Thursday, August 20, 2009

A good lemonade, some amazing people and a nightime adventure

Yesterday (I'm posting this before today performance, so this is the delayed yesterday post) I had 15 in, but I think I really managed to squeeze every single drop of laughter from such a small lemon. People even asked if I perform in London so they can come and see me again! What they don't know is that another thing I squeezed to the last drop for this show is my material, but hopefully more lemons will come in the future Two fellow performers came to see me, including Ashley Freeze, a very clever comedian, he seemed to love it. The other performer was the guy behind the show "Moz and the meal" and I returned the favour by going to see his show, a one-man-cum-recorded-voices about the love pains of a cannibal with the habit of eating his girlfriends. Half of the audience walked out, but I found it very powerful, original and amazingly well done. He told me that he had nothing to do with theatre before, but sets himself a challenge every every, so last year was running a marathon, this year was writing, producing and interpreting a play. Amazing. Even more amazing is Lynn Ruth Miller, a 76 years old lady from California who is doing three shows a day, one of which apparently involving her doing a striptease! I saw her other show, where she plays a role more traditional for grannies, that of telling stories. It was beautiful and moving and the very existence of somebody likes her is a bell sounding cheerfully for all of us. Funnily enough, I had a (real) telephone conversation with my mother, who asked me if it wasn't too tiring doing a 30 minutes show every day! She always manage to be stranger than my comic fiction. By the way, the Free Festival is full of very good shows and I'm really proud of being part of it. Generally speaking, there is a very nice atmosphere among Fringe performers. Yesterday I danced in the street with the cast of some musical and they gave me a stick saying "I danced with strangers". I met again a couple of them today and they celebrated me as an old friend. And I continue to bump into Mario Pirovano, one of the most famous Italian actors. Yesterday we were discussing how our shows were going, a bit like Cristiano Ronaldo comparing football notes with the guy from the pub team. I have been pushing him quite a lot to come to my show, it would really be great, I have even some jokes prepared for the event. Let's see. And the other night a funny episode happened involving another performer. My hostel is composed of flats of four rooms sharing the toilet and kitchen. I arrived at the hostel at 1am and I confused room number and flat number, so I tried to open the door of the wrong flat and it got stuck in! Not only I couldn't enter my room, but given that 1am is very early for most people at the festival I was potentially preventing other four people from entering theirs! After I don't know how many attempts with the key the door of the flat opened and the comedian Jo Romero came out of it in her pajamas. She is a good looking woman, who appears naked on the cover of her show's poster, titled "Touched for the very first time". I explained the situation and she managed to unstuck the key, adding to my humiliation but also to my relief. I said that waking her up was my revenge for covering part of one of my posters with one of hers, she weirdly replied that if I found a poo on my bed I could be sure of the origin. Such a classy lady. It was like we were rehearsing for a double act and it was actually good fun. By the way, pity that the English language uses the act of turning a screw as a metaphor for sexual intercourse, unlike the Italian language, which instead uses the act of turning a key. I know, a metaphor lost in translation doesn't make much of a kiss-and-tell story. But this blog, after all, is all about sublimation.... sorry, I meant "comedy". Maybe I should do that show on Freud after all.

2 comments:

  1. Very interesting read. I look forward to reading the remaining chapters!!!

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  2. Hi Giac - sounds like you are having a whale of a time - well done! Jax

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