Wednesday 5 October 2011

Now, I Get It


Earlier in the year, whilst still pregnant with my second daughter I was visiting Sandringham Hospital for a standard midwife appointment - one of many. At the appointment they measure your belly and listen to your baby’s heartbeat. I love hearing those precious rapid heartbeats. But I digress.
On this one particular day the appointment was over and I stepped outside the hospital entrance to notice two strange things. The first thing to capture my notice was a huddle of people near the emergency entrance off to my right and they were lugging professional cameras. The second odd thing, as I followed the camera’s line of fire was a stylish red head sitting on the low fence bordering the front of the hospital property.
The peculiar thing about the red head was her perfectly groomed hair, the high heels on her feet, the small party purse dangling off a shoulder and the hospital robe hanging off her form. Imagine my confusion. What hospital patient looks that immaculate? More to the point what hospital patient walks out still wearing the embarrassing generic hospital robe that never decently covers the derriere? Considering the cameras I concluded that it was some silly pretty person just trying to get some media attention. Once I got back home though I filed the memory away under ‘weird and unexplainable’. And it was forgotten. That is, until last night.
Last night I sat down to watch some television on ABC.  A new Australian program which I had little interest in watching began to play. It was a twenty something show marketed towards twenty something people, and it was called Twentysomething.
Lo and behold as I watch, a red head steps out of the emergency department of a hospital, talking on a mobile phone. I turn to my husband, “Hey that’s Sandringham Hospital.” I am suddenly quite interested in what I am watching because the scene is a recognisable landmark. Then in a microsecond my brain dives into archive retrieval: hospital; cameras; red head; stylish; crazy. Now I get it. That day in the hospital car park – I wasn’t witnessing a crazy, stylish attention seeker. The red head is an actress [by the name of Jess Harris] and the cameras were for this television series – Twentysomething.
Now I can refile that memory under ‘I was there! I was there! Oh my god! I was there!’
Twentysomething: Jess Harris

A little more of Jess Harris