If you’ve ever lived in Western Australia, which I did for nineteen uneventful years, you’ll know what a big deal the annual Telethon is for locals.
For twenty-six hours, various celebrities, mostly of the D-grade sort, with an international celeb dragged in if they happened to be in Perth, perform vaudeville acts and read out donations sent in by the public.
Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder a few A-pluses in its fifty-five-year history.
If you stayed up long enough, usually midnight, a hollow-eyed stripper would come on and do a wild bumping dance, grinding to an apparently creaming frenzy.
An old pal of mine, a TV star at one point who flew back for Telethon in a sort of look-who-made-it-big play, was told he’d babied up his girlfriend sixteen years previous.
Like I said, a Perth institution.
Anyway, this year Nicolas Cage, who is a few months shy of turning sixty, is in town, or town-ish, he’s three hours south staying in one of the wings of Taj Burrow’s famed Nautilus Shell house along with his twenty-eight-year-old wife, shooting for the straight-to-YouTube film The Surfer.
Storyline: “When a man returns to his beach side hometown in Australia, he is humiliated in front of his teenage son by a local gang of surfers who claim strict ownership over the secluded beach of his childhood.”
(Note to Nicolas Cage fans: three killer Dobermans lurk behind the Burrows’ ten-foot high steel gate.)
And, although Nicolas Cage couldn’t make it to Perth for Telethon despite one newsreader’s pledge to make the six-hour round drive to get him on the show, Cage made a “very special phone call.”
To wit, a five thousand dollar donation.
“I’d love to be with you right now but I am filming down south,” Nicolas Cage said in a recording, which was aired on the show. “I’d like to ask you to please donate to Telethon and help some children, maybe save some children’s lives.”
Cue rapturous applause etc although for Nicolas Cage fans, they’ll know the donation was served with a hefty serving of irony.
For who can forget his 2018 turn as a “child murdering lunatic” in the film Mom and Dad “which begins with an act of infanticide-via-speeding train, and only gets wilder from there.”
Madcap!
The post The Surfer star Nicolas Cage donates thousands to save lives of dying Western Australian children! appeared first on BeachGrit.
