SHEILA FLORANCE AND ME
My first meeting with Sheila. In the 1960s I was an impressionable seventeen-year-old keenly interested in following a career in the arts. My new boyfriend Peter Oyston took me into the ABC television studios to meet his mother who was working as a floor manager there. I knew she was an actress, a kind of alien species I had never encountered except in the movies, and I was nervous, expecting someone formidable. My first impression was of the usual middle-aged mum – a bit dowdy with a boring suburban woman’s permed hairdo (it was done that way for a play apparently). She didn’t appear one bit unusual. Then, ‘Hello dear,’ Sheila said sweetly as one does to little children. ‘Would you like a glass of milk?’ A horrified Peter whispered, ‘Sheil, she’s seventeen.’ (Sheil? I thought, I couldn’t imagine calling my mother by her given name). Then the extraordinary Sheila Florance screeched, threw her head back and burst into ripples of very loud laughter. And this being