Well, wasn't April bloody fantastic? I had a huge, fat, endangered WHALE of a time. My birthday was great, despite Sir Skanksalot Antonello from the Karakas Bar, who decided to replace us with a burlesque stripper but didn't decide to tell us about it, thus earning himself the accolade of Wanker of the Year. Then it was Easter, followed by Ben's birthday. I've never had so much fun in one month. All I have to do now is to make sure I don't catch the swine flu.....

We had another English Class gig at the East of Eden. It was brilliant. We had not one but TWO surprise guests – the lovely Paul Salamone and the bloody fantastic Rico. Yeah. My son, Rico. What happened was that I thought he was staying at his dad's, only he wasn't. His dad brought him home to me at 7:20 in the evening. So we put a tie on him and sloped off to Friedrichshain, feeding him Brezels and choco milk on the way.

“You can perform if you want, Rico,” we told him.

“What can I do?” he asked, anxiously.

“You can do jokes or a poem,” we replied.

“I'm going to say that a hat went on a man's head,” he announced, carefully.

“Yeah, that's a good direction to go in,” Ben said.

I just totally thought that he would chicken out when he arrived. UH-UH.

“Mum, when am I on?’ That was just about the only sentence I got out of him for the next hour and a half.

“Mum, am I still allowed to go on the stage and talk into the microphone? Mum, when's it my turn to talk into the microphone? Mum, when am I going to go on?”

In the end, I whispered to him: Go on then. He bounced his way through the crowd and clamoured onto the stage.

“Ladies and gentlemens!” He announced grandly. “Fire is gonna come! You're all gonna die! Don't laugh – it's not a joke! Why are you laughing?”

Pretty dark stuff, hey? What I really liked was the way he talked about it afterward, like a right little performer: “Mum, I was the best, wasn't I? Did you hear them laughing? Mum, we were all funny, weren't we? And I was the best? Did you think it were funny, when I said about the fire?”

Yeah, Rico, you're a real star.

Stuart Austen also made his English Class debut. And, of course, he was bloody fantastic. He did stand-up, his Slaughternaughts poem and a magic trick. I think the magic trick was the best. I won't give away his secrets or he'll throw me out of his Magic Circle.

Niti did stand-up about racist Germans. You've got to admit, it's a real goldmine of a topic, isn't it, racist Germans. She was talking about people in clubs and stuff – I don't want to give away all her material but it set me thinking. For years, I thought everyone in Germany was deeply and fundamentally racist, coz whenever I said I was English, they said, carefully, politely, coldly, worriedly: “Oh, you don't look English.” And one day, I said to Ben: “You know, these Krauts, they're so fundamentally racist, you know? Obsessed with skin colour and then being so POLITE about it, that's the really offensive thing, they're trying to be polite, but they are just deeply racist people, they can't help it, they just ARE. For them an English person will always be white and a non-white person will never be European and I'm just so bored by it you know? I'm so bored of their racism.”

Ben looked at me blankly and blinked a little bit. He does that a lot, actually.

“Er, Jacinta, er, erm, they think the English are ugly,' he said. “That's why they're being so polite.”

There's racism everywhere, of course. Yesterday on the bus I sat behind two British guys – two Northerners with half their teeth missing – they had obviously been living in Berlin for years and years – and who didn't stop effing and blinding about the Turks and their mosques and their Kindergeld.

“I'd cut off their Kindergeld, I would,” said one Northerner, before wheezing and cackling with delight at the thought of kids not being able to afford shoes and books for school because their parents have brown skin and weren't born in Germany.

“They can't even speak German, the half of them,” replied his friend, viciously. Behind us, a dozen Turkish teenagers communicated with each other in German.

Rico, at the front of the bus, said something to his friend, Mascha, also in German. It was a devilishly clever plan to get people to stop smoking – something to do with putting Quatsch in a Zigarette or something.

“What did you say, Bink?” I called over to him. I just wanted to know.

The man turned to me. “You can't even understand your own son,” he said. “You can't even speak enough German to understand your own son.”

“I can,” I said. “I just didn't know what he meant.”

“Your mum can't speak German,” the guy said to Rico. “She can't, can she? She has a fürchtbares Akzent.”

I went and sat at the front of the bus with Rico on my lap. Then they started on about Pakistanis and Indians and that. They would never be British, not for hundreds of years, despite whatever their passports said.

So, it got me thinking, as these things do. These old fellas, they had white skin – well kind of white, a bit grey and blotchy. But kind of white. And they thought that this whiteness of skin gave them the right to come to Germany as Ausländer and sit in a bus speaking a foreign language, slagging off German youth (the Turkish teenies in the bus being most likely being actual Germans, with German passports, nationality and everything) for not being able to speak German well enough. But, of course, it was a lie. Just as it was when he said my German wasn't good enough to understand Rico. I'd not understood the content, and I'm allowed to ask my four-year-old child what he means by something, the same as any white German mum would. What did you say, what did you mean? They're only kids, they chat a load of rubbish half the time. I'm allowed to check what he bloody means.
No, it wasn't our language which wasn't good enough. That old chestnut. My German is fine, and those Turkish kids, their German was fine. It wasn't our inability to speak or understand German which offended them – it was our skin colour. It was pure, old-fashioned racism. They were jealous coz their skin was all grey and blotchy, and their faces looked half-dead, whereas all those Turkish boys, gold and orange and slightly brown, looked totally and completely and absolutely alive. That's all racism is. It's just envy, and it's totally bullshit.

Okay, so enough of my racism rant. Do you wanna know what bloody fantastic things are happening this month? You sitting comfortably? Well, check this lot out!

COMEDY WITH KIM EUSTICE:

English Comedy Night at Kookaburra
Glitz and Glamour in May: The English Comedy Night is proud to present a feast of stand-up comedy from the USA, musical comedy Las Vegas style und brilliant pantomime, with our star guests: L.A. stand-up Eric Shantz, Evi and the Animal, the master of silence Gregor Wollny (pantomime extraordinaire) and our own Queen of Comedy Tamara Ingram.

All presented by your host Kim Eustice. For more information go to www.myspace.com/englishcomedynightberlin.

Tuesday, May 5 and every first Tuesday in the month, 8:30 pm, Comedy Club Kookaburra, Schönhauser Allee 184, 10119 Berlin, reservations: 486 231 86 or info@comedyclub.de, U2 Rosa Luxemburg Platz

GET CREATIVE at the Creative Writing Group Monthly Meeting

At this Creative Writing Group you can read out your own texts for constructive discussion (fiction, verse, verse translations). Please bring 15 copies. Room charge: 3 euros. For more info and times of their 1-euro workshop, see: www.cwg-berlin.de
Friday, May 8 (normally every 1st Friday of the month), 7 pm, Buchhändlerkeller, Carmerstrasse 1, 10623 Berlin (near Steinplatz).

SEE JACINTA IN ACTION AT MIDNIGHT POETRY!

Afterwards you can go to this German/English poetry reading with Rebecca Ellis, Jacinta Nandi & Daniel Postulka Entry free! www.midnight-poetry.net
Friday, May 8, 11:45 pm, Coffee Karma, Sonntagstrasse 30, 10245 Berlin (near Ostkreuz)

DON'T FORGET FUEL, PEOPLE

FUEL poetry, spokenword and performance
The regular FUEL night, hosted by Lady Gaby, with poets TBA plus Live straight from UK, London, Infinite livez...spokenword/rap with experimental nu jazz beats. Guest-starring the Italian Slammer Sergio Garau who is bloody fantastic.
Sunday May 10, 9 pm start 5 Euros, Schokoladen, Ackerstr. 169 Mitte

MORE COMEDY

New English comedy show!! -- Comedy in S.I.N.

Comedy in SIN is a new monthly experimental comedy show hosted by American poet and comic Paul Salamone and featuring stand-up Rey Melara of Honduras, along with other special guests, including yep, yours truly, Jacinta Nandi and everyone's favourite slightly perverted tortured genius, Ben Knight.

Wednesday, May 13 at 9 pm at the SIN Club (Schönleinstrasse 6, Berlin-Neukölln, U8 to Schönleinstrasse), 3 euros at the door with free whiskey shot. http://www.sin-berlin.de/

MORE POETRY

May Movin’ on with VERSES
Movin’ on with VERSES will host each month, two poets on stage, doing multiple sets... Come, applaud, heckle or just love them! Hosted by lady gaby, this event will take place normally on the third Thursday of each month. (sometimes the last thursday..)

Thursday May 21, 9pm start, 3 EUR, S.I.N. Club, Schönleinstrasse 6, Kreuzberg

OPEN STAGE

Open mic – poetry, prose, performance and music, hosted by the mistress of spoken word, Paula Varjack
Thursday May 21, 8 pm sign-up, 8:30 start time, Mano Cafe, Skalitzerstr. 46a (Görlitzer Ubahnhof)

TOP SECRET TOP COMEDY GIG

We would tell you more but we would then have to shoot you afterwards. Just trust us, it will be brilliant. For more info, look on www.myspace.com/nitid
Friday May 22, time TBA, Primative Bar, Simon-Dach-Str. 28., near Warschauer Str.

POETRY EXTRAVAGANZA

In May, poets take the stage at Exberliner's Wednesday at Kaffee Burger. Featuring readings by Alistair Noon, Catherines Hales, MC Jabber and Shane Anderson. With music from Canadian electro-aerobic-disco band Trike.
Wednesdy May 27, 9 pm, Kaffee Burger, Torstraße 58 - 60, Berlin-Mitte, U2 Rosa Luxemburg Platz/ www.kaffeeburger.de /www.exberliner.com

Okay, so all that Kultur should make the relentless racism of everyday life slightly more bearable, no? And if anyone thinks their Krautspeak is up to it, I'm the guest reader at the Samstagshow on May 16, Z-bar, Bergstr. 2, Berlin-Mitte, starting at nine.....http://www.samstagsshow.de/

Okay, see you next month, possums. And don't forget to read my blog:
http://bitchslutcuntgirlwoman.blogspot.com/

comedy literature songs http://www.myspace.com/myenglishclass

JNP/Expatica