Donald Sutherland and Ed Harris, Together Again

by Steve Lazarowitz

So I'm on top of the world, down under. I'm a day ahead, a world away, upside down and driving on the wrong side of the street, but for all that I'm happy.

How can I begin to explain what it's like to turn your life, literally, upside down? What twist of fate has left me with the blood rushing to my head? What bizarre and random set of circumstances have driven me (or flown me as the case may be) around the world in a whole lot less than eighty days? Glad you asked. Not that I can really explain it myself.

So here I am in a place where they routinely put beets and eggs on hamburgers and don't know what half and half is. Go figure. I watch cricket instead of baseball. How did that happen? Before this, a cricket was just something to feed to my lizard. Dinner is called tea, we say ta for thank you and I'm not even going to begin to try to figure out what size I now wear in pants. Somehow having a 40 inch waist sounds a lot better than a 107 centimeter one. Oh yes, and I'm still searching for something that tastes like a hot dog.

Australia, specifically Tasmania. Seems just yesterday I was wandering the streets of Brooklyn. Drabber, older, more dangerous, but offset by the fact that I could walk a few blocks and find just about anything I wanted (sometimes not even within reason).

And then there's the money. This stuff can't be real. A two dollar coin? Come on! Plastic bills with clear holes in them? I feel like I'm living a game of monopoly. And that's different. Boardwalk and Park Place are gone, replaced, along with all the other names, with the names of British Streets. When did that happen? And where was I? Does it seem ethnocentric to think that the streets of Atlantic City would have made it into foreign versions of the game? Maybe I'm just looking for the familiar.

So here I am, my first day, buying something in a store for the first time. A beetle in Lucite key chain from a store called Socrates. I love insects and I've always liked that kind of store. Then I hand over my $20 note (which is not green...none of their bills are) and I get back in exchange a pink and purplish five dollar note and a handful of coins. Naturally I examine them. Mind you, the woman behind the counter thinks I'm daft, but I want to see what the currency looks like. I didn't expect George Washington or Abe Lincoln, mind you. But I didn't expect Donald Sutherland either. That's right, Donald Sutherland is on the Australian five dollar note.

Okay, I've been assured by actual Australians that the man in question is not Donald Sutherland, but he sure does a heck of an impersonation. Still it prepared me well for my shock at receiving a nice pastel blue ten dollar note, with a picture of a young Ed Harris on it. Now I was certain this could be no accident. Australian politicians impersonate American actors. It's the only possible explanation.

Who would be next, I wondered. Madonna on a fifty? Denzel Washington on a hundred? I shuddered to consider the possibilities. They say everyone in the world has a double, but they never claimed that double lived in the same hemisphere. Could it be that all the people in the southern hemisphere look like all the people North of the equator? Did God run out of features, get lazy and just decide to divide us? Maybe it was the end of the sixth day, he was creating man and was a bit tired. Maybe he cut some corners. Sure explains why he gave men only enough blood to use one head at a time.

So I'm in Australia with Donald Sutherland and Ed Harris. Not bad company, if you have to pick someone to share a foreign country with. I wonder how they like it. I wonder if they know. I wonder if they would try to claim royalties on every bill printed if they did.

Also, I wonder if I'm getting an Australian accent. I did call someone a bloke the other day. Of course someone called me a bloke too. Never thought of myself as a bloke. And sometimes I ask what's for tea, instead of what's for dinner. Never thought I'd say that either. I find myself using the metric system more and more as well. Funny, they could never get me to do that back in high school.

Tasmania! I still can't believe it. The furthest place in the world from where I grew up, unless you want to count the Antarctic. And I wouldn't go there, cause I think winters in New York City are cold.

Actually I quite like what I've seen so far. I even like beets and eggs on my hamburgers (though they call it beetroot here). In fact, I've found I like cricket, Aussie rules football and I don't even mind having only four channels on the telly. I like the fact that the water in the toilet goes anticlockwise when you flush (what I'd once have called counterclockwise) and that there are two buttons to flush, one of which saves water.

Hell I like everything about this bloody island and I'm not sure why. I don't recall hating New York while I was there, but after spending a couple of months here, I can't think of anything I'd miss enough to return (excluding friends and family perhaps). Maybe I was tired of the pace or the pollution or the tension. Perhaps I just wanted to slow down.

Or maybe I just like having actor's faces on my money.

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