Today was the day of my first ever performance as a part of the Edinburgh Fringe festival with my debut one-man show Confessions of a 'Smart' Wrestling Fan. It was attended by two people, saw three walk-outs and was over around seven minutes earlier than it should have.
But before that unimportant stuff I thought I'd mention two things that happened yesterday that I'd forgotten to mention in the previous day's blog:
1) The foreign father smashing ping pong balls towards his son's head saw me using the internet on my laptop and asked if the campsite offered "free wiffy". I know I love Stewart Lee and Daniel Kitson and all the others but I guess my inner Stan Boardman got the better of me and I had a good private chuckle.
2) I was almost steamrolled over by a young sprinter desperately trying to evade the police. It completely took my surprise and I never really had time to consider I could have been knocked over, or worse become part of a nervous hostage situation. I think I would have been relieved of some of that fear by the look of steely-eyed determination on the police officer running after him. His teeth were gritted to the point that fragments may have been scattering behind him on the ground as he ran. You could tell in his head the Starsky & Hutch theme tune was blasting at full speed, full volume. The menacing wielding of his baton brought the chase to a finish and I continued on my way, needing twenty four hours reflection to really comprehend what I'd witnessed.
So, what happened today? I made the final internal alterations in my tent to the point I had places to put my used clothes, my collected flyers and all other necessities which will hopefully make everything easier there from now on. Two very good days and nights of weather means the tent will not have been tested with heavy rainfall yet, but I'm sure that day will arise. The biggest problem with sleeping in a tent is the minutest of sounds seems to suggest evil sprites are surrounding your tent poking, prodding, scurrying around waiting for the final pounce. Rain makes things even worse. What seems like a monsoon ocurring outside turns out to be light rain that you wouldn't bother taking your umbrella out to shield yourself.
An early journey into town was what I required in order to fit my planned healthy attitude towards exercise for the duration. Every morning, I decreed, I shall go into my local Banantyne's gym taking full advantage of my membership (which I really fail to do back in Birimingham) and swim a kilometere every day before facing whatever is presented with a refreshed and exercised body and mind.
This will be the last day I get to swim at Banantyne's gym.
Apparently Banantyne's gym in Edinburgh charges their members an extra £4 a month than the Birmingham gym. No problem, I reasoned, the extra £4 can be paid off at the counter and I can continue to go on my very way. 'Not so fast' the lady at the counter cried (not literally unfortunately I've yet to live the dream of being spoken to like a 60s Batman TV series villain - for a start I can never find three tough guy goons to wear matching masks and lycra for my wrestling-themed acts of dastardly doing). I have to contact Birmingham Banatyne's and have them sort it out. Meanwhile I can swim there this one time. I also had to pay £1 extra because they don't automatically provide you with a towel on arrival like my local. Seems towel is a tougher fabric to find in Scotland and of much higher value. Towel's a fabric, right?
I just found out, though, that to get the upgrade to use Edinburgh I need to pay the extra £4 EVERY MONTH for the remaining eight month's I have on my contract. I would suggest Douglas Banantyne go forth and multiply, but a quick Wikipedia check shows he has already done so and quite often.
Unless I can find a local pool within decent distance of everything else I don't know what I'm going to manage for exercise now. People who know me will again point out this hasn't been a problem for me recently, but I'm going to Edinburgh on a quest for improvement - and I'd like it to show physically as well as mentally and spiritually when all is said and done. But if it hurts too much financially maybe I should just do pushups or something.
The harshest realisation about yesterday had been I might not be as much of a 'lone wolf' as I had originally romantically envisioned. (By the way, my romantic visions of wolves do not involve Tyler 'Biggest Head-to-Body-Size-Disparity-Ever' Lautner; my romantic carnival rider operator visions on the other hand...) Being in crowds of thousands but knowing you're essentially alone with only a tent and inflated mattress to call home at night wasn't a great feeling. The first tip I would now give anyone who wishes to go to Edinburgh is this - bring people. Be with people. Friends, strangers, whoever will join you on your daft journey. You will be shocked how desperate you'll be for company in an event that sees you amongst walking beside and around so many semingly like-minded people passionate about the arts.
So it was with great relief that I met up with Mary Lockwood. The only person who seems to be as equally daft and naive as to book herself for the whole run of the Fringe at the Edinburgh City Football club. We met up at Fringe Central just away from the Gilded Balloon and traded stories about what had got us here and what we want to get out of the experience.
Mary is a storyteller by trade - travelling the country telling stories to kids in schools or adults in pubs and other social gatherings. It seemed like a fantastic way to live from what I could see as a 9-to-5 office drone. One thing that we did have in common, though, was our mutual trepidation towards flyering people. Neither of us possess that immediate confidence to approach a stranger in the street and shove a piece of paper in their hands imploring them to realise that our show is the one only one you need to see at the festival. As we walked along the Royal Mile I admired the dexterity and tenacity she showed in avoiding every student wielding an A5 that locked her in her targets. I had at previous festivals made a resolve to accept every flyer handed to me - partly to help the person out but also to see just how many I could collect by the end (it easily numbered over a hundred or possibly two in less than a week).
We essentially spent the next few hours convincing ourselves that we didn't actually NEED to flyer. My programme image had already been met with praise, I pointed out, from random strangers. Surely I didn't even need to flyer to get at least a crowd I would define as decent pretty much every night. I could just as easily throw my leaflets in the bin and have done with them, saving me a lot of shoulder and back ache for the rest of August.
We traipsed up to the venue several times hoping to get access to set up our stuff and see maybe run a few plans on what the show will be like and how we should plan collect our audience contributions after the show had ended. We both had the plan of basing the next day's food budget on the previous day's take in the hopes of saving what remained in our balance to spend on drinks, shows and whatever else you need to live - swimming pool access, perhaps.
Unfortunately my show was the first one on that night which meant we'd probably only get in for sometime after four. That was particularly unfortunate for Mary as she had been under the impression that she would be on at four today. It even said so in the programme.
It soon became clear to me that I would need to flyer my ass off for the next three weeks as the time came for me to take stage and a total of one person had made the journey to see me on my opening night. Alongside Mary I was performing in front of an audience of two - but a very appreciative two. There were benefits to this - the show was no longer fresh in my mind due to the gap between the last preview and the fact that everything I'd been concentrating on for the past week or so was in preparation for the time spent in Edinbrugh and little to none about the actual act I was taking up to Edinburgh.
Around five or so minutes into the show some local regulars to the pub this venue when it is usuallt only a pub sauntered in to take some seats. They spent the next ten minutes or so making observations on top of my observations, talking over my mimes and generally trying to engage me in conversation. I know my show is categorised as "stand-up, talk" in the Edinburgh programme but the talk is meant to be one-way. This may sound snobbish and I don't mean it to be but those weren't the people I wanted to come to the show - they wanted to have a laugh when they came in but I knew very quickly that apart from a few more general rountines about staying healthy and so on this wasn't the humour they could relate with or want to hear. By the time I was discussing Freud and the id, ego and superego they knew this wasn't how they wanted to spend the next forty minutes and left the venue saying "is no' ferus, pal"
Marcus and Mary stuck it out, though, and I think they were rewarded with a show that was intermittently amusing and a lot less formal than I planned the show to be if it finds a larger audience. One thing that frustrated me, though, was talking to Marcus after it was clear he was exactly the kind of Fringe audience member I wanted to see my shows and me performing at my best. Marcus is someone who knows his arts, wants to encourage youngsters to try even if it results in failure and adores events such as the Fringe because these disparate people from around the country and the rest of the globe can congregate into one beautiful city for a month to share each others' thoughts and experiences and search for common ground. That I couldn't even remember my favourite material about politics and my masturbatory habits was annoying to look back in retrospect - remembering various fragments of the show I forgot throughout the rest of the day and kicking myself each time.
My show involves a projector and because I still can't remember all of the order in which the slides come I was having to back-track more than I could and because I was reacting to the slides instead of just having them be one feature of the entire act (I had always envisoned not even acknowledging the slides except for the interactive part of the show) but that night they were the defining feature and the show suffered as a result.
If you're reading this Marcus thank you so much for coming and I'm very sorry that you witnessed what I hope is the worst performance I have for the duration of this festival.
This may sound like a defeatist and demoralised diary entry and on the first proper day of the festival that surely can't be good news. That's not the case, though. I believe you learn by doing but you learn even more by doing wrong. I went back to the campsite earlier than intended to and sat in the games room going over the show in my head, clearing my thoughts and conversing with a German hiker who had come to Edinburgh to nto only experience the festival but the sights and sounds of the beautiful surrounding Highlands. It was a lovely way to end a topsy-turvy day - meeting three very interesting peple from different walks of life - and I think Marcus would agree that's what the Edinbrugh festival is really for...
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"I believe the ability to think is blessed. If you can think about a situation, you can deal with it. The big struggle is to keep your head clear enough to think."
- Richard Pryor
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