It should be obvious from the colour of my skin that I’m South African. I was born in Johannesburg although I have no memory of that! I lived there until Mandela became the first president to be fresh out of jail and with a passport that had a misspelt middle name. South Africa is the same country that gave birth to comedy great Urzila Carlson. I, however, started out my stand-up comedy career, standing up as I was expelled from several classrooms in high school for giggling excessively. After graduating from high school, I left for the USA where I earned a degree in Creative Writing and Psychology from the University of Miami in 1996.
After living as an “African-American,” I immigrated to Australia because of the abundance of flies and mosquitoes there. For family reasons, I settled in Queensland (which is at the opposite end of Australia from Perth where my brother lives). I currently still live “Down Under” (this is not a sexual term for England).
In 2009 after training with Mandy Nolan and the late great Robert Grayson, I had my debut performance as a stand-up comedienne at the Hamilton Hotel in Brisbane, sharing the stage with performers including Gary Fludder. I briefly gigged at several venues in Brisbane including the Sit Down comedy club and in the same venue as Sam McCool. So far on stage, I’ve been a nervous contestant at various stand-up contests including The Village Idiot in Bangalow (where the hilarious Hannah Gadsby performed on the same day) and Raw Comedy (the year before Mel Buttle won). I also competed in the UK in the So, You Think You’re Funny contest. I was a finalist in Sydney’s Comedy Court contest and won the Battle of the Sexes contest at my performance at the Melbourne Comedy Festival.
Although I went to the Edinburgh Comedy Festival, I did not perform there as it was exceedingly cold there and froze my butt off and was thus just a torso and head. I do, however, have a photo in which I’m standing next to Carl Barron in a theatre in Epsom (England) in 2010.
My short story “If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother” was published in the collection of short stories with other authors in the Rorschach Odyssey. I’ve also written other short stories and poems and have almost completed writing my second cozy mystery “My Mother, the Mad Hatter.”
I am a member of the Writer’s Heights Writer’s Association, The Alliance of Independent Authors and the Australian Society of Authors and with that, I am excited to announce that I have completed my debut cozy crime novel “Murder in Lake Placid – the story of the brutal murder of that lovely girl and who is looking after her cat now.”