Interview

JW: You can always give them away if they don't work out.

CB: Or if they're redheads. But, then again, yours probably are.

JW: We'll keep those, yeah.

CB: Our little one, Iggy, is 6 months old. I'm waiting for Andrew to notice that he's got a little red fringe.

JW: Iggy.

CB: It's very Catholic-Ignatius.

JW: That's gorgeous.

CB: Of course one thinks of Iggy Pop. But it's Ignatius Loyola.

JW: My confirmation name was Septimus.

CB: Septimus!

JW: Yeah. But the bishop laughed at me when he confirmed me because I was the seventh son in my family. Talk about lots of kids. So I wanted to pick a name that dealt with that number. I found it in an old copy of the Bible. But Ignatius is a good one-maybe I should have picked that. So, to start off, I did some Internet research. I'm going to tell you what I've learned about your history, and you can tell me what is true and what is not. Okay, so you were born in Mexico and orphaned at age 1.

CB: Yes.

JW: And then again at age 3.

CB: Shit. That's on the Internet?

JW: Eventually, you were raised by either shepherds or Sherpas on Christmas Island-I don't know which one because I think someone misspelled something.

CB: And then I was kidnapped and raised by a Mormon family.

JW: Well, it says here that you slept every night with a baby goat in your arms until you were 22.

CB: Twenty-three.

JW: Then you attended an all-boys school in New Zealand, only to experience the opposite when you were transferred to an all-girls school in Australia.

CB: Well, such is the life of a hermaphrodite.

JW: After discovering America and claiming it for Australians everywhere, you set about learning to type. You never completed training in this, but it did get you to use your hands, which of course led to acting as a hand model in a series of soap commercials in France. Then you decided to drop out of high school and look for a real job, so you became an actress. How does it end, though?

CB: Then you run a theater company with your friends and your husband . . .

JW: [both laugh] I wanted to ask you what aspects of the theater company in Sydney you're involved with. Are you interested in the lighting? Let's start there.

CB: Basically, we've programmed 12 one-woman shows based around the various chapters of my life, and for some reason-and I cannot work out why-our audience numbers have been dropping. [laughs] But, no, it's a huge company. For me, I think the bigger something is, the more difficult it is to make it nimble and fleet afoot. So that's kind of been our mission. There's not a long, entrenched tradition of theatergoing in Australia. People love events-they love performances, they love music-and I think Australians are great entertainers. But there's this patina of weariness regarding any theatrical endeavor, so I think our job has been to kind of enhance the event atmosphere, bring excitement around actually coming to the theater. We are on a wharf. We're on the sort of seedy side of the bridge, and we have been having sessions once a month to get some music in the foyer, just to kind of rough it up a bit and create an atmosphere around the shows. Because our people need to see something good. The company has done great work in the past. It used to spill out into the foyer, and now there's nowhere to go and nothing to latch onto-you kind of just go home, and you forget the experience, or it sort of rests in isolation. And theater is all about foyers and conversation and digesting what you've seen. That's a long-winded answer to your question, but it's been mammoth