IN THE SOUTH

There are certain stigmas attached to the various areas of Jo’burg. There are accents, there are behaviors, and there are very specific styles of clothing. I had the pleasure of visiting the South the other night to watch Prime Circle sing their sexy hearts out. The closer The Wine Merchant got to the South, the more I noticed his accent changing. He was morphing into Southdom. Any minute I expected his blue Gap shirt to miraculously change into a hoodie and a gold earring to appear in his left ear.

Sitting down in a relatively nice carpeted theatre-type place I took in the crowd around me. There was the couple next to me where the boyfriend had clearly been taken to the concert under much duress and was sulking, the rowdy bunch behind us had clearly been drinking for eighteen hours prior to the concert and there was the two tone wonder in front of me who was completely unaware that she was in public and was taking PDA’s to a new level of inappropriateness.

It was during the final song that I felt something wet land on my shoulder. Hoping to God that The Wine Merchant had not turned into a girl and was now crying, I looked behind me. Two women, both in their early forties, wearing clothes clearly borrowed from their 12-year-old daughters, were going for each other. Throwing their drinks in each others faces, pulling each others hair and screaming such obscenities I wanted to grab a pen and write them down.

There is nothing scarier than women fighting. We have nails, we have large rings and we tend to lie on the brink of mental unstableness so there’s always a good chance we’ll go completely over the top and start eye gouging. Just as I was about to ask the one woman if she could repeat the last word she used and how to spell it, she decided the hair pulling was overrated and she needed to take it up a notch. She took a step back from her opponent, leaned back, lifted her top and started shaking her fake breasts wildly while screaming ‘F*ck you b*tch’. I was absolutely finished. It reminded me of a lion roaring, but with breasts. Security stepped in and removed the women and we came to terms with the fact that Girls Gone Wild were not coming back. Everyone remembered that Prime Circle was in fact the show for the evening and we settled back in our seats with sighs of disappointment and the sounds of cameras being switched off echoed through the theatre.

On our way out we spotted the two women being treated for a bloody eye and a broken nail. The Under Duress husband looked at them, sighed and said ‘Only in the bloody South’ and then gave his earring a good tug.