Hi ho readers, Captain Fabulous and Lady Mystere back with you for another month of Tribuning. Not tribbing, which is something else entirely, and not the kind of thing we condone around here.

Where was I? Oh yes. Welcome to the October Tribune, where we dissect all manner of things, some of them living, some of them the Commonwealth Games. The past few weeks have certainly been a Festival Of The Ordinary, and dull as they’ve been, surely deserving of dissection.

The election crawled inexorably to its conclusion, the Indies finally leaning towards perceived stability, thinking that the Coalition were more likely than the ALP to go to an early poll and try to get rid of them. Oakeshott and Windsor exhibited remarkable dedication to the task of representing their constituents at the same time as acquitting their responsibility to the rest of the country, so it’ll be no surprise when the major parties do everything they can to eliminate them, or at least their hold on the balance of power, next time round. Bob Katter’s a whole ‘nother kettle of fish, however. Strange and shouty fish at that.

Everyone, including me, who watched “The Deal” on 4 Corners the other night on this very subject has been spruiking off about how gripping it was, and how good an insight it gave into the machinations that gave us our current minority government. Now, with a day or so to reflect, peeps are starting to notice how staged some of it was, how they seemed so desperate for the cameras to be on them for certain moments, and where the hell was Bruce Hawker, acclaimed spin-merchant, who was supposedly advising at least one of them? Was it actually as fly-on-the-wall as it seemed, or was the ABC duped? Discuss.

Hm, discuss. Sounds a bit like Discus, doesn’t it? Did you know they throw a discus at the Commonwealth Games? Did you know the Games were on, at least before you saw all those photos of poo on kitchen floors and snakes leaping out of toilets? Are you one of the fourteen or fifteen people watching? Let me know how it goes, but if you mention swimming, you’ll be stripped naked and forced to watch Christopher Pyne interviews for the rest of the week.

Back to The Ordinary, it’s impossible not to admit that Collingwood won the Grand Final, and St Kilda, on that effort, didn’t deserve to. Eddie McGuire’s still a snot-monkey, though, and so is this packet of crackers that’s almost empty. Empty is how I’m feeling after two weeks of Grand Final pain, so unsurprisingly, Sports this month doesn’t have a whole lot to say on the subject. At least I didn’t cry all the way home (and for a few hours afterwards) like I did last year.

Somehow we here at Casa Del Tribune managed to drag ourselves from the pain and horror of St Kilda’s loss (well, one of us was hurt and lost, the other was quite happily sewing and reading books about English history), get all dressed up, and we mean All Dressed Up, and make our appearance at the Arcadience Fantasy Masquerade Ball on Sunday night. Jane made for herself, from scratch, a stunning velvet and silk Georgian-era ball gown, and whoah was there hawtness emanating. It was too much to expect her to make my outfit as well, so I did a mix-and-match job at the costume hire place, planning on Charles I, but ending up with a little number that quickly earned me the handle of Captain Fabulous.

But enough about us (really? REALLY?), the Ball was the inaugural event, promoted solely through facebook and other social media, and the place Went. Off. If only we were ten years younger, childless, and immune from prosecution under the Drugs Poisons and Controlled Substances Act. We thought we’d gone to a bit of effort, but some of the costumes were simply outrrrrrrageous! There was a girl who’d painted herself entirely green, another with a perfect four-foot semi-circle of peacock feathers, a bearded dude dressed up as Tinkerbell, a lot of scary-arse Warriors, Elves, Dukes, Duchesses, Fairies of all sorts, and then there was Thor. Or, as he preferred to be known, Sven The Bear-Puncher: six foot four of long hair and beard, draped in bearskin and a terrifying horned helmet, he massacred all comers in the Best-Dressed competition, even beating the girl who suddenly revealed that she’d painted herself green under her dress.

It’s not possible to describe the whole scene in words, but I did make the observation during one of our frequent bouts of crowd-watching that you could build an airport on the acres of décolletage on display; very very few of the women there would make it on the front cover of a magazine, but my lord, everyone there was beautiful. There’s something about people having the self-confidence and the verve to display themselves in costume that is highly attractive. Hiding behind a mask disinhibits you somewhat, and despite the fact that you’re hiding, you’re somehow more out in the open, and that openness, that display, makes you more interesting.

Another observation made by our group was that it looked like every single person in the room was picked on at high school. It was true of all of us, and looking at the attention to detail and the obviously intimate knowledge of history and/or role-playing games, it’s fair to say it was true of 99% of the rest. Naturally there was an opportunity to get up on stage with the band and share my fabulousness with everyone at high volume

There’s only so much flouncing around and getting busted staring at cleavage that a bunch of 40 year old dorks can do, so we called it a night fairly early. As we waited for our driver, I took the opportunity to do a bit of swashbuckling at passing cars and be called a poofter a few dozen times. When we got home it was kind of deflating.

Having been someone else for a few hours, with the chance to do and say things one wouldn’t normally do or say, it’s not without a sense of sadness that one peels off that skin and returns to the everyday, no matter how fabulous the everyday may be.

On that poignant note I think we shall leave you to enjoy this month’s Tribune.

Love to those who love us, and a week in a dungeon with Spida Everitt for those who don’t.

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