A sea of Kates! The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever (MWHDE) Berlin, 2017

At the tender age of 16, my time was mostly spent working as a 'checkout-chick' (that's Australian for 'supermarket cashier') in Woolies between juggling that old quotidian secondary school chestnut, punctuated with occasional weekend party frivolity. Pretty normal teenage stuff, if you don’t count the goats, cats, dogs, kangaroos, wombats, mealworms (that's what the possums ate, as well as huntsman spiders we were tasked with hunting down to throw, live and agitated, into the freezer to become frozen spidery possum snacks)...

...and so many other organisms we cared for growing up due to an overly eccentric mum. 

Mum feeding a wee possum with an eye-dropper, cos, that's just how she rolls! 

My great soft spot for animals has existed since I was a wee lass (and I genuinely believe that anybody who doesn't love baby goats must be a bad person; 'kids' are definitely the cutest things on planet Earth! See image proof below)

Yeah, maybe I inherited *some* of Mum's eccentricity... 

My ginga ninja brother and I with some more goats

A little Abi (left), our Rhodesian Ridgeback, Tuli, me and a kitten hanging out next to our then very skinny Dad in bed! 

How many cats can YOU carry? 

I think that's my chinchilla cat, Missy! Oh bless her cotton socks.

Baby goats = CUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUTE

I still sleep with doggies when given the chance. This is my Schillerkiez neighbour, Gretchi! 

So, the point I was trying to make, before becoming distracted with nostalgia for my menagerie riddled childhood, was that ... Kate Bush led a very different childhood to that of mine. Rather than spending hers milking goats and feeding rescued marsupials, Kate Bush rather spent her early teens writing songs destined to become cult like in their status. With accompanying choreographies so experimental, ethereal and strange, Kate would go on to receive widespread critical acclaim for her ‘eclectic, experimental and idiosyncratic music as well as her theatrical performances’. 



I, on the other hand, would go on to...well not much! I like to dogsit when given the chance. 

But back to the original point of writing this blog, Kate Bush's classic number one hit ‘Wuthering Heights’, with its dark and gothic descriptions of a romance between (the living or non-living?) Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff all pulled out of Emily Brontë’s classic novel of the same name is celebrated as one of the best songs ever written. 

In her video for the track, an 18-year-old Bush is dressed in a now iconic shaggy red dress with a black belt, red lipstick, green eye shadow and a deep red flower behind her ear, swaying and flailing to the song with movements so erratic and yet graceful that it’s hard to look away. 

There’s not much not to love about it! Watch it here:

And I am far from alone in my views! 

And so it was written; ‘The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever’ (MWHDE) would become an annual and international event, celebrated by thousands of Kate Bush lookalikes, destined to frolic upon wiley and windy plains across the globe every year donned in their shaggiest red frocks with not a care nor inhibition in the world! A sea of red, males, females and children alike, flailing like they just don’t care. And that’s exactly what happened, last year with a staggering 20,000 Kate Bush’s in attendance! 

MWHDE was initially inspired by a Flash Mob organized by UK artists Shambush! in 2013, but only went on to gain a strong momentum, going viral due to an Australian friend of mine here in Berlin, Sam Wareing, who became enamored by the concept of the Flash Mob and worked hard to create and promote the event internationally (initially as a dare, I'm told!)

And so this year on July 15^th 2017, I attended my first MWHDE … 

...and oh what a joyous event it was! 

Clad in a red dress that used to fit me perfectly, but now, after massive over indulging in America and Italy, was close to impossible to zip up, my awkward and restricted dance movements, though they surely looked comical, filled me with happiness and glee. My sweaty bosoms, pancaked tightly across my chest, crushed my lungs making it difficult to breathe as I pranced and lunged and swayed on the windy and wiley plains of one of Berlin’s most notorious parks, Görlitzer, known to tourists and locals alike as the mecca for scoring drugs from the (mostly) friendly chaps who heckle but always back off once told ‘no thank you’.

Despite my limited flexibility and exacerbated further by my general inability to dance and flail on the windy moors, Sam patiently guided us all hilariously through each absurd dance move using terms such as the ‘backwards pterodactyl’ and the ‘Restaurant on a train’, mnemonics that even the most uncoordinated amongst us (me?) could not possibly forget, and we fuddled our way through like the culturally diverse motley crew we were (a friend there with me did actually report hearing some Germans around us translating Sam’s funny associations into Deutsch!)

Watch our final performance here: 

** Albeit it unquestionably catchy, with lyrics such as ‘You had a temper like my jealousy

Too hot, too greedy’ as well as, ‘I'm coming back, love, Cruel Heathcliff, my one dream,

My only master’, upon closer lyrical inspection of ‘Wuthering Heights’, it becomes clear that antagonist ‘Heathcliff’ is probably a candidate for domestic violence and so it came as no surprise when the Melbourne contingent of MWHDE doubled as a charity fundraiser with proceeds going to Safe Steps Victoria to prevent and eliminate violence against women and children. On ya, Melbs! 

xx c