comedy is tragedy plus time Archives

Edinburgh Fringe Festival (16 years later)

I was scrolling through photographs earlier today and I came across this:

If I went through the archives there’s possibly a copy of it back at the time it was taken. Although there’s every chance the image has long been gobbled up by the domain transfers and the pixabucket or whatever it was I was using to host photos (it wasn’t flickr because for some reason that was blocked in the UAE at the time, along with skype).

It is taken outside the venue where I performed my show when I went to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2009. My first solo show, had never even done more than a ten-minute spot before, and I went to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with it.

WHAT WAS I THINKING.

Well, 2009 was the year after the year when a decade of experiences happened to me in the space of eighteen months and then we moved to Abu Dhabi. It’s no exaggeration to say that I was barely clinging on. So I guess I wasn’t thinking, eh?

In many ways, this show did my head in and when we left I was pretty convinced I’d never be performing again.

I had one reviewer who came, fell asleep, then gave it two and half stars, or maybe it was two stars and I’m just talking myself up 🤣. But mostly, it did my head in, because I left utterly and completely consumed by a belief that I didn’t belong in that world. I knew stand-up wasn’t for me. By then I’d been on enough line-ups and backstage with enough people who said they were nervous, who said they had no self-confidence and yet … out they went and looked like they knew exactly what they were doing. I had no theatre training so it didn’t occur to me that there was any kind of performance that would work for me.

At this stage the only person I’d seen who was doing what I could see myself doing was TJ Dawe. But he was a trained actor, and I was really wary of stepping into that world.

I still couldn’t see anyone doing the kind of performance that I wanted to do, which wasn’t standup and wasn’t acting. Edinburgh also made me think that the fringe circuit isn’t just brutal…it’s a blood sport. I just couldn’t see how someone who was quiet and wrote quiet shows could possibly find their way through it all.

Looking at that show now from the distance of sixteen years, I can, however, see that I was working my way towards the work I would be able to do. This show in Edinburgh was was on the way to where I wanted to be. A draft. A draft that probably shouldn’t have been shared publicly, but that’s what you get at an open access festival I guess. So this show is full of my early stand-up work, but is also clearly the foundation script for what would become An Evening With the Vegetarian Librarian.

It has taken me a long, long time to find my way through to the writing I want to write and the performing I want to perform. I mean, so many of my friends are talking about their plans for retirement (not immediately but coming up), where I’m thinking, ‘But I’ve only just worked out what I’m supposed to be doing!’

But Edinburgh wasn’t only about the performing and the show and what it taught me about being an artist. It was hard and it did my head in, but as part of my parenting life, this moment here is one of the absolute favourite times of my life. It was magic.

That bit about the pelicans is true

It happened just as Adelaide was throwing her second u-turn on the road she would later discover they didn’t need to be on anyway.

Her eldest boy said, ‘Mum, haven’t we already been here? It’s half past twelve and we told them we’d be there at eleven’.

‘Well, thank you Captain fucking Obvious,’ Adelaide said, while simultaneously realising that her arms were long enough to reach into the back seat, unbuckle her eldest child, pull him towards her then fling him from her window in the manner of a newsagent delivering the morning papers.

So giddying was the liberating effect of this move that she repeated it for her youngest child who landed softly in the next paddock next to his brother, such was the previously unknown skill of for her extended throw.

Guiltlessly, Adelaide watched as the children were rescued by a pair of passing pelicans, who, coincidentally, were the same pelicans who had perched on the roof of the school only two days before the end of term and dropped such spectacular shits on the path leading down to the playground that the children had danced around the collected mothers at the end of the day recounting the moment that the pelican poo had almost hit Oscar and Lucinda, while the mothers could only look on incredulously until said incident had been confirmed by a teacher and a mother who was an expert in pelican poo.

Adelaide put her foot to the floor. She could afford to burn petrol like it really was juice, for just yesterday afternoon she had received the advance for her latest novel which she had, after all, written, instead of sitting mindlessly at her computer, refreshing bloglines, playing games of word twist against herself and reading Josh and Donna fan fiction.

As with her previous novels, this would bring her both literary acclaim and financial fortune.

She used her handsfree phone kit to check her messages. One from Pinky Beecroft and one from Willy Vlautin, both of whom had just penned songs inspired by her raging hotness which she hid, seductively, beneath her fragile exterior of delicate beauty.

She pressed 5, once, twice, deleting both their messages. She needed no man. She needed no one. Adelaide was a proud, independent, self-sufficient woman. She was satisfied that she had achieved to the best of her intellectual capabilities; she was heart-stoppingly excited that time had marched her through her twenties and thirties and towards the adventure-filled years that would be her forties; she was proud of the life well-lived she saw reflected in her wrinkles; and she had not even noticed that she had put on one whole stone in the last twelve months because in fact, she had not fallen into a miserable slump on the lounge, mimicking her mother by comforting herself with alcohol and unwise food choices and had not, therefore, put on even an ounce of self-punishing weight.

And she drove off into the sunset, which was especially beautiful for that time of day which was twelve thirty five, knowing that she had a suitcased filled with clean knickers and matching bras.

And then she woke up and it was all a nightmare and she was still driving around Two Wells trying to find the new dog kennel they were using because she was too ashamed to use the other dog kennel (which did pick ups and deliveries of the pups) after the last time when the cheque bounced and the woman was a bit unecessarily snippy even after Adelaide had explained the unusual circumstances and immediately transferred the money into the dog kennel account; and if they didn’t find a petrol station soon they would be not only lost at around lunchtime with no food and the children’s stomachs already grumbling, but out of petrol too, and her without a charged mobile phone.

And there was still the washing to be done.

Help

Dear paperless world

Where are you and what is your estimated date of arrival?

Yours in anticipation of not drowning in the paper avalanche of bills, birthday invitations, tax doo-dahs, notifications from centrelink, minutes of this meeting, agenda for that, diggers catalogue, rates notices, unread unopened New Scientists, membership renewals, quarterly budget reforecasts, work rosters, soccer rosters, brochures of things which look fun to do if only I could remember to make the bookings oh and had a babysitter, scribbled recipes and I wonder whose phone number that is,

ThirdCat

Solidarity forever

So, the teachers went on strike, we met some friends in the park, there was an uneven number of children wanting to play soccer, I didn’t like the look of the ensuing conversation about who would have to sit out, so I said ‘how about if I play’.

‘Yay! Yay! ThirdCat’s gonna play.’ The two big girls jumped around.

My boys looked at each other. I’m almost certain they raised their eyebrows. ‘She can be in your team,’ they said.

‘You go in goals,’ the big girls said, ‘cos we’re really good at attack.’

After my eldest boy had scored three goals against us and I had scored one own-goal, the tallest of the tall girls said ‘maybe I’ll go in goals’.

Halfway down the field, my left foot tripped my right foot over. I am a grown up, so must laugh such things off, but fuck, it hurt (and would for days to come).

I scored a goal!

And then, I had to go in time out, because there was a boy, crying on his mother’s lap, his face etched with the etchings of a ball kicked by an inaccurate foot, and his words ‘I don’t want ThirdCat to play any more’ and my boys ‘she’s hopeless, our mum’.

The moral of the story is: pay teachers more.