Weeks into quarantine, we must find joy in the little things – like wheeling out the garbage in a giant inflatable penis

A 74-year-old woman in a fluffy purple dressing gown pulls a wheelie bin down her driveway. As she walks, she tugs suggestively on the zipper in a pretend striptease, kicking up her leg and singing to the tune of Right Said Fred: “I’m too sexy for my bin”.

This is the sort of content you can find in Bin isolation outing, an Australian Facebook group that’s amassed almost half a million members in under two weeks. Its premise is that with social distancing measures in full force, the country’s wheelie bins spend more time outside than we do – so why not dress up for those weekly walks to the curb?

‘I took me teeth out and said, “I’m too sexy!”’: Helen Smart. Photograph: Facebook

Members of the group, which has found fans around the globe, have been busy sharing their bin day outfits for all to enjoy. The submissions range from the heartwarming to the downright ridiculous: some have used it as an excuse to put on some lippy and their wedding dress from 1974, others have gone to work on dramatic, garbage-themed Game of Thrones re-enactments (hashtag: #BinterIsComing). The more creative a poster can get, the bigger the response.

Helen Smart, star of the striptease video, says she spontaneously decided to film her video “for fun” after being added to the group by a relative.

“I got up this morning and looked in the cupboard at the old dressing gowns hanging there. I just put it on, added a scarf around my neck, took me [false] teeth out and came out to my husband in the living room and said, ‘I’m too sexy!’ He looked at me and couldn’t stop laughing. And I said, ‘Come on, let’s do the garbage bin now!’

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“My son just rang me up and said, ‘Oh my God, Mum, I can’t believe you got your teeth out.’ I went, ‘Yeah, ’cause I’m sexy!’ Just because I’m 74, nearly 75, doesn’t mean I’m dead.”

Helen has been isolating at home with her husband in Newcastle. She’s only left the house twice in the past month, both times to go to the doctor. “I said to my husband: we’ve got to cheer ourselves up. And then that [Facebook group] came up and I haven’t laughed so much in all my life.”

There’s a quintessentially Australian energy to the way people in the group aren’t afraid to take the piss out of themselves. Tattooed tradesmen have wheeled the bins out in budgie smugglers and high heels. A mother and daughter filmed a scene dressed as Kath and Kim from the eponymous TV show. One lady simply posed between her blue and green bins in an inflatable penis costume.

Photograph: Jenni Lawrence on Facebook

Kim Ross, of Bendigo, “got so many laughs” from the group that she and her partner decided to film their own contribution: the two of them waddling down the driveway in matching dinosaur costumes, ready to greet the garbage men at sunrise.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kim Ross and partner dressed as dinosaurs. Photograph: Supplied by Kim Ross

Karen Aitchison, of Burpengary in Queensland, has raked in 14,000 likes in a few hours for her post: a photo of her husband standing on top of a campervan in a flowing pink frock, in tribute to the classic movie Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

She says the shot took about half an hour to set up this morning. “We had to wait for the bin to be emptied so we could hoist it up with a rope,” she says. “Then I had to wait for another neighbour to go inside so we weren’t seen in the process.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: Karen Aitchison on Facebook

Karen has been isolating with her husband and their son. “We were joking amongst ourselves as a family the other week, ‘We better wash our hair, it’s bin night tonight.’ Then I came across the group and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s priceless.’”

In the midst of a global crisis, she says, the Facebook group has become a source of much-needed comic relief – and a show of solidarity among the isolated. “I mean it just levels it, doesn’t it? We’re all the same, and we’ve all gotta have a bit of fun somehow.”





