It’s a breezy spring day in the back streets of Fitzroy and RocKwiz host Julia Zemiro is goofing around with comedian Aleisha McCormack.
‘‘She’s the daughter I’ll never have,’’ says Zemiro, pinching McCormack’s cheeks and touching up her friend’s lippy with her finger, in a break during out footpath photoshoot. ‘‘I looked mental in that one,’’ McCormack tells her. ‘‘I made crazy eyes.’’
‘‘Don’t make crazy eyes,’’ chides Zemiro. ‘‘That’s the one they’ll use.’’ But then they pull more silly faces for the camera and crack up laughing.
This pair who live near one another in the inner north are bound by a shared industry and a love of ‘‘the funny’’, regularly walking the few blocks between houses for a coffee, a meal or a laugh. It’s a friendship that’s shrugged off a 13-year age gap – Zemiro is 45 and McCormack is 32 – since they met six years ago working in commercial radio.
Now in the throes of a demanding three-month national tour of RocKwiz Live, Zemiro is juggling her role as beloved host of the music quiz show with directing McCormack’s one-woman show, How to Get Rich, part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival. It’s based on McCormack’s real-life experience of flying to London to meet her cybercrush, Richard, in the flesh, and sees her spending the entire flight liberating her mind from its customary optimism to canvass all the things that could go wrong. Could he have a secret girlfriend? A whole family? You don’t even know if he has legs, pointed out McCormack’s aunt. (Which would be fine, McCormack hastily adds. Just fine.) Or maybe he’ll smell funny.
Almost as interesting as the story of a cyber romance is that of the friendship between these two women, struck up in Sydney when they would volunteer to get the coffees for the male-heavy staff at the radio studio where they worked – Zemiro as co-host and McCormack as assistant producer – “so we could have a bit of a whinge and a bit of a chat”, says Zemiro.
McCormack had just been dumped at the altar after an eight-year relationship and was “at a bit of a crossroads”, says Zemiro. “I said if you ever come to Melbourne, I could introduce you to a few people, help you out.”
McCormack did come to Melbourne, sleeping on Zemiro’s couch and making the national finals of open mic comedy competition Raw Comedy with a piece based on her dumping story (the ex was in the audience and appalled, she says). She went on to work with Glenn Robbins, Steve Vizard, The 7pm Project and, most recently, as an on-air reporter with The Circle, where she brought her cheery, I’ll-try-anything persona to a range of interviews and events, until the show was axed earlier this year.
Zemiro knew of her friend’s online affair and applauded McCormack’s courage in taking the trip to meet cyber-boy in the flesh. “She really put herself out there,’’ she says. ‘‘I loved working on this show because I think everyone should have this romantic moment in their lives where they do something as bold as going halfway across the world to find someone,” she says. “One life to live. Why not?”
For herself, Zemiro claims to know nothing about love, despite having experienced it, and frequently being the recipient of it. (A woman approaches us during our cover shoot on a footpath to tell Zemiro her husband is in love with her. ‘‘Oh, how awkward!’’ Zemiro hoots sympathetically, saying later, bemused, that it happens all the time. ‘‘I get all these women asking for photos of me with their husbands.’’)
If she were a man, you might describe her as one of Melbourne’s most eligible bachelors; attractive and successful, vivacious but strong. But of true love, she says she knows only ‘‘that it’s a moveable force and it doesn’t always stay the same and it can be hard to find it unconditionally”.
McCormack says she hesitated before asking Zemiro to direct the show. “I didn’t want her to feel obliged to do it because we were mates. But she was really excited.”
Each grew up as an only child, and they share an exuberant resilience. “She’s very warm and gracious and hilarious,” says McCormack of Zemiro. “She’s someone I can turn to for advice, be it career or relationships. We can be quite silly together. We had to do serious time during the show, and pretend we’re professionals and do work. Which took a bit of control.
“My mum died five years ago and I didn’t have a close relationship with her. I tell Julia she’s like the mother I never had, ‘without sounding like a wanker’. She’ll say, ‘You sound like a wanker’. But I mean it.”
McCormack says she went to 16 schools as a child, and without siblings she had to work hard to make friends. “I’m a fast friend-maker. It’s been a big bonus in my life. I was class clown, the idiot new girl, the extroverted weirdo. I’ve never been a victim, and you make what you make of those situations.”
Zemiro points out she’s not technically old enough to be McCormack’s mother, but admits “she brings out the protective person in me”.
“She’s very self-sufficient,’’ says Zemiro. ‘‘You give her an opportunity and she just runs with it. I love her energy. I’m 45 and she’s 32 and sometimes when I’m feeling a bit energyless and I see Aleisha, it’s like plugging into a big voltage plant and I get this little surge of energy.
“That’s why you should hang out with different people of different ages. I might have some old-fashioned wisdom to impart, but Aleisha knows what’s going on with technology and stuff in the real world.”
They share a ‘‘life is short, take the risk’’ philosophy that each expresses separately. “You take whatever adventure emerges,” says McCormack. Zemiro repeats this credo often in explanations of herself. Now in her eighth year as host of SBS’s enduring cult hit RocKwiz, she was drawn to direct McCormack’s show because she had never done such a thing before; she is visiting Romania later this year to spend four weeks as a volunteer teacher, living with a local family; she agreed to play a French-speaking role in Rachel Ward’s upcoming telemovie, An Accidental Soldier, because it was a challenge.
“I like to work with people who know more than me,” says Zemiro. “With the film, I feel a little out of my depth. I turn up to work nervous and excited and that’s what you want. You want to be going, ‘Ooh, that’s a bit scary, a bit of a challenge’. So I said yes to that in a heartbeat.”
Fluent in French, Zemiro has commentated SBS’ broadcast of Eurovision for the past four years, a gig that indulges her love of languages. “I’ll always say yes to Eurovision because I get to spend two weeks in an environment where I hear at least 40 different languages every day, and I love it.”
She doesn’t use social media professionally, and is typically forthright about its shortfalls after the saga of TV personality Charlotte Dawson, who endured a vicious bullying campaign on Twitter. “I’d rather not be part of it, and then it can’t happen to me,” she says, pointing out that her lack of interest in Twitter has not affected her ability to get work.
“There’s this idea that your fans can get close to you on Twitter and, to be honest, I don’t really want them to. I do the work and that can stand for itself. I’ve turned down a lot of these covers where you tell people your best chocolate cake recipe. You can be in the public eye too much. I mean, I can see the social experiment of Twitter and Facebook. But really, there’s too many good books to read.”
Does she ever worry the performing work could dry up? “I do think about it. I would like to go back to uni and get a teaching degree, just so I’ve got it. So when I’m 60 and work is losing interest for me, or I’m not getting the roles, I’ll have something else to do that I know I’d enjoy.
“What’s the worst thing that can happen? Well, it might not work out and it might be a disappointment, and that’s life. You’ve got to grab life by the throat and go for it.” ■
How to Get Rich, October 2-7, Trades Hall Annexe, corner Lygon and Victoria streets, Carlton. Tickets $22 (concession $18). Details: visit melbournefringe.com.au.
