When Lady Gaga Met a Plumber Who Forgot Her Name –
but remembered the birds
The universe, as it often does, had a wicked sense of timing. It was exactly one year later, almost to the day, when Lady Gaga found herself back in Sydney’s Paddington. She was in town for a secret listening party for her upcoming album, and the universe, apparently, decided she needed a spiritual sequel to the most unexpected encounter of her life.
She was standing outside the same café, wearing something that could only be described as “a deconstructed wedding dress meets a jellyfish,” when she spotted the white van. “Aussie Flow Plumbing.” Her heart did a little skip. The fluorescent work shirt. The meat pie crumbs. It was him. It was Dave.
Gaga smoothed down her dress, adjusted her crystalline
headpiece, and approached the van with the enthusiasm of a woman about to reunite with her creative muse. The song they had started—the one about pressure and flow and heartbreak and gaskets—had haunted her for twelve months. She had tried to finish it herself. She had written verses about “rising mains” and “pressure valves” and “the drip of a broken heart,” but something was always missing. Dave’s gruff, working-class poetry. His lyrical observations about blockages. His voice.
[Menu]
“Dave!” she called out, her voice carrying that distinctive theatrical vibrato that made pigeons take flight from nearby rooftops. “It’s me! Your co-writer!”
Dave emerged from the back of the van, carrying a heavy-looking pipe wrench. He had the same sun-weathered face, the same faded Australian flag patch on his sleeve. He looked at her with the polite confusion of a man who had been summoned by a singing jellyfish.
“G’day,” he said cautiously. “Do I know you?”
Lady Gaga laughed. The kind of laugh that said of course you do, you magnificent plumbing genius. “Dave! It’s Lady Gaga! We met here exactly one year ago! We wrote a song together! About water pressure and emotional blockages and—”
Dave squinted at her. His brow furrowed with genuine bewilderment. “Sorry, love. I meet a lot of people. Coffee shop’s busy most days. You look familiar, maybe… you’re not the lady who lost her cat in the storm drain last week, are you?”
Do king parrots mate for life?
“I am not,” Gaga said, her smile faltering only slightly. “I’m a singer. A performer. You might know my songs. ‘Poker Face’?”
Dave shook his head.
“‘Bad Romance’?”
Nothing.
“‘Shallow’? From the movie? Bradley Cooper?”
Dave shrugged. “Don’t watch many movies. Too busy fixing pipes.”
Gaga felt something shift in her chest. This was uncharted territory. She was Lady Gaga. She had ten Grammy Awards. She had performed at the Super Bowl. She had an Oscar. She had more number-one hits than most people had hot dinners. And this man—this glorious, pipe-wrench-wielding, meat-pie-eating man—had absolutely no idea who she was.
She started listing things. “I performed at the Academy Awards. I had a meat dress. I—”
“Meat dress?” Dave looked genuinely concerned. “That sounds unhygienic. You’d get flies.”
“I collaborated with Tony Bennett. We recorded a jazz album. It went to number one.”
Dave nodded slowly, the way one nods at a child explaining an elaborate imaginary friend. “Right. Jazz. Good stuff.”
“I have a Golden Globe. I have thirteen MTV Video Music Awards. I have the largest social media following of any—”
“Look,” Dave interrupted gently, “I’m sure you’re very successful at whatever it is you do. Singing, was it? But I really should get to this job. There’s a blocked toilet in Woollahra that’s not going to unblock itself.”
Gaga felt the sting of irrelevance for the first time in perhaps two decades. This was humbling. This was character-building. This was the kind of experience that would make for excellent material in a future one-woman show. But right now, it was just embarrassing.
Then, a flash of red and blue in the jacaranda tree caught her eye. A Crimson Rosella. And behind it, a screeching flock of rainbow lorikeets. A sulphur-crested cockatoo landed on the café awning and let out its signature raucous cry.
“The birds!” Gaga exclaimed, pointing. “Dave! The birds! We talked about the Crimson Rosellas. The bell-like whistle. The Platycercus elegans. You told me how their colour changes depending on the rainfall. You told me about the King-Parrots in the Blue Mountains. The way the lorikeets gather in the evening. The screech of the cockatoos at dawn!”
Dave’s face changed. The polite confusion melted away, replaced by something else. Recognition. The kind of deep, soulful recognition that happens when someone taps into a part of your memory you’d forgotten existed.
“Wait,” Dave said slowly, lowering his pipe wrench. “The bird lady. The one with the big hat.”
“Yes!” Gaga practically shrieked.
“You were talking about the King-Parrots. Alisterus scapularis. The males have that red head and the females are green. You knew all the scientific names.”
“That was me!” She was bouncing now, the jellyfish dress flapping like a wounded sea creature.
“And the lorikeets. You said the rainbow lorikeets were like a kaleidoscope having a sugar rush. That was a bloody good description. I’ve never forgotten it.”
“You didn’t forget,” Gaga breathed. “You just needed the birds.”
Dave looked at her properly for the first time. He saw past the jellyfish dress and the crystalline headpiece. He saw the woman who had stood in this same spot one year ago, pointing at a tree, more excited about a parrot than about her own fame. And in that moment, he remembered everything.
“The song,” he said. “The one about pressure and flow. We got halfway through. You had the chorus in that little phone of yours.”
“Yes!”
“I had to go fix that burst pipe near the Rosellas. The whole flock was covered in mud. I saved them, you know. Every single one. They were roosting in the park for weeks after. I still go down there sometimes to check on them.”
Gaga felt tears pricking at her eyes. “Dave, I need to finish that song. I’ve tried. I’ve rewritten it a hundred times. I’ve had Max Martin look at it. I’ve had RedOne. I’ve had Nile Rodgers. Nobody gets the plumbing metaphor the way you do.”
Dave picked up his pipe wrench and nodded toward the van. “I’ve got forty minutes before my next job. There’s a thermos of tea in the cab and a packet of Tim Tams. You want to finish this bloody thing once and for all?”
Lady Gaga, global superstar, Oscar winner, and the most famous woman on the planet, climbed into the front seat of a plumbing van in Paddington, Sydney. She took off her ridiculous hat, accepted a Tim Tam, and said, “Dave, let’s write the most beautiful song about a blocked drain the world has ever heard.”
https://sites.google.com/view/birds-of-australia/home
And they did. Well, they started. Right up until Dave’s radio crackled again with another emergency. But this time, Gaga didn’t let him go without promising to find him next year.
“You’ll remember me this time?” she asked.
Dave looked at her, then at the cockatoo still screeching on the awning, then back at her. “If you come back, bring a photo of that King-Parrot I told you about. The one with the odd white patch on its wing. You remember that?”
https://sites.google.com/view/birds-of-australia/is-the-king-parrot-endangered
“How could I forget?” Gaga said. And she meant it. Because in the end, it wasn’t the Grammy Awards or the Oscars or the Super Bowl that made her memorable to Dave the plumber. It was the birds. It was always the birds.