You can feel it in your arsehole.’ That famous voice had once carried to the back rows of the Opera House. In the empty fifty-seat theatrette we were standing in, the voice of the Patriarch filled our heads with the imminent roar of thousands—thunderstorms of applause about to break over our flashing souls. ‘Look to the skies, my brethren of the boards. Flap your arms and know you can fly. Yes you can, if you learn how to (and this has to be exact, so practise): tweet, tweet, tweet. Those precise sounds will unlock the heavens for you, dear friends of the lights. Tweet, tweet, tweet. I feel liberated just making those sounds of freedom. I wake up and blink my sky-blue eyes three times every morning as I say it—tweet, tweet, tweet. Because if there’s one thing I know, it’s that all of you dream like birds. Your heads full of feathers. I’m not talking goose down, comrades of the hyperbole. I’m talking eagle and falcon feathers. Ostrich and emu feathers. Peacock and partridge and pigeon, my allies of alliteration.
