From dispelling common myths to talking about what it’s really like to grow up as the sole child in a household, McCormack uses the show’s theme to discuss childhood, family and how our birth order impacts us as adults. It’s a rich mine, and there are some brilliant moments, predominantly when she when focuses on her own experiences and family.

Watching McCormack interact with the audience is enjoyable as her extensive performance experience comes to the fore. She’s genuinely likeable, and builds up a strong rapport as the show goes along, looking to audience members for agreement and sympathy as she talks about their potential common ground as only children, partners or parents of only children. If that happens to be you, you’ll really enjoy this stand up offering.

See the Melbourne Fringe Guide for details.

It can feel strange to see disembodied parts of women, anonymous and intimate at the same time. Vaginas presented in black and white photographs, pieces of women, are more commonly seen as the macabre fodder of post mortem photography in coroner and murder mystery television shows. Here they are accompanied with stories, giving each woman the voice denied to her when she is little more than a central puzzle in a television narrative.

The images sit well in their exhibition space, and the images are arresting. Most engaging are the stories, some of which are more personal than the others. The photographs are crisp, and people wander amoung them reading and viewing images at leisure.

The book itself is beautifully presented in serene white and subdued fonts. In these pages, the pictures exist together as a cohesive narrative. In exhibition it is harder to read each story carefully, there is a tendency to let your eyes slide past the pages. Oddly, taking in all of the images at once rather than page by page highlights the sameness of the women, rather than the differences. The variations between bodies seems more alike than when focussing on them page by page.

This exhibition sits nicely amoungst other counterparts such as The Great Wall of Vagina (Jamie McCartney), Colour Me Dead (Philip Brophy), Wall of Vagina (Kembra Pfahler) or C*nt Paintings (Betty Tompkins), with the addition of each woman’s story assisting us to associate our own bodies with that of the women on display.

See the Melbourne Fringe Guide for details.