I have just started the first biography that I can remember reading. Bruce Willis: The Unauthorized Biography by John Parker. It’s quite strange reading a biography after reading mostly fiction because in this biography, every person mentioned in conjunction with Willis’s life or anything that might’ve influenced him is named.

Normally when reading fiction people are named if you need to remember them because they have a part in the story, otherwise you just gloss over their existence.

“Bruce called into a bar on his way home to drown his sorrows after yet another failed audition. The barman was sympathetic and poured him an extra shot at no charge.”

In this book, they are all named for their 1/10th of a second of fame.

“Bruce called into The Thirsty Actor, a bar located at the time on the corner of Greene and Thompson Streets in Soho, on his way home to drown his sorrows after yet another failed audition at the Paramount Theatre for a part as an extra in the Greenwich Village Community High School’s version of The Caravan directed by the enthusiastic principal Jimmy Jones. The barman, Ed Porter who’d worked in the bar for three years since leaving high school was sympathetic and poured him an extra shot of Bourbon, Bruce’s poison during the late 70’s.“

For example!

I suppose I am reasonably vain and while I don’t pass judgement on people of different sizes and shapes, I still secretly wonder how some people can wear the stuff they do.

Due to the sunny nature of the day yesterday and a comment from one of the waitresses at Nikau about a rumour that girls were out in bikinis on Oriental Beach, we wandered over that way. We found a fairly central park bench to sit on amidst the crowds and took in the fairly typical beach scene:

• the crowd of boys in long board shorts playing with a ball
  
  


• the back-packer travellers in jeans, long-sleeved shirts, and boots with their packs sitting on a blanket stolen from Emirates airline
  
  


• circle of Goths/junkies dressed in black sitting in a circle drinking beer and wine straight out of the bottle, waving their arms in the air and making slurred proclamations
  
  


• Mr-Metro, rippling and tanned showing off his dolphin-diving grace in the breakers testing out his new waterproof digital camera
  
  


• a real man, who probably drives a great big noisy flat deck Ford with an enormous killer-looking dog with very enormous balls. He (the dog!) had a kind of cute look at times and just when we were saying you can’t judge a dog by how mean he looks nor by the chain with metal spikes around his neck which dug right into his flesh when the real man yanked his leash, the dog went ballistic at a guy with a camera, and the real man shoo’d away a couple of little kids that went up to pat the nice doggy saying “Ahh, no, don’t come close, he’s not good with children“.
  
  


• a few small clutches of skinny teen girls in the lolly-pink singlets, cut-off jeans and fake Armani glasses smoking and looking with distain at the boys playing ball
  
  


• and right in front of us, a group of girls in their early 20’s who seemed to be unaffected by those nasty women’s magazines proclaiming that you’re only beautiful if you’re thin and detox regularly by eating beetroot and carrot juice, because there they were, wobbly bits and all in skimpy bikinis cutting into their flesh, smoking and swapping stories about who texted who and who was seen at so-n-so’s party.
  
  I found my eyes drawn to it like the car accident or animal squashed on the side of the road that you just can’t look at, yet always do. But good on them for just being comfortable with who they are.