The Penta-Stellar Paradigm Shift

September 2 2004

  Links and lynxes,

  The Edinburgh Festival is finished; long live the Edinburgh Festival.  Today is my first day off since August 6th, that is, unless you count my three sick-as-a-dog days and my one unfortunate cancellation due to excessive fraternizing with rock stars.  Beginning on Friday the 19th our posters and flyers were adorned not only with the Scotsman's dazzling review, but also with a notice: "Extra shows added due to popular demand."  C Venues, in their infinite capitalist wisdom, offered me an extra spot each night once my show began to sell out, and for the final twelve days of the festival I performed twice a day, once in the afternoon and once at night.  You would think this would be draining, but actually it was a welcome challenge, especially since it motivated us to renew our promotional efforts, flyering, postering, and seeking random public speaking engagements, because we suddenly had twice the seats to fill.

  I'd like to say we sold out every show for the rest of the festival, but sadly (and predictably) this was not the case.  We did, however, sell out the majority of our afternoon shows, and draw an average of twenty-five or so to the night shows, which together added up to about twelve-hundred tickets sold over the course of the month.  This exceeds even my most optimistic projections for the festival, not to mention the CD sales, which have continued to support us and give our ATM cards a rest.  In a situation this competitive, with fifteen hundred shows where the average audience is between two and three people (seriously), I call this no less than a triumph.

  But lest I dwell on smug statistics for page after page, let's move on to some of the more interesting incidents and developments over the past couple weeks.  The weekend after the penta-stellar paradigm shift my parents arrived to visit for a few days and we put them to work.  Erik and I got to introduce them to the ego-annihilation that is flyering on the street, where you must drift like a leaf in the stream of constant rejection and acceptance without letting it saturate you and drag you under.  To my parents' credit, their wizarding skills served them well, and they were naturals.  The Royal Mile, which is Fringe central, is so completely over-run with promoters desperately trying to pitch their shows that you are literally assaulted with flyers every few steps if you should be brave enough to walk there, as the tourists invariably are.  The effect, however, is that many people get so fed up with being handed brightly-coloured flyers at every turn that they refuse anything offered them, often impatiently.  This must not be taken personally, however, especially when you are out there for hours every single day.

  A few days later my sister Dawn and my brother's girlfriend Natalie arrived as well, pilgrims to the Edinburgh Fringe Mecca, and we had a team of six working the streets, at least for a few days until my parents departed.  Dawn and Natalie were generous enough to donate their time to helping with promotions, in return for being included in the communal bank of merchandise loot, which continued to feed and water us.  Natalie also brought her roller-blades, so between her and Erik they were irresistible.  In addition to handing out flyers, our new drudgery also included stapling, since each flyer had to be individually adorned with the review and the extra shows information - fascinating, isn't it?  Last week we actually got rid of the last of the original print run of ten thousand flyers (full-colour two-sided post-card sized) and had to order up five-thousand more.  Thankfully, Dawn and Natalie graced us with their company for the rest of the Festival, and left, along with Erik, only earlier today.

  Each day we would get up and get moving - usually too late to do anything but hustle over to the venue and prepare for the first show.  After the show we would spend the late afternoon flyering, stopping for dinner, and seeing to administrative details, until show number two at 9:50 p.m.  After all was wrapped and I had showered and changed we would head out on the town, which usually meant head over to C Venues' main bar, where the staff and company members would go to fraternize and shake their tail-feathers until the wee hours.  The licensing laws in Edinburgh are wisely extended during festival time, so that all watering holes are open until 5 a.m. - which meant we often found ourselves straggling home beneath the breaking dawn.  This was perhaps not so wise for a performer doing two shows a day, but I always had the option to sleep in until 1 p.m.  I also knew that the people we were meeting and getting to know, theatre people, actors, comedians, performers, producers, etc, were all well worth the sacrifice of trifling sleep.

  To keep things fresh, C Venues organized and implemented a series of theme nights, a few of which were of interest.  One, Games Night, saw Erik take over the role of croupier at the blackjack table, seeming to add an air of fascist professionalism to what would otherwise have been a mere diversion.  We had photocopied U.S. dollar bills for chips, which had to be bought with real money, ten for a pound, (which may soon be the actual exchange rate).  After a few hours it seemed as if everyone was rolling in the photocopied dough, and it became obvious that Erik was dealing from the bottom of the deck to ensure everyone kept winning and having fun.  At this point I leaned over to remind him that since he collected everyone's money and distributed the "chips", he was in essence the House, and was putting himself in the position to blow our entire merchandise pot on his punters, myself included.  At this point people's luck seemed to turn, and after a few bravado bets things were back even, the money redistributed at no loss to the House, or gain.

  Another night of note was the Lost Property Fashion Show, which was a showcase of all of the clothing left behind in the theatres, modeled by C Venues staff. For this event they went all out, building a catwalk with a red carpet and drawing some flash-bulb-toting paparazzi to shoot the models.  They also commissioned me to write a "Lost Property Rap" to introduce the event, which gave me a chance to lampoon the stuffier side of C Venues, as well as name-drop all over the place, joking on the whole C Venues scene.  Unfortunately, this was one of those pieces that has a niche audience, since most of my punch lines were Fringe specific in-jokes, hysterical for the companies and staff, but not the general populace.  Nevertheless, I worked on it for three days, and when the moment came I performed it for five minutes, never to be heard again, an exercise in the Zen art of creative non-attachment.  Okay, I'm only human, so here are some of the opening lines:

  We got ten models dressed in lost property
And you can bet none of it was washed properly,
So if the models start to slip and walk awkwardly,
They're probably pissed off, 'cause their bras are all chocolaty
From sittin' in the same box as grandpa's colostomy.
Whoah, if I go too far the models will not talk to me,
And then I'll be forced to hang out with the Paparazzi,
Makin' total asses of themselves, takin' photographs
So they can show them after to newspapers loaded with cash.
I'd say we should just take 'em in the back and bash 'em,
But we can't make Diana safe from those bastards'
No doubt, now let's roll out the red carpet,
Paid for by credit cards left in the darkness,
And collected by ushers with the rest of the garbage,
Cigarettes, make-up and personal journals -
I think they even found a lady's purse in the urinals,
Now the staff play dress-up at work and turn purple
While the girls from "The Crimson Corset" search for their girdles...

  Yesterday was the final day of the Fringe, and I was pretty exhausted.  The first show only had about 30 people at it, our smallest house in weeks, but it was obvious that the Festival was winding down.  I began strong, delivering the Pardone's Tale and then moving into the Miller's Tale: "His name was Nicholas / And when it came to women his game was limitless / The ladies he visited became libidinous / When he played his instruments... BRRINGGGINNGGGINGGG... uh, ladies and gentlemen, I believe we have a fire alarm, so if you would all just calmly proceed to the side exit..."  My venue is a theatre constructed in a hotel conference room subject to the hotel as a whole, which has numerous fire alarms that go off for numerous reasons, very few of which have to do with fire.  I remembered there were a few false alarms during the rehearsal period before the Fringe started, so in retrospect I'm actually surprised it only happened once during my run.  The building did have to be cleared, however, and the fire brigade called, and every floor checked before we could return to the theatre.

  So there we all were on the sidewalk, waiting for the word to return, the Miller in a state of performance interruptus, when Erik suggested I resume the show.  I was reluctant and begged off at first, especially because of the noise of buses and cars and the good chance that we would be interrupted again and sent back in.   However, eventually Erik's Carpe Momentum prevailed and I jumped up onto a lamp-post block and called for my audience's attention.  Everyone from the show was there, and from all the other shows as well, and the Miller took over, spewing his drunken rhymes into the crowd as the fire-trucks trundled off.  I actually got through the whole Tale, and managed to draw a considerably larger crowd than I started with, the mark of true street theatre.  When we were given clearance to return to the theatre the audience once again took their seats, and I worked a whole sub-plot into the show about the tour bus engine catching fire.  "...And all of the rappers were forced out onto the street, but the Miller, drunk and agitated, jumped up onto a lamp post and continued his Tale, shouting over the noise of the traffic..."  Then I picked up from the end of the Miller's Tale and amazingly we finished the show within our allotted time slot, while all of the other shows ran fifteen minutes late.  Members of the audience told me after the show that they had never witnessed anything so quintessentially "Fringe".

  The last month has been the most frenetic yet, and the most rewarding (financially and otherwise).  I have performed The Rap Canterbury Tales thirty-three times in the last three weeks.  Besides the sellout shows and rave reviews (I also got a four-star review from "Three Weeks", the second most prestigious festival publication), the best part about this fringe was the connections I've made.  Critics came to my show, but so did theatre scouts looking for shows to book in the off-season.  The five-star rating in the Scotsman was like a magic ticket, getting me invited to promoters' events, spoken word competitions, radio interviews, you name it.  I was approached by organizers of poetry and theatre festivals, movie producers, rap artists, booking agents, professors, student newspaper journalists, and other performers, all with suggestions and offers - manifold possibilities of what to do next with my show.  So far I have nothing concrete to say, "this is where I'm going next," mostly because my next three weeks are already booked up (I even had to turn down an offer of an extended run in London), but the overwhelming feeling is of doors opening all around me.

  Now I get to take a nice long rest... for about ten minutes, before I shift gears and begin catching up on my sorely delinquent preparations for the next festival.  I fly back to Vancouver tomorrow, Wednesday, and my first show of the Victoria Fringe Festival is on Thursday night.  Victoria will keep me until the following Monday, the 6th, with either one or two shows each day, then I will have one day to make it down to San Francisco for my first show there on the 8th.  Right now I feel like I could sleep for a week, but I know I am over the hump of this tour, and I intend to treat the next two fringes like desserts.  To those of you who have written me during this festival and not received a response, please accept my thanks and forgive my neglect.  I hate the idea of my friends constituting a backlog, but such is the nature of my existence right now.  Still, I can already feel the velocity of the spinning world beginning to slow for me, at least a little, and this is welcome.  Come the end of September I will be able collect myself again and look ahead to preparations for next summer, when I plan to go ten times as big...

  Love from the centrifuge,

  Baba