I was hoping to get a fancy invite to the races this year. I was thinking I could spend the whole week swanning around with Brynne Edelsten or one of the Minogue sisters, wearing some sort of sculptural two-mile-high hat, stabby heels, and something tight and leathery. We’d spend the week being photographed, and partaking of canapés and Champagne from random corporate tents.
But no, alas, the mailbox is empty. So it looks like it’s going to be me and the mums from school again, dressing ourselves up for the Oaks Day do at Moonee Valley where, as usual, we’ll stand out like sore thumbs next to the fancy Essendon ladies who, like, so make an effort. We raid our kids’ drawers for random hair accessories so we look like we’re wearing actual fascinators, while the Essendon ladies wear little bowler hats with hand-made origami birds on top.
As you can imagine, no one from our table ever gets nominated for the best-dressed, to our enormous relief, because who wants to get called on to stand up at the front of the Moonee Valley banquet room for the humiliation of a clap-vote.
Last year the best-dressed prize went to a lady who might possibly have dipped-dyed her entire body in bronzer. She deserved that bottle of plonk – in fact, we all agreed she might well have got a guernsey in the Chadstone fashion stakes were it not for the tatt of a tiger on her calf.
But if there was a best fun award given out at the Moonee Valley ladies’ day, our table would win hands down. Last year we were the last ones there – and I mean not just in the special ladies’ day room where they lay out the smorgasbord of cascading oysters and prawns. We were the only ones left in the whole of the Moonee Valley Racing Club. Seriously, not even one old withered-up soul was sitting behind a poker machine by the time we staggered out in search of souvlakis.
At some stage in the day, there’s dancing. Actually, it’s about 5pm, so technically almost night time but no one cares at that stage. A lot of the other ladies have gone by then, dashing off in their SUVs to pick up the kids from soccer or something. But not us – we have a leave pass and are not going to let the chance to dance to a cover band pass us by.
It could possibly be a strange vision for anyone chancing on Moonee Valley at that moment – a dance floor filled with middle-aged women, dressed up in nice frocks but many without shoes, singing Katy Perry songs at 5pm, the gorgeous backdrop of Moonee Valley racing track, sans horses, behind us.
Even though I would like to turn it around a bit this year, jazz things up a notch, extend myself beyond what I usually do, which is pull out some black Witchery dress from last season and defrizz my hair with the kids’ straightening iron, I think “why bother?”.
Because the spring carnival has become a bit like the Brownlow, so focused on the fashion that the horses and footballers don’t even really need to show up any more.
It’s OK to just pull something together and have a good time, enjoy the moment for what it is, which is a great day out even if, like us, you’re not actually there.
In fact, this time around, me and the school mums might just deck ourselves out in pirate hats made out of newspaper just for the fun of it. Apparently fascinators
are out this year anyway.
