North feature contributor Bill Leff visits the Lyric Opera of Chicago . Bill explored the possibility of being a shiphand, for the Lyric Opera of Chicago, during tryouts for the production of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. It all started in a little town called Merrylands, in the backwoods of outer Sydney in the Great Southern Land of Australia during the year of our Lord, nineteen hundred and something. Okay, so it wasn't all pain and suffering, after all it was in England that our young man finally discovers music and girls. This time back home to Oz.
More beatings follow.
Unfortunately for his very mobile parents however, the young lad's school work has begun to suffer from neglect. Certainly not once there are teenage hormones, dreams of guitar-god grandeur and the odd wet dream racing through his body. After a time, well a few times anyway, young Rick is asked, by principal Potter, if he wouldn't mind leaving school, as he appears to be hell bent on living over a warm grate in the middle of the inner city and eating out of trash cans. It's Pete Watson. A professional rock musician with a band that actually works nights.