I was once asked to be Jesus in the Easter Mass at my Catholic girls’ school. The rehearsal got me out of several maths classes and one double science class, and I liked wearing a beard and acting like a man of god. I also enjoyed some prominence in my home town of Wollongong for about a fortnight afterwards (and I got a free strawberry milk at the canteen). I thought the only way was up for me. How very wrong I was.
Other things did happen in my youth. I enjoyed an emotional affair with Oscar Wilde (though I was never quite sure how he felt about it), my peers and I found a poo in a bra on the basketball courts, and when I moved out I lived in a share house with licentious Marxists. But when you were Jesus as a teenager, what is left but martyred eye-rolling at the horrible idiocy of whatever daily life has to offer you? Join me to find the answers – it should only take an hour.