tragic clown. He even gets a lovely underwater scene that recalls his bottom-of-the-pool bottom-out in Rushmore. His character gets drunk a lot, and he gets hostile phone-calls from an offscreen harpie of a wife. (She has to be a harpie because it's Necessary To The Plot – you can't have a tremulous, winsome friendship between girl-woman and jaded middle-aged bloke without a harpie wife somewhere off in the wings).

Everything you need to know about Scarlett Johansson's character -- by some reports an autobiographical creation of the author/director -- is in the film's first shot: a close-up of her lovely bottom in transparent undies, which fills the whole screen. Ah, that poetic bottom. For most of the film, she sits on it, first literally, then metaphorically. Occasionally, she needs a kick in it. A navel shot would have been perhaps more appropriate, but less subtle.

I really wanted to like the film. It has moments of lovely romantic melancholy, like Bill Murray's karaoke version of "More Than This," and of cross-cultural comedy, like the shooting of the whiskey advertisement that is his reason for being in Japan. But the story is so riddled with flaws, both pragmatic and dramatic, that after a while I stopped believing anything that was going on. The time zones for the international phone-calls are wildly out of whack. We see Fujisan with snow, and then without, inside of what's meant to be a couple of days. The chronologies of both characters' marriages make no sense – Murray's character has been married twenty-some (long, annoying) years but has primary school-age children; Johansson's character is vaguely on honeymoon after being married for two years, and/but is just out of school. She's allegedly a philosophy grad, from of all places Yale, but is so eye-poppingly stupid as to make you wonder if she got in to Yale the same way the current President did…

Stupidity is nowhere on the agenda in Sylvia, which stars Gwyneth Paltrow as the titular poet, and Otago University as Smith College -- rather, too much smartness would seem to be the problem. Talented New Zealander Christine Jeffs has a period-piece ball with the story of fiery Sylvia Plath and brooding marauder Ted Hughes. The film got mostly rotten reviews, but I liked large chunks of it.

Paltrow is excellent, managing an authentically flat Boston accent and a creditable impersonation of genius thwarted by megalomania, pervasive depression, and -- as suggested some years ago in a carefully argued article by scholar Catherine Thompson -- what seems to have been a rampant case of PMS (cue lots of looming, suggestive shots of the full moon). Daniel Craig is craggy and hunky all right, but alas insufficiently gigantic to muster the full awesomeness of Ted Hughes. There are a couple of top-notch supporting performances, by Gwyneth's own mother Blythe Danner as Sylvia's frosty mother, and Michael Gambon as the discombobulated downstairs neighbour who misses all the signs in the final days of her life.

The sets and costumes are excellent, and the colours throughout are moody and autumnal: red, gold, auburn, and a deep poisonous dark green (every other room seems to have been painted a lacquered version of the latter colour). I particularly loved the interiors – not nearly as stagey and clean as those in that other recent 50s weepie, the vastly overrated Far from Heaven. Lots of peeling paint and worn furniture, and a handful of well-loved pictures and gew-gaws. Domestic life before credit cards and mass production. Or just life as a poor young poet in fusty, chilly old England.

The film leaves a lot out, but it also leaves a lot in. Much critical hay has been made of the difficulty of filming writers actually writing without looking silly, and true, there is at least one scene in which Gwyneth-as-Sylvia types furiously before crumpling a sheet of paper and hurling it at the window. But I really can't say enough about the baking scenes. Phwoar. Cake tins. Old stove. Perfectly turned-out finished products cooling on the bench. You know, there just aren't enough incidental baking scenes in movies.

Of course, you know the ending before the film starts; it has to be said, this is a bummer of a date movie, especially for the literary types who are most likely drawn to see it. Jeffs goes for a strangely redemptive finale that invokes the final poems – beatific visions of glory and transcendence. It sits uncomfortably with the scene of the bawling toddler children being rescued safely from their chilly bedroom. In fact, of all the many obsessive inquiries into the last days of Sylvia Plath, which have made the family angrier and angrier over time, I think this one is the most sympathetic to the children. Usually a pathos-ridden footnote on the last page, in this film they totter about the place winningly in hand-knitted woolens and bowl haircuts, fully flesh and blood creatures oblivious to the veil that is about to fall over the rest of their lives. It's heart-wrenching.

Watching the credits roll up, I noticed that one character wasn't listed: the Morris Minor in which Sylvia tootles about for the second half of the film, and in which Ted makes the fateful trip to consummate a flaming affair with the sultry Assia. I haven't seen such an animated four-wheeled inanimate object in film, at least since Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Parked stolidly in the muddy yard in Devon, racing recklessly to the beach for a failed suicide attempt, or waiting patiently outside the London flat as a mute witness to the ambulance-men removing the body of the poet, that little car was acting its metal heart out. A vehicle for more than just the characters and their stuff, that wee Morrie seemed to say something about the self (well yes, it's an auto, you see) -- about propulsion, a shared drive, access, getting to where you want to go... Not to mention the unbuckled kiddies rattling around in the back seat, helpless hostages on a helter-skelter ride to posterity.

You like us! You really like us! We won Best Personal Blog at the NetGuide 2003 Awards! OK. Wow. Phew. [Pause, breathe, fumble for piece of paper]. First I'd like to salute Russell for being the instigator, main man, and throbbing intellectual heart of Public Address. [Big kiss, a la Adrien Brody and Halle Berry]. And the rest of the gang, including Matt and Karl who make the site the object of beauty that it is. [Group hug, back patting all round, more opportunistic snogging]. And all the readers, especially the ones who send feedback, and especially the ones who nominated us.

[Gulp, gasp, hyperventilate]. Oh my god, I can't believe this is really happening. I'd also like to thank my sister Gemma, who introduced me to Russell and got it all started. And my Mum and Dad, who taught me to read and write in the first place. [Surreptitiously check mascara not running]. My brothers, Greg and Ben, whose comic timing I aspire to, and Lizzie and Michael likewise. My beloved partner, who comes up with the best lines and proofreads all the others, and without whom... [Orchestra starts up].

All right all right, and lastly, New York Fuckin' City (you're so beautiful!) and the inexhaustible, smoochable Busytot, who between them provide all my material – this one's for you guys! [Dragged off stage by handsome host].

Cheers. It was very nice news to wake up to this morning, and very flattering too to learn that the judge was impeccably credentialed uber-geek god and founder of Slashdot, Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda. And we were in nice company with the other nominees (see the shortlist here). I'd have liked to see Leto and her naked lady there as well, but you can't have everything.

Thanks to the time difference, I get to break the news on the site -- although while Russell and the Cactuslads were partying up large, I was sleeping the sleep of someone who hasn't had a lot of sleep lately. Busytot has taken turning two as some sort of licence to have a system-wide brain-up, which is making it hard for him to fall asleep at night. There's a lot going on: he's speaking in increasingly complex sentences, and semi-reliably making a splash in his shiny new potty. Not surprising, then, that his little head is fizzing and popping. You can almost see the sparks.

Exercise helps, and the average toddler knows this instinctively. It's been freezing and dangerously windy here for the last couple of days, so we haven't had as much romping in the playground as usual. Last night before bedtime, he announced "I run around in circles!" and proceeded to do just that for a good fifteen minutes, pausing every so often to catch his breath and say "I getting really dizzy!" He stopped just short of doing what a friend described as the living-room Wall of Death – but then you really need to go three days without a nap to rev up for that one. It sounds wildly impressive, and I can't imagine how you get the footprints off the wall.

All this fearsome toddler brain energy reminds me of the possibly apocryphal story about John Lennon, who once dropped the wrong kind of acid and then stayed up all night staring intently out the window of his apartment, muttering under his breath, his hands curled into tense little fists and his face a mask of concentration. When Sean and Yoko found him in the morning and asked what he was doing, he said he was driving the house, and he had to stay at the wheel to make sure it didn't veer off the road or crash into anything.

So, yep, lots of house-driving going on in the crib lately – and lots of house-building outside of it. The parent who spends his working hours trying to figure out why the universe appears to have only three dimensions (when string theory tells us there might in fact be ten, or even eleven, but who's counting?), spent a good hour yesterday constructing a fire station out of Lego. Actually, out of Duplo, which is baby-Lego -- chunkier and less well-supplied with the fancy wheels and gears and bells and whistles. Impressively, given the primitive components, the fire station had a hinged front roller door that went up and down to let the fire engines out. (For blueprints, send a dollar to the physics department at Columbia University, c/- Busytot's Dad…).

But toddler concentration has nothing on the level of attention that I achieved the other morning. While Busytot's Dad looked after our boy and his best mate, I grabbed the laptop and went down the road to hang out with the other mum. The baby (who was born at home seven months ago this week) and the cat were both fast asleep. Fuelled by a giant pot of tea and a packet of precious birthday Tim-Tams, the two mums typed and contemplated and typed some more, working in complete silence for two hours. If you could bottle the mental electricity that was crackling away in the room, you could power a continent. I can't remember the last time I worked so hard. Keep an eye out for the result -- another big old Listener review in the next few weeks.

While I'm on the subject, more food for domestic thought to get you through the weekend. "Housewife Confidential" is a considered tribute to doing it the old-fashioned way. Then there's the wackily random and strangely beautiful Art for Housewives, and the intelligent Theory of the Daily. I also just rediscovered the excellent Being Daddy ("Like being Mommy. Only hairier") which excelled itself recently with a Wiggles -- Behind the Music piece, and this week brings you the latest on male breastfeeding. You know, it's nice to walk off with a prize, but I think blogging was the real winner today.

The solar storms of last week have nothing on the tempest that erupted in our kitchen this morning, when poor old Busytot dropped the vintage yellow Fiestaware teacup. "No break cup!" he howled, just a split-second too late for the fundamental laws of the universe to temporarily reverse themselves. Cue total meltdown.

This was a real corker. See, the cool thing about toddlers is that they spend all day literalizing metaphors -- making waves, being on the ball, getting hopping mad, driving various things up the wall, kicking the bucket, you name it. Today, before breakfast was even over, we got "crying over spilt milk" AND "a storm in (or technically about) a teacup." Not to mention "picking up the pieces."

The teacup, which I got for a buck at a rummage sale, isn't completely irreplacable – although I admit I nearly shed a tear myself when I saw what those puppies go for on eBay – but as far as Busytot is concerned it was a singularity, and now it's gone. Shards swept into a paper bag and put in the rubbish bin. He was so distraught he tried to climb in after it. Feet first, like a grief-maddened widower leaping into a grave. And then he spent five abject minutes lying prostrate on the floor and sobbing into the grubby kitchen mat. None of which will bring that special teacup back.

It would have been so easy to chivvy him out of it, to say "oh well", to remind him in a Buddhist sort of way that attachment is the origin of suffering (duh: anyone who's tried to prise a wine-glass from the death-grip of a determined toddler has that concept down pat). But this seemed worth taking seriously. Sometime soon, something is going to become his first memory. And first lost things make a huge impression.

Remember yours? Remember the first object or creature you really, really, really loved? Where is it now? Gone? Lost forever?

Well, here's the funny thing: wherever it is, it's still in your life -- as a story. And as long as you tell your story to someone else, that lost object continues to exist.

This was the premise of a brilliant new show I saw the other night: "Gone Missing," by The Civilians. Lucky we caught it: it was the second to last night of the run, and until three hours before showtime we thought we might just catch a movie (forgetting temporarily that we can watch all the movies we like on DVD fifty years from now, when we're living in Taihape or wherever we can afford to buy in NZ now that the cat is out of the bag thanks to the LA Times).

But good live theatre isn't something you can get any old where, so we forked out that little bit extra for some off-off-Broadway fun. The venue alone was worth the ticket price: The Belt, a former warehouse in the Garment District that's been refashioned into a theatre using what appeared to be red velvet church pews, wrought-iron fencing, and number 8 wire. It's on an otherwise deserted block (if you don't count the parking garages and the Cuban diner and the sister-venue The Zipper just down the road), it's dimly lit in the manner of an Amsterdam brothel, and it serves excellent drinks at tiny tables while you're waiting. I was fully satisfied in every respect even before the non-existent curtain went metaphorically up.

But on with the show: the troupe, which counts among its mentors the inimitable Caryl Churchill, specializes in "docudrama," stories based firmly in real life but massaged into theatrical form. (NB They're not alone in this technique: Chicago's Neo-Futurists have forged a similar approach over the last decade and a half. And the Civilians' bare-bones stagecraft, innovative delivery and minimalist music took me back to early Front Lawn days [why no link? No Front Lawn tribute page, that's why. I know, inexplicable]).

Like the best art, "Gone Missing" reminds us why we need art at all. For this show, The Civilians interviewed dozens of people about things they'd lost -– just things, not people, or jobs, or money -- then wove those stories together with gorgeous songs into a meditation on the nature of loss and the art of memory.

In the course of the show, six talented and charismatic performers (three men, three women), all dressed in suits and with their hair slicked back into anonymity, evoke the voices and mannerisms and situations of a huge range of people. Young, old, cops, philosophy professors, elderly mothers, deli owners, stockbrokers -- they all describe the loss of something important. A cellphone. A beloved ring. A kitten. A tiny doll made from a sock. A shoe. Stories are told in tones ranging from tragic, disbelieving, bereft, to self-mocking or self-dramatizing, or, in the case of the handful of miraculous findings, quietly or ecstatically triumphant.

The songs mostly provide comic relief. A tale of lost wallets and much more is transformed into a sort of fado/mariachi/flamenco act, in "La Bodega." There's a girl-group number about why an ex-boyfriend needn't come by to pick up his stuff. But laughter shades into heartbreak in a song about feeling trapped in a game of hide and seek, and in "Lost Horizon," a torchy ode to how easy it is to lose yourself in another person.

Then there's the chap who earnestly keeps trying to think of something he's lost, to please the interviewer. "Well, lessee, I los' my job, all my money... but you don' want that, right? Just things. OK, I think. I get back to you." Or the black teenager hassled by the cops for having lost his ID. Or the retired NYPD cop who describes a working lifetime of gruesome finds. "You gotta laugh, right?" he constantly reminds the audience, with increasingly desperate bluster, "oh, but never in front of the family."

Characters are evoked with (mostly) perfect accents from across the spectrum of New York voices – Korean, British, Jamaican, Brooklyn, Puerto Rican, Upper East Side – and with carefully chosen gestures. An elderly woman fends off a helping hand to sit down by herself -- she may have lost her steadiness but she can at least sit down unassisted. A highly educated man, who once lost large chunks of his vocabulary, visibly seizes up and gropes for words as he relates the story and by implication remembers everything he felt at the time. Three women describing the loss of precious rings unconsciously fold their hands tightly together, as if to forestall the loss that has already happened.

Naturally, given the location, the shadow of 9/11 hovered over the stage. But it was only invoked once, and then obliquely, in the story of a man who lost -- and then recovered -- something that on any other day would have been quite important. He seems almost guilty telling the story, as if a dropped palm pilot barely merits mention in the light of what else was happening around him. And that day is hinted at again in the final moments, in which the performers depart the stage one by one, leaving in their place a Magrittean tableau of absence made palpable. I found it utterly hollowing.

And yet this is not a heavy show. It's funny and engaging and deeply accessible. If you get a chance to see it (it has finished its run at the Belt Theater for the moment, but seems like something that will be resurrected), you'll notice how beautifully constructed it is. Watching it is like reading a masterfully written novel: you can see the ending coming, you know it's going to make you cry, but there's nothing you can do about it -- you just have to live through it, with Jude, or Anna Karenina, or Charlotte and Wilbur. This is art as catharsis: for an hour and twenty minutes, you sit through a mounting accumulation of losses big and small, but you leave the theatre feeling somehow unbearably light, with something intangible gained.

It was all very Greek (ancient, I mean): channelling voices, dramatizing the fickleness of the gods, illuminating puny human lives. And it was laced with references to make a classics geek swoon. Freud, Locke, Atlantis, the Sargasso Sea and the mysterious life of eels. And a brief reference late in the piece to Simonides completely did my head in (if you know the story, you'll never again read stories about what happened in the WTC and the Pentagon and those planes, or indeed any post-disaster journalism, without thinking of it).

Oh, and that old rascal Plato makes a crucial appearance in a strangely comforting lullaby that sums it up -- death, teacups, and all:

When I lost my keys,
You told me the words of Plato:
That our possessions are only shadows,
echoes of fate,
So that the things that you lose, you never possessed.

You're only remembering, only remembering...
The things that we see
are just memories of the things that used to be.