I’m doing the Edinburgh Fringe this year and I’ve already fucked it up 2019: Entry 5

 the first day of the Free Fringe has come and gone.

I went to the gym in the morning determined to lose not just sterling pounds but also a few pounds of fat if possible by the end of the month. We’ll see how long that lasts. I burned several calories trying to get into  and out of the gym as it is in the basement at the bottom of a maze in  a fancy hotel. This is super weird because it is the cheapest gym in the country. I am passing very important, suited people with briefcases and I’m wearing the kind of workout gear that makes me look like I am about to paint a house. 

I spend my gym time listening to the podcast 99% Invisible, it is a podcast about angry people fixing bad design and Fresh Air, an NPR podcast by Terry Gross. I am spending my mornings listening and reading anything not entertainment related in a futile attempt to keep my head  outside the Fringe bubble. 

I work on the show for a few hours and I am very proud of it. 70% new material and 30% stuff that usually always works. Given that Seinfeld gets rid of 10% of his material a year , I like to think he would be impressed. 

I flyer by myself as the guy I hired doesn’t start until tomorrow and I’m not too worried. It is a small room and the Fringe Fringe hasn’t officially started yet anyway. I spend a few minutes just before the show starts adding another comic as a Fitbit friend that I can compete steps with. That is the weird thing about the Fringe. When you are flyering about a half an hour before your show and are trying to get people in, every comic you’ve ever met in the past year will pass by and want to have a little chat about what they are doing and why they can’t come to your show tonight . This might sound weird  and Californian but  I think it might have something to do with the energy we put out revving up for the show, it is probably our most social vibe .( Note to self: I must learn how to do that at will at parties and industry bars.  I am  awful at those.) To be fair. I love those chats and am guilty of doing the exact same thing to other people. If I go to hell, it will probably be because of all the shows I said I’d go to and never did.

Two friends sent by one of my best friends working in Bahrain come along with two punters that also ignored that start date on the flyer. (I knew nobody reads them!)

The room is stifling hot and sauna like but it doesn’t smell awful.  Nobody is drinking anything and this concerns me. I go out and get water for them. Carrying two cups with one hand means my fingers have been in the water but I assure them that I have just washed my hands and the water is for emergencies only. The gig goes great and nobody faints. My buck have to speech is still terrible but I make a decent bucket even though my card reader can’t find it’s g-spot and I forfeit a fiver. 

The two friends of a friend and I go to Bob’s bus for a drink and have the conversation only Americans who have spent most of their adult life abroad can have. I learn that it is possible to get sick of even the best Italian food and that Saudi mens can’t drive, let alone Saudi women. These new friends are ace. 

I make sure they find their cab back to their hotel a little past midnight. I start to walk home and pass Tom Stade and his wife, the photographer Trudy Stade. They are so super cool. I feel like I’ve just made friends with the most popular kids in school, the cool kids EVERYBODY likes and wants to be around. 

Not a bad way to start the Fringe.

This daily blog will not be proofread for spelling or punctuation, just like Chortle.

Click here for details about my Edinburgh Fringe 2019 show

I am doing the Edinburgh Fringe and I've already fucked it up 2019 Diary: Entry 1

It’s that time of the year again. The Edinburgh Fringe is starting in a few days and I’ve just renewed my Squarespace webpage subscription and am thinking “I should be getting more out of this website that I never look at or update. How can I get more people to look at it without updating it?! I know! I’ll just pretend it is 2004 and start a blog!” 

I’ve been doing the Edinburgh fringe since 2010 and the one thing it has taught me is that every year when I finish I think to myself, ” I have experienced every challenge  Edinburgh  can throw at someone doing a free show. You can’t surprise me anymore!” The next year, I am promptly surprised and baffled as soon as the flat keys are handed to me. 

This year I have already surprised myself by putting the wrong start date on the posters and flyers. The start date is supposed to be  1-25 of August but I have written 2-26th of August! So smart of me to get my first fuck-up out of the way even before I get on the train.  My spirit animal, Sarah Conner, would not be proud. 

Because this will be a daily blog and I am typing with one hand, I will not be proofreading for spelling or punctuation so forgive me like you do Chortle. And now I’m off to carry out my favorite financial mistake of the year…

It should read 1-25 August

Delicious Pain: A Tale from a Tokyo Hospital

Since being born blue a month early, head to head, with my identical twin in photo finish fashion (Nobody knows which one of us was born first. I think it was me because she was dead at the time.) I've spent more time than my fair share in a hospital. Over the past ten years, I've had four knee surgeries in Tokyo. Several years ago, I snapped my ACL ligament doing a jump kick in karate class. (I know, I'm a jackass.) The doctor at the time wouldn't fix it because, in the doctor's words, "You're not an athlete. You're a woman." As a result, I've needed patch up surgeries over the years. This year, I've finally got the ACL repaired. Here's one thing I've learned over the years.

In Japanese hospitals, pain is considered a relatively good thing. When my kneecap broke in three places and my leg started to spasm, causing me to internally stab my thigh over and over, I screamed for morphine. The doctors and nurses laughed. " You're not getting morphine! You don't have brain cancer." I was encouraged by the ER nurse to look around and see all the other patients correctly suffering in silence as they waited to be treated. I look up and sure enough, there in front of me was a salary man with a samurai sword through his head waiting patiently as he pretended to be asleep, or maybe he was dead. I don't know. All I know is that the only other people screaming were two, what looked like 7 year-old boys with broken fingers. The three of us locked eyes and began screaming in unison, creating a Bermuda Triangle of Pain. By that, I mean everyone around us pretended we didn't exist. A few minutes later, the doctor agreed to give me a "mild morphine". However, they only had suppositories. Yep, that's right, the home of the space-age toilet doesn't have chewables. The nurse said,"We will have to remove your clothing." "I can't move!" "What do you want us to do?" "Cut them off and stick the morphine up me!" "But they are nice clothes!" "They are from Uniqlo. Cut them OFF!" Had I been in America, the nurse would have been cutting through my clothes with massive shears as I was wheeled into the ER saying something along the lines of, " Oh, I'm sorry, did you want to wear your wedding dress again?"

Perhaps the best example of just how comfortable Japan is with pain is the fact that friends smuggled drugs into the hospital for me. Yup, I routinely got gifted chocolate, Starbucks and a bottle of valium. I soon became a model patient:)

Buxom Buddies: A Story for Early Developers

I grew up in a rural suburb of Kansas City, a place where a car is the only means of freedom. There was no grocery store, movie theater, ice cream shop or hangout I could walk to. I walked outside the front of my house and saw cows; if I walked out the backdoor, I saw woods and occasionally, my dad in his underwear. It took me five minutes to walk from my house to the end of the driveway to catch the school bus in the morning. I could run it in three, but I tried not to. The reason? My mother could never acknowledge that by the fifth grade, my breasts were larger than hers. Therefore, she never bought me a bra that fit.

On the days I made a mad rush down the 2 1/2 acre front yard to catch the already waiting busーmy boobs bopped, flopped, and damn near slapped me in the face. Trying to dodge my boobs, I looked up and saw kids hanging out the bus windows, laughing and juggling invisible balls in front of their chests.

As I crawled up the bus steps out of breath, the large, red headed, heavy smoker-bus driver looked down at me. Wiping her mascara ruining tears away, she struggled for enough air between cackles to wheeze, "Damn Girl!" closing the door behind me.

Nobody knows where my boobs came from. They are not from my mother or father. I believe they are a gift from God. Only he would know how much I'd fall flat on my face and how much I needed the extra couple of inches of cushion to keep me from breaking my nose. Plus, I they provided a place to put my keys, wallet, ID, homework, lunch...

When I was twelve, my mother told me I should have a breast reduction, and while we're at it, a nose and eye job. At the time I thought, " If I get a breast reduction, I'll eventually break my nose as it will now bust on the pavement. The nose job will have to come sooner or later, Mom's just thinking ahead...but I never thought I'd damage my eyes in a fall." I watched a news program about plastic surgery and was horrified. I wasn't going to let strange fully-clothed men draw all over on my naked body with a blue marker. The surgery never happened for me.

Needless to say, my mother was addicted to plastic surgery and endless beauty regimes. I watched her go through a facelift and a nose job. For two weeks she slept sitting up in bed, her entire head and face wrapped in white cloth. She looked like the Elephant Man.

Yet, it never occurred to her that eating well, getting 8 hours sleep, abstaining from several glasses of alcohol and pots of coffee every day might make her beautiful. (To be fair... does that occur to anyone?)

When I was eleven, she pointed out to me that my "boobs were already droopy". In my mother's eyes, my boobs were not "big" but "old". From the age of eleven to twenty-five, I believed her. I thought I had " Granny Boobs". I also believed it was my fault. "I should have never ran so fast down the yard to catch the bus, I've ruined the elastic in my boobs already..." I thought.

When I was twenty-five, I performed at the Melbourne comedy festival In Australia. There I saw a novelty t-shirt in a tourist gift shop that had, "Tits around the World" written above various cartoonish representations of boobage.

From that shirt I learned that I did not have "Granny Boobs" at all. As a matter of fact, what I had was found under the category " Porn Star Boobs".

It was like the ugly duckling discovering she'd turned into, not a swan, but a stallion. I walked out of the store a little taller, though it did hurt my back a bit.