May 3. Day 123. Surprise!

It's so great when you are looking forward to something and it lives up to all expectations. It's even better when you have no expectations at all and end up being very pleasantly surprised. I've been to the annual Buddha Birthday Festival at South Bank and knew it would be a bright, colourful family festival - and it didn't disappoint. But what I didn't expect was that we would be entertained on the walk down the hill. And there was Leon riding up the street on a unicycle juggling a hoop above his head and waving a pom pom like it was the most natural thing in the world. "It's just something I like to do," Leon told me. His next aim is to learn to ride a bigger unicycle. And as if that wasn't enough of a surprise for one day. Tonight Drama Teen and I went to a one man show at Brisbane Arts Theatre knowing only that the performer Michael Webber would use no words. We figured that even if it was woeful the fact that it was called Alone on Stage for 60 Minutes meant we'd only have to endure an hour of it. How easy it would have been to back out at the last minute. And what a great performance we would have missed. Never before have I seen stand up comedy without words. Webber is a seriously silly, seriously entertaining performer who can work a room without uttering a word (a pleasant change from a lot of recent comedy which seems to rely on dropping one word starting with F with monotonous regularity). Yep, there's nothing worse than really looking forward to something and leaving feeling short changed but how good is it when the reverse happens? Who doesn't love being pleasantly surprised?