Yesterday we ported in Hobart Tasmania. I was particularly looking forward to this stop because my dear friend Anvi lives there. Anvi was born and raised in Hobart but we met when she moved to New York in 2019 to be the executive chef of the sister bar being opened by the venue where I produce a weekly burlesque show. It turns out 2019 was not a fortuitous year to open a new business and the venue did not survive the pandemic. Anvi spent the formidable amount of her time in the city locked down with the rest of us. We had an instant connection when we met and she was the first person I very naughtily broke quarantine with when she asked me if I wanted to share two dozen oysters she’d just scored from the distributor. We had a great time then and many times after.

Anvi left New York when her purpose for being there was ripped away. Unbeknownst to both of us at the time we were hooking up with the same dude when she was in the city, a dude who worked at both our venues. How cliche. On her last few nights in Brooklyn, after she’d moved out of her own apartment, she crashed in the temporarily vacant third floor apartment of my bestie’s brownstone. This is the same apartment that would eventually become my own. On her last night we made a picnic on the floor in the kitchen surrounded by the light of my grandmother’s silver candelabras. We smoked a joint in the empty bedroom and took photos of each other with her old film camera. At this point I had stopped hooking up with said dude after he’d hurt my feelings for the 900th time and that night she made me promise never to go back to him. I promised.

I did go back. Because of course I did. He was the only intimacy I had available to me after a long, lonely year and he seemed a better option than continued solitude. The familiar won out over the unknown. Going back to him was indeed a mistake and while nothing dramatic or bad ever happened, the non romance between us fizzled out in a terribly unsatisfying way. He remains to this day the last person I’ve had sex with. Sex I described to my friends as being “fine”.

Anvi and I kept in touch after she left and even though our time together was brief, she remains one of my favorite women I’ve ever met. So you can imagine my excitement when I saw that my ship would be stopping in Hobart for one day. The excitement grew as that day crept closer. I knew that the visit would be wonderful no matter what activity we chose for our short seven hours together, but I was torn in half with indecision as two options arose. Visit the infamous MONA museum or feed kangaroos at the animal sanctuary. I still had not seen a kangaroo or any of the unique wildlife Australia has to offer and they were telling me I could TOUCH some? But then a news story broke. The MONA museum was being sued for gender discrimination over a small temporary exhibit called the “Ladies Lounge” which, you guessed it, only allows women inside. My decision was made.

Our reunion was joyous and emotional. She waited for me outside the port for an hour and when I emerged she ran into my arms and sobbed big tears onto my shoulder. It felt like a movie. Anvi has always been a deeply emotive person which is one of the qualities I love most about her. Being with her gives me permission to express all my big feelings rather than hold them close as I’ve been conditioned to do. She’d packed a picnic with some of her incredible homemade food accompanied by foraged herbs, local goats cheese, natural wine she’d collected directly from the vintner and her award winning Basque style cheesecake which tasted like if cheesecake fucked a creme brûlée and is the best I’ve ever tasted. We sat by the water and ate and drank bubbles and attempted to catch up on three years worth of life and love and growth while we’d been a whole world apart from each other. Then we parked her car and headed to the MONA ferry.

The Museum of Old and New Art sits on a small peninsula just up the River Derwent from downtown Hobart. We splurged on the “posh” tickets which allowed us to sit up front in the ferry and have more bubbles and canapés while journeying upriver. The museum is beautiful and iconic and thrives on controversy. I’ll say it’s one of the top three museums I’ve ever been to. The Ladies Lounge did not disappoint. The artist Kirsha Kaechele says that “men’s experience of rejection is the artwork” so I won’t ruin it by telling you what’s inside but I will tell you that a small handsome man in a mustache guided us to a small table and offered us glasses of champagne. I hope you aren’t keeping track of how much I’ve had to drink so far because it’s too much. Whilst inside we felt free to discuss our relationships with men and how those have shaped our distaste and disinterest in courting them again any time soon. What is really feeding our souls and need for intimacy at the moment is our relationships with women.

Anvi speaks about her time in New York as being ripe with female friendships. She observed that the women who choose to live in and ultimately thrive in a city like New York are some of the most interesting and resilient in the world. I felt empowered by her perspective. I have often felt that when I am at my lowest and most self deprecating, an experience that is not rare, I am able to pull myself up by marveling at the incredible women who have chosen me as a friend. The consistency of these relationships have fed me more than any one with a man ever has, and yet even I don’t give them enough credit. That is changing, in no small part because of moments like the one I shared with Anvi in the Ladies Lounge.

There is another exhibit in the museum in which people can go alone into a small enclosure and whisper their deepest secrets into a microphone. Whether they know it or not, on the other end of this microphone is a massive flaring horn similar to one you would find on an old-fashioned phonograph in the courtyard of the museum. One of Anvi’s favorite activities is to lay down in this horn and listen to people whispering their secrets for hours. Those whispering can hear anyone who might be on the receiving end so conversations often ensue. We sat there together and listened to a few giggled secrets about high school shenanigans and public sex and we offered our clever retorts. We started gathering our things and were about to be on our way back to the ferry when a small voice suddenly came through the speaker. A delicate man’s voice said “My wife died three years ago”. Anvi and I froze. I raised my finger to my lips to indicate silence so as not to scare this man from speaking his truth. He went on to say that he thinks he may be falling in love with someone new, but he’s scared to move forward for fear of disappointing his late wife. We both waited a beat after he had spoken and whole heartedly said “Do it. She wants you to be happy”. A moment later he replied “Thank you”.

For two women who are taking their time away from men, neither of us hesitated for a second to send this stranger all the love the world has to offer.

PS. I was only a little bit drunk by the time I did my show that evening.