It’s hard not to think about Einstein’s theory of relativity when your settling into the fourth hour of Oscar-bait movie Oppenheimer and chick-bait Cillian Murphy still hasn’t dropped the bomb, dated the nuclear physicist or recited the Bhagavad Gita about being Death and incinerating the planet, during sex with Emily Blunt.

I’ve never tried any of these things at home. Then again, like the caricature most men have become these days in the glossy government brochures or pages of Mamamia I struggle at multi-tasking and remembering shopping lists or birthdays. This just adds another disappointing subtext to my suburban dad existence of lawn-mowing and visits to Aldi. Occasionally, something pecks in your head, ‘If only I’d had more ambition.’ And just like that, it goes away, and you turn on Married At First Sight to see man-buns, fake breasts and pretend marriages that only last a week are back in fashion and not the advertising industry affectations your memory tells you they were back in the 1980s.

Time is relative, as Einstein said, and it’s an important axiom to remember whether chomping popcorn at the multiplex watching a four-hour cinematic epic which like hi-fibre diets and Senate committees on the wage gap is good for you, or avoiding the noisy, sequined and bratty Saturday night spillover crowds from last week’s Taylor Swift concert when you’re in the city to see 1970s icon Marcia Hines in a production of Grease because it’s your wife’s birthday and you’ve remembered.

Both Marcia and Grease are proof of Einstein’s time theory. As is my wife’s birthday. Grease is a hit musical from the 1970s that is about the 1950s and a simple Americana that never really existed except in Ronald Reagan’s mind, now being revived in post-Covid 2020s. So, is this a retro-Seventies or retro-Fifties moment? Are we channelling Elvis before Vegas, fried chicken and stretch jumpsuits, or John Travolta in his disco inferno, flare-wearing pomp? Or is it a statement about the tedium of passing time during lockdown? Especially in Melbourne during Covid where we turned tedium into an art form and then received government grants to support us as we turned that art into interactive gallery installations or water features that look nice in your backyard next to the roses especially after you’ve mowed the lawn.

Grease is that sort of musical. It asks you a lot of questions and leaves you questioning the Dan Andrews years and their glory days of pregnant women in their pyjamas being arrested in their homes for social media posts and protesters being tasered as they walked towards Camberwell in search of a bespoke bakery. Like the Andrews years, you leave humming memorable tunes you wish you could forget and thinking about Olivia Newton-John. It takes me back, to when I was studying James Joyce’s Ulysses during my own flares-wearing Melbourne University years. This was before the invention of marketing courses and people laughing at you for being a lit. major unable to monetise your habit.

ONJ was in her ‘Let’s Get Physical’ prime. We were young and drunk and none of us realised that eventually we would be those fat guys in the video at the gym, falling off the treadmill or collapsing in the sauna rather than the hot guy ONJ walks out with as the music fades.

Someone in a film studies class once told me that Grease wasn’t about a 28-year-old ONJ playing an 18-year-old student, it was really about the Vietnam war, though that may have been American Graffiti or Happy Days which were also hit 1950-nostalgia shows made in the 1970s. Someone else said these shows presaged the optimism of the Reagan years, or the dementia of Joe Biden for whom time has clearly stood still if not gone backwards every time he holds a  media conference or walks up an airplane staircase before tumbling backwards and gripping at thin air like he’s America’s Marcel Marceau.

Marcia Hines on the other hand proves that time does in fact stand still. The 1970s pop diva is 70 but looks half that on stage and her voice is as powerful as ever. It’s a small cameo as Teen Angel surrounded by sequined dancers who look like they would rather be off at the Tay-Tay concert buying tickets from a scalper. It has the audience on their feet cheering and she does a jukebox-set encore at the end of the show because that voice can’t be wasted on just one song or doing a host gig on a resuscitated Australian Idol.

Grease is a low-publicity guilty pleasure. The real water cooler talk, adding much needed tedium to standing around the water cooler of the city offices we no longer attend, is the ABC’s Nemesis. The fat-necked office bores with their political socials are in full swing denouncing Morrison, Turnbull or Abbott – pick your preferred demonised hate figure of choice. They may not know a lot about politics, but they know which conservative politicians they despise.

Nemesis is another study in time and relativity though unlike Oppenheimer and Grease it doesn’t feature anyone who would pass for a genius or would look good at 70 in a sequined dress. Most of all it has no sense of nostalgia and the hope it brings. Unlike Happy Days, nobody is likeable, especially the ABC self-promotion, too pleased with itself for getting this scoop. Nemesis is all about the ABC dancing on the grave of the previous Coalition government. Then again ,who can blame them when embittered former Coalition politicians are lining up like addicts at a not-so-safe injecting room waiting to be interviewed?

To use another time-relative but antiquated concept, regardless of whether you’re a wet, dry or just a wealthy dickhead who wants to own a political movement, whatever happened to loyalty to political parties that, whatever their faults, gave you the platform from which you built your career and superannuation fund?

I thought Malcolm Turnbull summed up the gravitas of the program and his own personal smallness as a human being best with his observation, ‘Gee, Mathias Cormann has put on a lot of weight.’

At least Malcolm wasn’t pretentiously claiming to be Death. Then again maybe that was a given for any Liberal party leader who got in his way.