If local grocers and fruiterers are experiencing an eerie surge in demand for bananas it's because thousands of Canberrans are going to see the Empire circus/cabaret in the yurt-like spiegeltent in Civic Square.
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Everything about the wild, senses-bombarding and vulgar 90-minute show from New York is memorable but the act featuring something consenting adults can do with bananas even feels (writing this the morning after seeing it) potentially life-changing.
Almost everything else done by stars of the extravaganza (described by The New York Times as ''Cirque du Soleil as channelled through The Rocky Horror Picture Show'') requires skills, nerves, suppleness and equipment we average mortals can't aspire to have. But we all have easy access to bananas and might, with lots of messy practice, imitate what the Empire husband-and-wife clowns do with that famous fruit.
Everything else done in Empire seems superhuman. At the end, the thrilled audience was very reluctant to leave. An MC told us that if we'd enjoyed the show we should tell everyone about it but that ''if you didn't like it then shut the f--- up'' (alas, the words of Empire lack the flair of its deeds). But Canberrans who've seen Empire really don't seem able to shut the f--- up about it. Here am I, too, gibbering about it.
There's not room to mention every act, but each one binds you up with spells.
Asked to pick favourites I'd mention, in awe, the sexy and brawny young couple on roller skates (on the tiny stage in the centre of the 700-seat wonderyurt) who whirl with such power and violence that you can imagine, if ever the Romeo accidentally lets his Juliet go, she'll be rocketed out through the yurt-top and off towards Bungendore.
What Yasu Yoshikawa, described by an MC as ''the half-naked Asian dude with f---ed-up hair'' achieves with a giant hula hoop and a giant hamster wheel defies belief. My jaw drops only about twice a year and this was one of those times.
The three pneumatic and gorgeous Gorilla Girls from Ukraine show bizarre feats of strength and acrobatics.
They would look terrific even if they wore garbage bags, but the fact they wear black lingerie and have contrastingly pale Nordic-looking skin gave the latent heterosexual in me a wake-up poke in the ribs.
Members of the bearded sex who go to Empire are counselled against sitting in the front row. Safe in the shadows of the 18th I still squirmed with brotherly sympathy for the front-row men preyed on by a substantial Jezebel (who emerged from the small suitcase in which she'd somehow managed to pack herself).
''Ooooh, his wiener sausage is huge!'' she marvelled, fossicking in the groin of one chap. I would have died with shame if she'd used me for her fossicking.
But her principal victim (what a good sport he was) was a man hauled up on to the stage, interrogated about his lovelife (''Are you dating and f---ing?'') and forced to simulate various blush-makingly lewd acts with her.
At one point, not simulating but actually doing it, he had to nibble one of her feet. His only reward for his humiliations, if you can call it a reward, was to have her apparently (from where she took it) in-use merkin (you'll have to Google that word, I'm too shy to explain it) rubbed in his face.
In a helter-skelter 90 minutes there was, cleverly scheduled at about the three-quarter mark, the performance by Memet Bilgin, the 3D Graffiti Guy, in which over 15 suspenseful minutes he constructed, all balanced on a single feather, a kind of impossibly fragile mobile from 13 skinny wooden branches.
Towards the end of this, as suspense reigned in what had all night so far been a raucous venue throbbing with loud and sexy music and shrieks of shocked laughter, you could have heard a banana, a wiener sausage, even a merkin, drop.
Some of the evening's feats of contortion, were magically indescribable. It occurs to me that, the older and stiffer one gets (I'm almost 68) and the harder it gets to even bend down and untie one's shoelaces, the more fabulous it is to watch a young contortionist with such a Playdoughy body that she could easily untie her shoelaces with her teeth if she wished.
After 90 minutes of exhilaration in this hair-raising, soft-core fairyland we reluctantly left the tent. Outside and around the feet of Ethos, and beside the tinkling, babbling, wussy Civic Square fountain, every-day centenary-year Canberra life seemed suddenly unacceptably pedestrian, average, and Wagga Wagga-esque.
We went to the car. Creaking, I climbed with sexagenarian difficulty into the passenger seat and then, gibbering wildly about what marvels we'd just seen, Sandra and I sped off into the night in search of a 7-Eleven selling fruit.
■ Empire continues in the Canberra Theatre forecourt until November 3. Tickets at Ticketek and Canberra Ticketing.