Free All Balls and Glitter by Craig Revel Horwood Page B

increasing confidence that my ballet classes had given me, I’d recently attended my first audition. At the TV studio, there was a troupe called the Channel 7 Dancers, who performed on all the programmes. I’d heard that they were auditioning for new members, so I took myself along to the try-outs. Unfortunately, I believed I was a lot better than I actually was. In fact, I thought I was fantastic!
    When I turned up at this audition, my first professional one, I walked in and just breathed, ‘Oh. My. God.’ There were dancers doing all these incredible turns and steps, and I thought, ‘This is unbelievable. I am so out of my league. How did I ever think I could do it?’
    After the humiliation was over, I came out to the car, where my mum was waiting, and I was so disappointed. I told her, ‘That was shit. I was shit. I’m going to have to train much harder.’
    Fred Fargher, who had taken such an interest in my early career, kindly paid for my first year at Tony Bartuccio’s, a new theatre school that had recently started up in Prahran, Melbourne. I adored going there. I was one of the first students after it opened.
    Tony was married to Caroline Gillmer, an actress from Prisoner: Cell Block H , and he managed the Channel 7 Dancers. That’s how Fred knew him, and about his school. Fred thought it would provide a good all-round education in dancing and theatre, so that I wasn’t putting all my eggs in one basket and limiting myself to Latin, ballroom or ballet.
    At Bartuccio’s, I learned classical, tap, modern, jazz, drama and singing, so it was similar to stage school in the UK, but that broad curriculum was a relatively new thing in Australia atthat time. There was a major dance craze exploding across the country because of films such as Saturday Night Fever (1977) and that made such opportunities slowly more accessible – even more so now because of shows like Strictly Come Dancing . It’s come completely full circle.
    Bartuccio’s was a full-time college, but because I was working at the TV station during the week, I had to take the part-time course on a Saturday. I travelled down there by train every weekend, a two-hour trip each way. Every Friday and Saturday night, I stayed with a guy called John Link. He’d been in Making Music with me in Ballarat and, fortuitously, lived round the corner from the school.
    Staying with him was beneficial to me in many ways, but the fact he was openly gay was an unexpected inspiration. By this time, I was leaning that way too. I’d been with Eric, of course, and I was prepared to agree some sort of deal with Mr X, but I was still quite confused about my sexuality, so it was a long time before I fully came out.
    I loved Bartuccio’s. It was brilliant working with all these inspiring people who could drive me forward. The singer Toni Basil led a class there soon after the success of her hit song ‘Hey Mickey’, while cast members from Prisoner taught drama. My teachers included Val Lehman (Bea Smith) and Maggie Kirkpatrick (Joan ‘The Freak’ Ferguson); Caroline Gillmer, who played Helen Smart, was my main acting coach.
    The school had a great canteen, which the Channel 7 Dancers used, so I was constantly star-struck. The college environment made me feel up there and on it, fierce and fashionable and involved, and that really drove me to want to turn professional.
    In those days, they often used dancers for catwalk work. Bartuccio’s was an agency as well as a school, and I was lucky enough to land a modelling job soon after I turned seventeen. It was a fabulous gig. Surrounded by gorgeous dancers and models, I travelled for two weeks up and down the east coast of Australiain a Learjet, modelling the Najee spring/summer collection. A typical day would involve rolling up on the Learjet and slipping into the clothes, then we’d disembark on to a red carpet, model the collection on the runway, get back on the plane, change and travel to the next destination, pose on