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March 26, 2007
Three Chairs In The Dressing Room
Brava!!! Brava!!! Brava!!! Madame Galina The New Forces’ Sweetheart got a listing in The Guardian.
It was for my gig at the West End Centre in Aldershot. And there it was shining forth from the pro forma press pack I got given as I left the theatre.
For once I didn’t want to swap the press pack for something better to take home: like a balloon, a slice of cake and a prize I had won fairly or otherwise at Pass the Parcel.
Hang on there, sorry: that reminds me. My cousin Sheri had a party for her twin six-year-olds the weekend I gigged in Newport and stayed with her, and she wrapped The Parcel for Passing in such a way that there would be a prize for everyone.
“What?!” I was straight on it, “what kind of piss take is that?”
“It takes out any aggression and disappointment.”
“It’s all about aggression and disappointment for O Fy Iesi Bendegedig’s sake. It’s Pass the Parcel, not hot stone therapy with the Thai girlfriend Mark bought.”
Mark is Sheri’s brother.
“You mean brought back. From Bangkok,” Sheri said.
“No, I'm sure I don’t. But anyway, what else are you making a mockery of? Are they going to play musical statues?”
“No. Megan who’s coming’s got this nervous twitch.”
“Hide and seek?”
“No. We like to play Let’s All Go And Look Round All The Nooks And Crannies Joining In Nicely Together.”
No doubt there would be hours of endless fun for the kiddiewinks playing Adopt, rather than Pin The Tail On, The Donkey.
The Right Way To Play Pass The Parcel
The next thing is Sheri won’t inflict Mary Poppins on the twins, and they’ll miss out on the bleak come downs off glue sniffed in the bus shelter post Wimpey that made our generation what it is.
Sorry, back to the Guardian listing.
It made gargouillade-all difference to the ticket sales. I opened my set with “look at all you few!” and included a routine about the theatre manager giving it the pursed lip empathetic look, and smarming:
“For the sake of the intimacy impact factor of your work, we thought it would be best to take you out of the main positive barn of a venue tonight and put you in the studio. Actually, we’ve not so much done that as put you in the work in progress space…no we haven’t: we’ve put you in the bar. I exaggerate: we’ve put you in the corridor leading from the loos to the…oh, all right: we’ve put three chairs in your dressing room!”
It was one of the best gigs I’ve ever done. And if I’d been on a fee rather than a box-office split I’d have been laughing. As it was, what I came away with wouldn’t have left me much over after I’d bought my own Thai bride and treated her to a Wimpey and a bag of Loctite.
Wrong kind of Wimpey, thank you the dipstick at the picture desk
But can I just say that I haven’t invented the story of going to Wimpey in Bargoed when I was about seven with Sheri but without my mother eager for my first non-defizzed fizzy orange experience? My mother, you see, always put a sugar cube in my Fanta to take out what she called the ruptured-sinuses-just-begging-to-happen effervescence. And there I was motherless for the afternoon at a formica covered table with orange bubbles well on the way to up my nose.
“Iestyn Edwards!”, came a voice I knew.
In terror looked round and there was Carol McNamara, my mother’s chief crony.
“Don’t make me have to come over there and sugar cube that for you, there’s a tidy-behaved little boy.”
And now, you’ll have to excuse me. I’m off to snort some Vintage Cava.
Empty. And nobody died...or did they?...
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