By now you’ll know that there are no prizes for sitting in the corner, and if anyone loves a public platform it’s me. I don’t just volunteer to do speeches, I actively push myself into the programme. So it was a no brainer, I was going to haul ass to the microphone come hell or high water. And boy did we have both. Saturday was the Grand Opening of Gallery ZAZA, and I kind of knew what was on the cards for the weather (in some circles they call me Jaqstradamus). 

I was the child who never got to have a pool party because every single birthday of mine was an absolute fucking rotter of a day. Fortunately, I was the type of child who was more into the food table, and less into the swimming pool, but it would have been nice to have the option.

Typically, Saturday morning rolled in a bit wet, and as each hour towards 10am approached it got steadily more like the “vicious cycle” on the washing machine.

At some point you resign yourself to these things and just open a beer. The breakfast beer helped to settle the nerves and things started to look up. However, Murphy was having a whale of a time, and so, as if by magic, things started to snowball spectacularly. The only thing keeping my sense of perspective intact was the wedding we had at the Hilton Hotel where the marquee literally blew away, tables ended up in the pool, and a tree split the best man’s car in half. The bride and groom ended up having their wedding in the Mist & Drizzle pub because every other venue was occupied. Turns out it was the best wedding ever.

I’d like to maintain the illusion that everything went according to plan on Saturday, but when the hail started and the generator flooded my adrenaline decided it was going to go into hyperdrive. Jono suggested cancelling speeches altogether, and for a few seconds I agreed. Then I reassessed, and decided I was completely keen to get up there and do my shit. Sadly there are times when the body and the mind have what some would call an “unconscious uncoupling” and others would call a cataclysmic divorce. My brain, it turns out, has still not grasped that “mind over matter” thing. Cue Uncontrollable Shaking from stage right. Of course the more I tried to control it, the worse it got. It’ll be chalked up as one of those performances that I’d sooner forget, but I guess I can reframe it and say it was special because it was so shit.

Anyway, here’s what I said. (For authenticity, if you read it out loud I suggest sitting on your washing machine and setting it to take off mode.) 

I remember when David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear, it was pretty dope. My question was, what’s next David? Get better David, do more! 

Magic in this context is about instant gratification and constantly seeking to amaze an increasingly unfocused and overstimulated audience. 

Perhaps it’s time to reframe. To slow down. To bask. 

As a child, magic was the recesses of imagination, it was the slow and lingering anticipation of the Easter Bunny, Father Christmas, and the Tooth Mouse. It was waking up on Christmas morning to the crumbs of a mince pie, an empty glass of brandy, and a nibbled carrot. It was that first pair of ballet shoes, putting Dubbin on a first soccer ball, watching a movie on the big screen for the very first time. Smelling the birthday cake fresh from the oven. 

For me, magic is about finding stories in strange places, but it’s also the ability to create them out of banal familiarity. Magic is painting pictures from nothing, from procuring sounds and smells from a string of small words, it’s the art of making a world out of nothing. Magic takes effort. 

Magic is home. Magic is place. Magic is community. It’s quite literally the stories we share. 

So allow me to share a story. 

My very first home was the cottage at the Hilton Hotel, further up the road from there is the Shell garage which was the only petrol station in the village. In those days Hilton was a village. Opposite the Shell, the Hilton Town Board Hall. This is where I’d spend Tuesday and Thursdays at Ros Nicholson’s School of Ballet. Here I proved my inability to live up to the expectation of Jaqualina Ballerina. The Town Board Hall was also where our folks went to pretend to look at our kak art, while they drank beer at the annual Hilton Lion’s Fair. Where every skottel braai in Hilton met once a year to play host to lashings of frying onions and sweaty wors. Carry on over the bridge, now festooned with flowers… If you were to sneak under that bridge you might happen upon me, in my later years doing rebellious things. If you take a right, you get to Laddsworth, a place that forged me into who I am. A school filled with the Sally Kellys, Pete Liddles, and Flick Wrights of the world. Humans who inspired magic from within the linear face brick architecture. 

Not far from Laddsworth is Hilton PrePrimary, the biggest most magnificent place on earth. Sandpits the size of Olympic swimming pools, a race track like Monza, a woodworking table fit for Santa’s elves, jungle gyms, and a crown for when it’s your birthday.

After school, if we were lucky, we went straight to the Fruit Basket, since demolished, or the Spar owned by the Footselars (I’ve used bad phonetics here) for a Super Moo. Sometimes Dave Hansmeyer would give us biltong. Often we’d have to hang around in Hilton Drapers waiting for our mums to have hour long “quick chats” and buy fabric to turn into matching tracksuits. All the kids in Hilton were dressed the same. Primary coloured tracksuits, gumboots, or Bata takkies from the Aladdin’s cave that is Kubela Stores. On Sundays we’d head to the Hilton Tea room clutching R1 coins to buy our candy cigarettes and other contraband sugar laden guilty pleasures. Terry the Greek would know which kids’ parents gave permission to buy the Benson and Hedges Special Milds for the dad in the car rushing to get to Opstal to blast clay pigeons out of the sky.

We had to make our own fun. Kid friendly bars and restaurants were basically those that allowed parents to push two bar stools together for small bodies to nap on. Communal parenting was everything. Wherever you were at 4pm is where you bathed. BMXs zooted down every road, pizza came out of a freezer and into an oven. We ate polony sandwiches by the dozen. Juice was red, green, or orange. It was an adventure to open the post box at the Post Office and see if there was anything exciting. Tupperware parties and book clubs were touted as these mysterious and magical events for our slippered feet to peek in on. 

Hiltonians have a history of seeing potential, as if looking through the mist and imagining what lies beyond it. And it’s up to us to create, to build, to explore, to play, and to throw glitter, confetti, and magic markers at every single problem.

Gallery ZAZA was an empty blank corporate office. It was the ultimate blank canvas. Now it’s the product of the passion and vision that only Jono Hornby could have cooked up. Even the starlings are dazzled. It’s home, and now things are appearing, not disappearing, as if by utter magic. It’s up to us, we can appear, or we can disappear. 

Special thanks to the amazing Hilton community for the awesome turn out, we had the best day sharing the space with you, and making it a place. There’s so much more to come, and I’m super jazzed!

On this occasion, it was 3 am, I was in Room 36 at the Hilton Hotel, and my brother Nicholas thought it would be bloody hilarious to wake me up from my slumber to enjoy a few seconds of euphoria, before realising it was March, and the Royal Show was a few months away. What an asshole. He really is brilliant. 

Fast forward to July 2021, and I found myself waking up to go to the Royal Show. And yes, I did have a tremendous sense of euphoria. This was despite the news that the showgrounds have been sold, and the days of the Royal Agricultural Show are another vestige of the past. 

Vestiges of the past. Remember going to Mike’s Kitchen and trying to get as many lollipops from the barrel by the door? Remember the fish tank at Da Vinci’s? Remember going to Capital Towers to watch a movie? Remember soft serve from Icy Cool Piping Hot? Remember being underage and trying to get into Buzz Bar? Remember Shuter and Shooter and getting lost in the sea of shelves? Remember going to Super Bodies to watch your mum do aerobics and being blinded by the men in unitards and leg warmers? Remember having a K-TV sticker on your space case and buying a snap bangle from the Lion’s Fair? But most of all, remember the Royal Show. 

I still remember going on the “baby rides” and anxiously looking for my mummy amidst the crowd of parents. Fast forward a few years, and I’m on the carousel, and my dad is standing on the platform next to the pink horse that I’m riding. He’s there in case I get scared, which is almost inevitable because if my Pre Primary report cards are anything to go by, I have the coordination and balance of an inebriated baby giraffe. On ice skates. Later that day, we’ll stand in the queue so my brother and I can get temporary passes to go into the members’ stand so we can watch horses do things I don’t really understand. The name Gonda Beatrix echoing through the loudspeakers. In those days, there was candy floss, those shakey balloons, and toffee apples that I still don’t see the point of. Siff. 

Then it was off to the army display, which was the same every year, but we still went because that’s just “what you do.” A visit to the rabbit hall, which incidentally I got banned from because one year my best friend David had the temerity to ask a woman with a very large “friend of the bunnies” rosette, whether they supply the Boston Barbeque. Sheep shearing, cows on parade, dodging animal crap, lots of hay. The smell of animals with a whiff of doughnut. Lining up to go through the “this is the rainfall cycle” just so that you could get a free Clover yoghurt. And speaking of free food, trawling through the food hall for free samples. Pretending you’re a connoisseur of preserves, with R25 to spend on a jar of posh jam, just so that you can carry on scoffing. Giggling as you walk away thinking you’d hoodwinked the cross jam lady with an ‘I’ll come back later and buy a jar.’ 

And then the second-best bit of the show. The much-underrated hall with all the weird shit made by grannies, bored homemakers, a few house husbands, and kids. I once entered a rock animal, and I’m proud to say that I got a “Commended” award. The judges’ comments applauded my imagination, but were stern in the amount of glue I’d used. ‘Take care not to use too much glue,’ they said. That’s right kids, stay off drugs. Obviously the kid who won had an overzealous mother, or maybe was just blessed with better artistic genes than me? Perhaps this child with the ravishing Highly Commended Rosette was given proper modeling glue instead of a bloody glue gun? Who knows. Safe to say I didn’t enter an artwork again; the judges clearly don’t know genius when they see it. 

In the early days, the arts and crafts hall was the main hall. You entered, and it was just chockablock with shit that would give Marie Kondo a cardiac infarction. I don’t know who makes and collects porcelain dolls, but can I just be clear? Porcelain dolls are more terrifying than clowns. They’re also porcelain, so you can’t play with them. Stop being weird and just buy your kids a Barbie. After the terrifying children of the corn exhibit, it was onto the cake decorators. The same woman won every single year, and I don’t know why other budding cake artists even bothered. 

But the best was looking at the scones. I’ve had a fascination with scones for a very long time, and I really think that if you need two women to judge a scone-off, you could do worse than me and my Emotional Support Animal’s mum Hester Joseph. Hester Joseph is a sconnoisseur, and if you try to deviate and make scones in a muffin tin, or make them square, you won’t get any support from us. There are firm rules about scones, and I’ve done a lot of research into where you can get good scones. You can’t. Bake them yourself; it’s the only way. If you want disappointment go out and order one, they usually crumble into dust, are served with marge, don’t have nearly enough cream, and come with that weird grated cheese that is all melted together in a mess. Have some respect. 

My young self used to spend hours lingering over the glass display cases scrutinizing the scones. Before I’d read the judges’ comments, I could tell that Sheila had overdone done it on the baking powder or Neville had overworked the dough. I could tell Doris had gone rogue and used margarine instead of butter, and that Maureen had nailed it. I didn’t even need to shift my eyes left to the purple ribbon claiming Maureen Queen of Scones for the third year running. 

No matter what age you were, the Looping Star was the major showpiece. Sure the Enterprise, the Breakdancer, The Ship of Death, The Wall of “What The Fuck We’re All Going To Die,” The Swings of “Don’t look up at the rusty latches,” and the House of “Horrors” were all worth a go. But in the end, it was the devastating and sheer Russian Roulette of the Looping Star that made all of us queue up in delighted terror. I maintain that it is the most dangerous roller coaster in the known universe, and it was out of order for most of the show, so it really was a race to get on it. One year people were left dangling upside down from the loopy part, and not even that stopped hyperactive kids from gamboling up the metal stairs once the out-of-order sign was removed for the umpteenth time.

Where were our parents, you might ask? Well, as we learned later on in life, they were off getting pissed at the Foaming Tankard. As we grew up, our priorities changed. Sure we still went on the Looping Star, but not before we tried to sneak in a few Hunter’s Gold, Solanti’s Spices, or good old Black Labels from the well-protected beer tent. Some of us had connections, others relied on older siblings, and some used their powers of persuasion to get any kind of illegal booze past the gates. The trouble is nine times out of ten, someone’s mum or dad recognised you, and then the game was up. ‘Terry, I saw Jaqui and her mates trying to get into the Foaming Tankard.’ Shit. 

And then it was the era of “the big field” where we’d all congregate with a bottle of Mokador and a few Peter Stuyvesant Blues we’d knicked off some suspecting parent. Dressed in our washed-out grey outfits and Dr. Martens, we’d mosh to The Narrow, sing along to Just Jinger, Wonderboom, Sugardrive, and the Springbok Nude Girls, and lose our shit to Fokofpolisiekar. Later we traded our washed-out grey outfits for Coco Bay; some of us held onto our DMs, others opted for Turtles. We were always late for whatever parent drew the short straw and had to drag our teenage asses out of there, still yelling “Lonely Lonely Sunday Morning” at the top of our lungs. A few days later, pneumonia nearly always kicked in. Worth it. 

2021. Everything is so still. So quiet. I can still hear the creak of the turnstiles, the soft crunch of the hay underfoot. I can smell the frying onions and burgers from the Hilton Lion’s Stand, and those doughnuts stationed around almost every corner willing you to be tempted by their tiny hot bods. A crack from a child throwing a pop-pop onto the ground, a sobbing child who’d just dropped an ice cream, and in the distance, the thunderous roll of the Looping Star. Beckoning. 

I get to the Olympia Hall. It’s so quiet. No one is looking at the building built in 1930. People are transfixed by their phones, tapping away. I feel like I’m part of the cow parade, but none of us are mooing; we’re just being herded into the various areas. It’s efficient; it’s cold, the lights flicker. I hear the laugh of a porcelain doll’s ghost in the distance. But I don’t care. I’m as excited as I was to climb those damn metal stairs up to the Looping Star. As the vaccine jabs into my arm, I feel the wind rush on my face as I approach the loop. 

‘Next!’ shouts the nurse. 

And like that, it’s all over.

Growing up in South Africa in the nineties, there were a few things that every single child had in common. Everyone wanted a strange man dressed in a Simba costume to come into their classroom, yell “surprise”, and give away free bags of chips. I am addicted to crisps, sorry chips, so I would be more than happy to suffer an over-zealous and awkward encounter with a dweeb in a Simba outfit, provided he was armed with crinkle cut salt and vinegar. Every child wanted to shout “Forward ford-ford-ford ford! Grab! Grab!” down his/her landline telephone, in order to win a Sonic the Hedgehog hamper; and perhaps even the star prize of a Sega Mega Drive. Fuck me! That was a helluva upgrade from the generic TV game console we had (red and white made in China- you know the one) if we were lucky. And then, the absolute motherload, every single child had the dream of getting selected to play the “Reggie’s Rush”. We were obsessed with the dream, we strategised during school breaks, we imagined the sheer rush… We all had our “If I got chosen I’d…” narratives.  

The Reggie’s Rush… it echoes in our eternities…

The game where you got an empty trolley and 30 seconds to dash through the aisles of Reggie’s toy store and grab whatever you could. Beautiful simplicity. Perfection.    

I remember filling out so many damn entry forms in the hope of getting selected. Actually this isn’t strictly true. I filled out entry forms with my brother’s name, because Nick and I had an agreement due to the fact that I am physically very “remedial”, and he was Sonic the Hedgehog in human form. To put you in the picture, the whole school clapped when I made it into the long jump pit (once, fluke). I was lapped so many times during a school running event that a kind teacher told me I could stop running because the race was very much over and I was at risk of being lapped by tumbleweed, and then there was the running around hurdles caper of 1995. I was in Std 5, using the junior hurdles (shame), and I was so terrified that I just ran around them instead of going over them. Reggie’s Rush material I am not.

So, Jaqui Hiltermann was clearly not a candidate for the high-octane world of panic dashing. And besides which, if I was chosen I would bring so much shame on the rich heritage of the game. K-TV Kids everywhere would marvel at my lacklustre performance, salivired Coco Pops would cling to television screens- remnants of abuse, “This girl is rubbish she’s miles away from the game consoles!”, “She can’t even run! What is she doing?!”, “Look how carefully she’s placing those Barbie’s into her trolley… What a dork!” Not even Reggie the Clown would smile. And, what if he told Simba I’m a lost cause? Reggie’s Rush was clearly not a game for me, but that didn’t stop me from having hours of planning and strategy sessions with my brother.

Nick agreed that he would add to my Barbie collection if he got selected, but only after he’d got a Sega Mega Drive and all the games he could foist into the trolley. The Reggie’s Rush brought my brother and I closer together, we had a shared dream, a shared goal. It was the glue that stuck us together and avoided him doing Judo on me and making me eat crisps out of an ashtray. Nick was never selected for Reggie’s Rush. But the dream still lingers.

And then today, day 67 of National Lockdown, I had my Reggie’s Rush moment. Well sort of.

Yesterday was a hectic day in our household. The last day of “no booze sales” in Mzansi. My folks and I are twitchy eyed when thirsty, and anticipation is something we’re all a bit antsy about. For the past week I’ve resorted to drinking back-of-the-cupboard rum, lime, and soda, and having an after-dinner port (heavy pour) is not uncommon, neither is a 2am headache for that matter. Port. Fuck me. That shit leaves a mark (read blinding headache). Stocks were running perilously low at our abode, and we knew the Empire Could Strike Back and announce an about-turn on booze sales. The three of us had a strategy meeting and decided we needed to strike while the Iron Lady was cool- Margaret Thatcher took milk away from kids, NDZ took alcohol from an entire nation… we may need to level her up to Tungsten. Anyway, it was decided the divide and conquer approach was the way to go. My mother and I would hit the shopping centre that pensioners go to, it was a bold move but with ankle protection we might come out unscathed. My stepdad agreed to stick local and try stealthy. A three-pronged attack… the goal was to buy enough wine to satiate a thirsty Lannister, whisky, and “forward ford-ford-grab emergency alcohol” (not port)!

Stockpiling is not the answer until it is. I’m a worrier and a forward thinker… and I saw how those damn Cape Town joggers nearly screwed the pooch for everyone. South Africans are not known for their good decision making while under the influence. In fact South Africans are bad bad dogs when it comes to drinking. And I use dogs as an analogy because if you put food in front of a Labrador it’s gone like a scone. Every South African is a bad dog. Don’t kid yourself. The feeling in our kennel was that NDZ could smack us on the noses and take away our kibbles… so we’d better make a plan. We were not going to wait for the potential about-turn. We were going to arrive before 9am. We agreed to be those people. We were metaphorical Cape Town joggers.

I didn’t sleep last night. At 3am I got a bad case of the “ports”, but mostly I got a sense of the rush. I wished more than anything my brother was here to take up the mantle, but I realized that today would be my day to shine. This was my Reggie’s Rush moment, my “Beveragie’s Rush” debut. I didn’t hit snooze this morning. I bolted out of bed, put on my New Balance, and hit the kitchen for a settling cup of tea. My heart was racing.

When we got to the shopping centre I joined the rebels without a cause outside of Picardi Rebel. I was number 10 in the queue. My trolley was empty. There were several pensioners ahead of me, for obvious reasons. Pensioners strike at dawn. The pensioner behind me didn’t have a trolley, my ankles were safe. For now. I surveyed the shop windows and began strategising. As with Reggie’s Rush all the good shit is towards the back of the store or on the top shelves… there was a lot of sherry and Advocaat… Not for long. That stuff is like catnip to the Norman’s and Edna’s of the world. A grey haired lady in front of me exclaimed, “This could be the most exciting day South Africa has ever seen!” “Extraordinary”, I thought. This little old lady has lived through some pretty dark shit… but this is her Reggie’s Rush moment too, she was fuelled by the promise of Monis Pale Dry. “I’m going to buy as much as my pension will get me!” from the chap behind me, with the grey tracksuit and Makro takkies. I started to get frightened… Have these old fuckers been prepping by watching YouTube clips of Reggie’s Rush in anticipation? Am I out of my depths?

And then after 23 minutes of queuing, group 4, my group, were allowed into the store. We’d seen the 9 before us leave, some armed with a simple bottle and others heaving trolleys with the last of their pension fund…

I was up… “Jaqui Hiltermann are you ready?! 3. 2. 1…GO!”

What a fucking rush.