Lisa Scott is a walking compendium of social inhibitions.
As The Smiths sang, "Shyness is nice, and shyness can stop you from doing all the things in life you'd like to."
I am very shy.
"Oh no you're not !" choruses the pantomime audience.
"Oh yes I am."
Like everyone growing up to "The Dunedin Sound", I adopted a surly demeanour and took up smoking and drinking to hide a spastic awkwardness in social settings. (Dunedinites didn't actually smile at each other until 1992, when Presbyterianism wore off).
A woman called Gaylene used to bellow: "Sitting around tables drinking" while we drank up the courage to speak to each other. Don't worry, I've given up smoking.
The economist has given up skanky blondes.
"It wasn't a sacrifice, sweetie," he said, "because I have you."
Despite clear skin and white teeth, there are some unfortunate drawbacks to being nicotine free. I used to waft into conversations, between popping out for fags, dispensing witty comments, compliments and droll observations. (At least that's how I remember it.
I may well have careened around the room like a stinky meercat, spewing noxious fumes on the H of my hello.) Now that I'm inside for entire parties, all the fantastic rubbish I talk is broadcast where people can hear it.
I was going to mention that Roger Hall once said my flitting from place to place like a chain-smoking fantail was a little erratic, but Tom Scott told me never to name-drop.
In my defence, shyness is related to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which may explain the need to fill every pause in conversation with jabbering, gabbling, blurting and quacking.
Though shyness is also thought to be a symptom of mercury poisoning, so I might just be a very sick girl.
"I can't stand Kim Hill," I said to two of her very good friends, "she is always butting in," I loudly interjected.
An attack of verbal diarrhea had me saying, "I could never find a bald man sexy."
The bald man next to me flushed to the roots of his shiny pate.
Am I blind? Well yes, actually.
There are great things about being short-sighted and too vain to wear glasses.
Often, I have no idea who I'm talking to - so exciting in a small town, just like a lottery or one of those quizzes: Guess the Blur.
Another major benefit of blindsight is high self-esteem despite crooked lipstick, although I once accidentally caught a close up in one of those magnifying mirrors in someone's bathroom and almost brained myself on the cabinet door in fright.
Talk about the picture of Dorian Gray.
My friend Sharon makes doll houses.
Last week she was on Stars in Their Eyes.
"Are you going to be the lead singer of the Pussy Cat Dolls?" asked the economist hopefully.
"I couldn't possibly say," said Sharon.
I had heard she was going to be a Diva.
"Are you Aretha Franklin?" I asked.
"I couldn't possibly say," Sharon said again.
"I really mean it; I signed a contract."
Fabulousness itself, in a red dress and the biggest, puffiest sleeves in the world, Sharon was Diana Ross.
Belting out Chain Reaction in the Motown voice of the Queen of the Supremes, fearless.
I was flabbergasted.
I had always thought Sharon was shy, but if I hadn't been talking so much I would have heard that she won a Gold Guitar at 14.
"I'd rather walk onstage with my pants down around my ankles," said the economist.
Possibly not the kind of television Simon Barnett would host.
As Morrissey knew, "Coyness is nice and coyness can stop you from saying all the things in life you'd like to."
But nothing could stop me from saying: Sharon Cunningham, you're my hero.
Lisa Scott is a Dunedin writer.
