comedy feature

Three fringe tips from the guest editor

This week’s guest editor, Lynn Ruth Miller, with three important tips on how to survive the festival

ONE - BREATHE: This is not as easy as it seems. The moment you arrive, be it at Waverley Station or at the airport, you will descend into the heady, irresistible atmosphere of frenetic festival activity. People will be milling about you wanting you and you only to attend their show, insisting that you come to their venue, drink their alcohol, eat their food, see their sight (this could be anything from a bent matchstick to a newly discovered galaxy).

You cannot help but feel immensely important, completely loved and much needed urgently in at least fifty places at the same time. For the sake of your lungs, for the benefit of your brain, for the very essence of your continued existence on this side of the grass, you must stop, close your eyes in the middle of this frantic hysterical and mad insistence on the possession of your body and your mind and BREATHE.

We strongly recommend you do this several times each day if you do not want the midnight street cleaners to spear your limp and useless body and pitch you into the dustbin with all the other unwanted and unread flyers that creep into every nook and every cranny of this tiny little city, packed to the brim at Festival time.

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TWO - SLEEP: This is a challenge so daunting most of us cannot manage so much as an imitation of slumber until after the month is over and what is left of us is shipped home to our own bed and board. However, you must be firm with yourself and remind yourself that if you do NOT sleep, you will not see what you see or hear what you hear. By the tenth day of the festival, is it impossible not to stumble over bodies that appear to be conscious, staring into space, their hands limp at their sides, their bodies soaked with rain and wind, and their chins resting on cups of coffee they have lost the strength to lift.

The money spent on the shows they thought they would die if they did not see will have been wasted. They will fruitlessly fill their diaries in print so fine it is illegible, with activity from six am until 5 am perhaps, but only perhaps allowing an hour to take care of urgent personal needs. They will not remember a single show, whistle a single tune or know why their feet have been worn to stubs and they need to walk on crutches when they leave Scotland for comforts of a home they are too numb to recognise.

Do not worry about what hours you choose to sleep. It has been my experience that dawn until noon are the quietest …but of course that varies with the day, the weather and how many flyers you stuffed into your pocket the day before.

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THREE - WEAR PLASTIC COATS AND BOOTS: Edinburgh at Festival time has to be the most exciting, most absorbing, most insistently active place on the planet but it is also the wettest. Unless you were reared in a fishbowl, or lived most of your life naked underwater at the Arctic Circle, your body will not be conditioned for festival weather. You will find yourself cringing and shivering as the wind propels the rain down your collar and into your knickers, lodging in frigid pools in your shoes.

Within two days, you will be coughing, sniffling and ingesting 3000 mg of Vitamin C, 40 Echinacea tablets, Zinc and Vick’s Vapo-Rub with your glasses of wine, double shots of Scotch and cannabis pick-me-ups in vain. The only protection for your body, your mind and your circulatory system is to cover up completely. This means, girls, that you cannot wear those lovely 4” heels with the open toes with your little cocktail dress that highlights your cleavage and hugs your bum. NO. You must wear proper boots (see illustration) and cover the rest of your person, including that new fluff-cut your hairdresser promised would be weatherproof, with thick ugly, non-porous plastic.

And men, you will do nothing for your image if you walk, head held high, jacketless and carefree into the storm. Within moments, you will look like overcooked pasta that was smothered in a clear, uninteresting sauce. You can forget scoring in any form since no one, man, woman or beast (depending on your preference of course) cares for a wet noodle between the sheets.

The good news is you WILL survive and once you dry off, and sleep it off, you will remember this August as the most exciting, exhilarating, delightful, stimulating wonderful, and magnificent month of the year. By July 31, 2010, you will be champing at the bit, ready to do the whole month over again.

Promise.

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And now, details of Lynn’s three shows…

All About Me, Laughing Horse @ The Counting House, 6 - 30 Aug, 3.45pm, (4.35pm), free, fpp178.

Aging Is Amazing Redux, Laughing Horse @ The Counting House, 6 - 30 Aug, 11.00pm (11.50pm), free, fpp166.

A1 California Comedy 4 Free, Laughing Horse @ The Counting House, 6 - 30 Aug, 9.45pm (10.45pm), free, fpp25.

published: Aug-2009

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