Although I have been right about quite a lot in my time, I have frequently not been very good about predicting the future. At the age of 13 (i.e. 1967), I begged my parents for a tape recorder, to record the hit parade, and radio shows like “No place to hide!” (a science fiction thriller serial starring Mark Saxon and his trusty sidekick, Sergei Gromulko – SA did not get TV till 1975! talk about needing to adapt, yong!). My dad, who was in the electrical business, gave me a catalogue. I looked through it, and picked what looked like the coolest, surest thing: a real reel-to-reel machine with auto-reverse – to turn the tape around there was a switch that ran the tape in the opposite direction. Internally, there was a dual record/replay head, one head used for each tape direction. When a friend of mine showed me his tape recorder, with this frail-looking platic “cassette” thing containing miniature tape that you could flip in a second, I thought “that would never last.” Ya, well, no fine! And the rest is history. (How was I to know that dual recording heads are better used for stereophonic sound – the radio wasn’t in stereo!)
My next big technological miscalculation, as I recall, was the plausibility of using Ultrasound to diagnose the dreaded leg vein clot (better know as a DVT – deep vein thrombosis). Initial ultrasound machines were clunky things with mechanical arms. Then the transducer probes got more compact and could be used with a free-hand action and angled in any direction. Still, my bet was ultrasound would never be as accurate as sticking a needle in a vein of a patient’s foot, and injecting x-ray dye with the patient propped-up on a clunky x-ray table with tourniquets on the leg, with the radiologist racing to take pictures of the veins before the dye disappeared – you know, with the training and reflexes of . . . like . . . a sports photographer. I never dreamed that ultrasound would improve to such an extent that one would simply move a transducer up and down the leg, squeezing the veins to see if they collapsed – when the veins did not collapse, the diagnosis of clot was made. (The impact of this on medical practice is one of the most enlightening stories in the evolution of modern medicine.) Venography, needless-to-say, has gone the way of the reversible reel-to-reel.
Yes, and I didn’t believe auto-focus cameras would work well either! (Actually, while you sit there, chuckling. Just look how often the background of the picture is in focus and Aunt Emma and your cousin Louise are once again smiling fuzzily at you, with red eyes from that built-in flash!)
So, after the fall of apartheid, I thought Pieter Dirk Uys (now pronounced “Pita Drek Aish”) was done for, and Evita Bezuidenhout would go the way of JF Kennedy imitators.
Well, I just caught his latest show, and it ain’t so! Pieter is a little slower physically, but his mouth is as fast as ever. He is thankful to any and all South African politicians for providing him with such varied and rich material – as he puts it, he “doesn’t pay taxes, but royalties!”
Many of his classic Apartheid-era characters have indeed adapted - Evita is running for president, nogal. (President Mbeki favors a woman, and Evita feels this is an appropriate extension of AA - affirmative action). And The Kugel, who returned to SA pre 1994 from failed emigration to Toronto because she would “rather be killed in her bed than have to get up and make it!” – she now lives in Cape Town. Her children visit her every year from Perth with at least one new grandchild per visit, and a Vietnamese nanny in tow. Still, she says, “If the road to the Cape Town airport was safe, she would emigrate already”.
For me, the best moment, among many side-splitters (eg Evita ran 4 red lights to get to the performance) was the character who derides the smug ex-pats who come back for visits from “Canada” to spend what’s “left in Nedbank”. Having fled SA, a greater danger awaits them – in reference to the SARS outbreak there a year-or-so back, the bitter local character says, “the bird flu will staat in Kennada. Dja. Kentucky Fried Chicken sal snies, en djulle sal vrek!”
I missed the next 5 minutes of material, wiping tears from my eyes, and trying not to spoil the show for the rest of the audience by stifling my shrieks . . .
“Long live Evita!”
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Eknowledgement: Foto above traced on google images to the following website
http://www.evita.co.za/photo_gallery.htm View at your own risk!
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