I begin the day with a taxi ride to the Royal Botanical Garden, to hear David Leddy`s play Susurrus, an audio installation, that enfolds in your ears a rich potion like the one Oberon places on Titania`s eyes to make her fall in love with an ass. I listen and follow a map to eight stations around the superbly manicured garden. The story weaves together; Mid Summer Nights dream, sparrows, socially singing song birds, a story of a sons love for his father, incest, interviews with an RSC type actress, and the garden. I start in the Orchid house, a huge elegant glass house, I take photographs of the exotic many colored orchids. The audio tape explains the root of the word orchid is testicle. Themes are carefully spun into each other, and into me as I walk beneath the canopy of ancient trees and carpets of flowers. I see lovers lying in each other laps reading beneath the trees, children running, picninc`s, inscriptions on park benches…(Bumped into David Leddy, the author of Susurrus, he was postering outside his second AWARD WINNIG show AT THIS FRINGE, White Tea, I had a brief conversation with him, as we met in Feb at the Push Festival in Vancouver.
(He`s a bit of a genious and very prolific).

Bus to Assembly Venue at Geroge St for next show: 1:30pm Wife of the World. I meet Susan and Terry from Norwich. We talk about our show choices…juggling scheduals, we have made schockingly similar choices out of the thousands of shows to choose from. The Wife of the World was a good poetic show, the actress covering alot of character ground, playing 20 wives from Medusa, Penelope, Quosimo`s wife, Devils wife, and many more. I felt a bit hot and fidgity pressed like a sardine into a small venue.

5:06pm Third show: Rabbit Faced Soup, by Laura Salon (Perrier award winner), brilliant, young actress, fantastic relaxed performance, great character shifts…I loved this show….it could have been twice as long, didn`t want to leave…wanted more. She plays a young woman with her dream job as a literary agents assistant…she is a master of the British ironic put down. She plays a bitchy New York style literary agent `Marcy“who calls her , the assistant,`shut up` rather than by her name…revealing she`d rather be single living with her cat. She imagions “marrying her cat and producing children that could lick ther own assholes and that they would probably be the next winners of Britain`s Got Talent!“
Salon`s entertaining characters include an Eastern European Tyrant, the new owner of the Publishing house, French Radio Host and French writer who mock english Culture or the lack of it.

Next I go to Art Gallery of Scotland to see the Renoir exhibit and the permenant collection of European and Scottish Art…impressive quick visit, I will return.

6:30pm Dinner with Jennifer Scarce, a lovely Scottish University Professor I met in Budapest last fall. She recommends a Spanish restaurant Andaluz with great tapas…we agree to meet for a play on Saturday, Irania.

9:45pm Forth show of the Day: Bourgois and Maurice: Social work. Bourgois is like a young Tim Curry, in rocky Horrow, but with weirder costumes. He is sexy, skinny, flamboyant, with thick emerald eye shaddow and glorious three inch eyelashes…and the reddest lips in town. He wears tight fire engine red sequin knee length pants with sequin suspenders over a tight red long sleved shirt. He wears a hot pink fetish body suit with small green poka dots and a matching face mask. He wears a black body suit covered in black flapper fringe, that he shakes to his advantage. He climbs over the audience, saying 7 years cabaret school taught him that is was improtant to get to know your audience and let them get to know you. She is Maurice, and has great black wig piled high like Marge Simpson. She plays the piano, she is supposed to be his brother, sex change, she is elegant with fine features.
They warn `Sex can sometime lead to children.
They sing`songs of Little Pins, Addiction, Celebrity, Ritilin and my favorite“If you don`t know what to do with your life, kill yourself“.
As promised the show is “sexy, macabre, inovative, provocative and irresistable.“

I bandaged my toes this morning, blistered from walking from one end of Edinburgh to the other yesterday…6 hours of walking 4 hours of shows!
The city of Edinburgh has multiple levels, (literally one lower old town and one upper), so does the Fringe.
There are 369 venues listed in the Fringe brochure. The brochure is so large it needs handles to lug around, for constant referals and maps. At every corner I am given a new leaflet and cajoled to come to one production or other.
There are hundreds of American Highschool students with 25 muscial productions, all the winners of their talent divisions in America. Then the stand up comedy network..hundreds of stand up acts in all sort of basement dungeon performance spaces. The Musical theatre and Cabaret Acts (I’m going to try for the Bongo Club venue 143, which has a variety of different performers showcasing their work from around the festival). Then there is the straight professioinal theatre like the Traverse Theatre, where I saw Orphans, yesterday a two hour gripping phychological thriller “Danny and Helen’s quiet life explodes when her brother turns up covered in blood.” Morally challenging, violent, confrontational and disturbing this play is superbly acted in a naturalistic stlye. I am bowled over by the magnitude of the Travers Theatre (it reminds me of the RSC in London but cooler) and find myself in the book shop buying plays I can’t possibly carry in my already overweight baggage!!
Then I experience The Hotel, an environmental peice where we are led from the theatre to a nearby Hotel, populated by actor employees. Seven floors of Hotel rooms full of different themes, a wellness centre where I am given a fitness test, everyone is proven to be unfit:my test is to run around a tiny track, challanged to beat the fastest time, I fail: the processing centre where I am psychologically profiled, measured (from my nose to employees nipple), interogated (about my sexual habits), have my glasses removed for safe keeping (they are returned), offered toilet paper by two poor actors locked in a very small cupboard; the Meditation Centre, where I meditate with the half naked Guru who spouts spiritual platitudes adn tells me I am healed and should leave Now; the Massage room, where I am given a dreadful massage by Philipa, a disgruntled employee who has been jilted by the Guru; …ending with the propritor a drunk, washed up award winning actor having a fit and committing suicide.
I walk to the old town for dinner and stop for a free show along the way…Cabaret Whore (how can I resist that title). I go down, down three levels of stairs to basement bar…the Kaspar. There is a tiny stage 3 feet by 3 feet, I feel I am in a fire trap, bamboo on the ceiling perfect fuel for the fire…no way out if there is a fire…ok calm down (Alex says 90% of the time good stuff happens only 10% bad). The Cabaret Act, Sarah-Louise Young, is a tallented singer with bad wigs. (even some of the great show here have bad wigs.) She sings in three different characters the first a Texas Whore with vulgar songs, the second a librarian wanna be reality tv show singing champion a la Susan Boyle, the third and best by far a suicidal French Cabaret Singer who hates Edith Piaf, she hold a large knife to her wrists throught her performance.
I am exhausted, I have a three show limit. I return to the University to rest my weary feet, after eating a pot of mussles for dinner.

One of the best shows I saw in Edinburgh was by Kirsten Fredrickson- Everything Must Go. She and her Dad were working together on the show for Edinburgh Fringe. He died of pancreatic cancer two months before the show was to open. He is still in the show in film and in Kirsten and in a life size puppet. This photo show’s her Dad in a red wig and lipstick that she dresses him in at the end of the play.

 

Haggis,blood pudding and kippers on the buffet breakfast….yikes, nearly lost my apetite. There are over 2,000 people staying in the Edinburgh University residences where I am staying for 9 nights, and everyone goes for breakfast buffet, mob scene…eggs and bacon and awful saussages abound. Luckily there is a fruit and yogart bar.
The first show I saw Monday 10th was a weird “too close to naked people covered in food” fringe experience, the performers were tallented, full of energy and passion but the material was a nightmare…”brother and sister food fight show” I will call it…he ended up naked and covered in ketchup and mayo and uncooked rice….easy to lose your appetite in Scotland.
Second day Tuesday 11th, I saw three very good shows. Beginning with “Girls of Slender Means”,Assembly on George St., a very professional production of a Muriel Spark book, with excellent performances. The woman who sat beside me in the front row Judy, said she has come to the fringe every year for 15 years, and loves it.

Second show “Everything Must go” or “the Voluntary Attempt to Overcome Unnecessary Obstacles” pg 114 program, (was my cup of tea)…. by Kristin Fredricksson, Beady Eye productions BDI. Kristin is a skilled physical performer, lit from within, her eyes sparkle with the love she has for her Dad. A brilliant show, moving and funny.
The play is about her Dad, who was making the show with her when he passed away June 2 2009 from Pancriatic Cancer. A colorful man who liked to dress up and try on different characters and wigs. The actress is very fit, beginning the show begining the show bouncing on a small trampoline in her royal blue school gym uniform. She made good use of her props, a small 7 inch puppet of her Dad, a tiny green house, cardboard cut outs of her Dad, two hurdles that she jumps over (he was a hurdler), and a life size puppet of her Dad….so he is there in every way, on film and mostly in the actresses performance of him..she looks just like him as a young man.
He was fruggle,(reminding me of my own Dad and Brother), saving water anyway he could, collecting it from the local school, saving his daughters bath water to flush the toilets…taking home all the flowers the florist was discarding to decorate the back yard…she unrolls a carpet of photographs from this floral display and then real film footage of her father dancing with her on this set comes on…it’s gorgeous and they dance off together.
I predict great things for this show and the performer!(British Arts Council was in attendance.)
Have three more show planned for today….Sururrus, Orphans and The Hotel….

Third show of the day, I saw “Tom Addams: Dropped as a Child”, at the Royal Mile Tavern…and as he promised in his flyer, he doesn’t let you down! Singing his original songs in a tiny venue at the back of the pub. He is an extremely likeable fellow, with a great voice and relaxed stage presence and makes you feel like you know him already…turns out we did meet on the 2006 fringe circuit in Canada, (he remembers my Stripes poster on the front of my journal. He sings a song of appology to his mother for being such a big baby….16 lbs..The Song of Incontinence! Then comes a Speed Dating song, A bit of a “too gay straight experience”, a Lament for Phone Boxes, closing with a “Vomit and Wee” song in which everyone sings along with the chorus. All the while engaging the audience with his friendly banter and deftly dealing with a 2 year old child at the performance.

August 10. 2009 Monday
I made it to Scara Brae, Circle of Broder, St Mangus Church in Kirkwall (see video) all before getting on the 4:20 ferry to Westray.

4 days later.. I’m just leaving Westray…I wept when I arrived and wept as I was leaving Westray. The Island is a warm place that enfold me in its firmly woven community. Where everyone waves from behind their steering wheels to acknowledge each other as they drive by. From the moment the ferry docked I was warmly greeted by Jock and James, two bachelor brothers who had heard Jim was having a visitor and were on the look out for me. They jumped in my car and asked me if I could drive them up the gang plank to their Land Rover, and after several attempt to interpret what they were trying to say….thick Orkney accents need to be heard at least three times before I could understand what the were saying. One brother James held my hand for quite awhile, telling me I was very welcome. They said I could follow them to Jim’s place…it was a great indication the close knit community and I felt immediately “at home”.
Gentle, rolling hills, miles of farm land with cattle and sheep, gorgeous sandy beeches and castles, hundreds of ancient stone crofts falling apart by the road side in a romantic tumble of decay and sturdiness.
Jim sits at his kitchen table, with the bare light bulb, just like he did back in Vancouver, his mail and business affairs and vitamin regime all organized on the table. I was relieved to see him looking much as he had 5 years ago. He’s 94 now and his older brothers and sisters have gone. He’s the last of his family. A nephew William, another career bachelor, (I heard there are 100 bachelors on the island) runs the farm now. Their farm is now 300 acres of cattle land which has grown from the 67.5 their family began with. Lochend, the name of Jim’s farm. All farms have a name instead of a numbered address, which makes places hard to find as most of the place names are not on the houses. Jim has a book with all the houses and history of each place and family and name of the house, that’s the best way to find anything on Westray. Jim says this can be my second home now. “Plenty of room” he says, “tell your brother and friends to come and stay”, “I need company” says Jim. Jim and his brother built the new 5 bedroom house in the 50’s.
Jim has several village women caregivers that look after him, they come at 8am, 12noon and Alyson from the Pierowall Hotel, brings him up his supper and gives his back a wash if he need it. She makes the best fish and chips in Westray and brings us both dinner while I am visiting. Last night, I had a big blue lobster (13 lbs) from Crostie’s Lobster Ponds and periwinkles, unbelievable fresh and delicious.
Had an afternoon Van tour with Westraak, Kathy and her kind husband who run the Half Yok café. We (all four of us) went up to the Lighthouse at Noup Head, perched high atop the cliffs, where the bird life is astonishing, Kittywakes, Ganets, Squeers all nesting in the ridges of the rock face. Then to an archeological dig site near my favourite beech, where I think they will find an ancient stone village even bigger that Skara Brae.
Jock visits Jim every day at 6 to water his plants, the tomatoes in the front porch and the pear tree in the green house in the back garden and do any small chores Jim may need done. Jim has a walker and can still get from his electric Easy boy chair to the table, bathroom and his bedroom down the hall, but that’s it these days, no leaving the house. He dreams of striking it rich (through some mail scheme) so he can have a big staff, a secretary and a motor home equipped with a nurse so he can see the county and have his freedom.
Found two kittens in Jim’s yard, of course I started leaving food for them. I asked Jock to keep it up, he said he would.
Visited Jock and his brother yesterday to have my Nun photos taken, Jock is so shy, taking a photo was a big deal for him and he was scared to make a mistake. We took the Nun photos by a tumbled down stone cottage with a blue door that he owns next door to Dogtoo, the name of his cottage. Jock come from a family of 13 children, his sister Kitty, fell of the cliff when she was 18 and a few others have passed away or moved away.

I finally sang for Jim last night, didn’t know if I’d get to it as he seemed to need to talk more than listen. Started with “That’s the Glory of Love” and then did “Strip Tease of the Soul” and “Halloween”, and a bit of Pollyhymnia…when ever I’d start speaking lines they seemed to think I was just speaking, so they could speak too….so I stopped that and listened.
I was really glad I sang to Jim. He was pleased to have a little song and dance in his kitchen. He said “it’s so human, your songs. You just don’t know what to expect, you’ve got something there. You fit in so easily here.”