I’m doing the Edinburgh Fringe this year and I’ve already fucked it up 2019: Entry 7

Show day three and it is the first Saturday of the Fringe. The holiday makers have settled into their hotels and are walking around town bewildered with backpacks looking like freshman at their first day at uni.

Since I overdid my walking the day before, I do my best to stay in the flat as long as possible to give my legs a rest. I have very mild cerebral palsy that affects the right side of my body. Naked, I look like my dominant left side of my body has been beating up the comparatively  scrawny right side for its lunch money for a few decades. My left side has been working overtime and I don’t want to piss it of this early in the fringe. I don’t leave the flat till 2:00.

I go a do a spot at Funny Cluckers at the Three Sisters. It is Ian Fox’s compilation show of adult humor and Saturday’s audience was full but very sober. No boozy brunch for these people. They were nice and got onboard with the show eventually. 

Afterwards, I walk to the Meadows park listening to a podcast with my headphones on about how women shouldn’t walk around with headphones on because they could get attacked and raped. I took one headphone out of my ear mid-podcast. 

My temporary solution  to turn my nightly sauna into a comedy room before my more permanent solution arrives from Amazon is putting bags of ice throughout the room. Low and behold it works! Especially since someone put in a fan.  A bucket of ice in front of a fan did manage to bring the temperature in the room down from a boil to a simmer. 

We had a full house last night. So full that I had to stand on the sofa to be seen by everyone, even in that tiny room. 

The show is going well. I am tweaking bits here and there but generally the show is in good shape. I am rushing the show a bit still since the room is so hot. I am doing my best to give the audience no time to even think about how hot it is. I sound like an audiobook being read at 1.5x speed. 

I am still shit at the bucket speech but that should improve in time. I used to think I was a good salesman as a kids because I sold a lot of candy bars for school fundraisers. Looking back I realize a disabled little girl hawking chocolate bars door-to-door by herself  is hard to say not to.  A disabled adult that just made you sit in a sauna for an hour…well, didn’t they just prove in sweat how much they liked your show? Why should they give you a tenner? My solution which should arrive today or tomorrow will hopefully help.

Afterwards, I ran into Chris Betts, a very funny Canadian walking out of one of the Monkey Barrel extension rooms. He was on his way to see Glen Wool work on new material and I tagged along. Wool was amazing as usual.  I’ve seen Glen Wool live a few times and we did the same gig once last year. He is a nice guy whose leather vest and saunter  always makes me think of the Bounty Hunter in Raising Arizona,  especially now that he has a baby. During the show  I wonder if he will get a pair of bronzed baby shoes and attach it to his belt.

On my way home, I run into a friend that 8 years ago, at the fringe, introduced me to my now boyfriend and has said my favorite sentence of the Fringe ever. “I can’t flyer for you now Spring. I have to crochet a scarf.”

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

Click here for more info about my 2019 Edinburgh Show

I’m doing the Edinburgh Fringe this year and I’ve already fucked it up 2019: Entry 6

I don’t know why I contemplated joining a steam room with some other performers when it turns out I am performing in a sauna every night. 

Every comedian complains about how chilly Scotland is in August and how roasting it is in the venues. It is often uncomfortably hot but my room is ridiculous this year. Everyone who went in to the show with curly hair came out with damp straight hair. The only ones not fazed by the heat were the Scottish punters that  could somehow pretend they were on a tropical island that smelled like a cave people dance in.

I am happy that everyone in the audience is facing in the right direction. I’ve learned you need punters not to be able to look at other punters faces when watching dark comedy or they will start to wonder what other people think of them. That said, my room is too hot to think in. I am rushing the show every so slightly in order to distract them from how hot it is. In a way I feel like a child in the back seat of the car desperately trying to entertain the family on the summer vacation drive across the US in a car with no air conditioning and the windows rolled up and oxygen becomes less and less available.  I thought one punter hated it but it turns out he was just trying not to faint. I am working on a solution.

A lovely couple from Nottingham that had seen me at the Glee Club few weeks ago came as well as a punter with a massive guitar who came a few minutes late. I did not let in a woman who asked to come in after a half hour had passed. I am considering not letting in any latecomers at all, it’s not like I am in an auditorium where punters can quietly sit in the back unnoticed. It feels more like someone asking if  they can join a dinner party in progress while the host is telling a story everyone is into. We all get pulled out of the story as we all move over to make room. It is not ideal. 

I go to an industry bar hoping to run into someone I know to spitball possible solutions. Everyone suggests getting a fan but there is zero cool air coming in that it will just exacerbate the situation and it just makes me think of Ebola.  I will try some ideas I have tonight as my big solution from Amazon is coming tomorrow. We will see how that goes.

I then lost my phone. I retraced my steps from the industry bar back to the venue and had no luck finding it there. I then remember googling “How  to cool a hot room” and getting the answer, “Sleep like an Egyptian” (Apparently, that is a thing) near the industry bar. It seems my phone had fallen out on the couch I was sitting on when I realized it was gone and was just behind me the whole time I was looking for it.  Someone turned it in at the bar. 

I go home having made my Fitbit very happy and crash into bed.

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’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’m doing the Edinburgh Fringe this year and I’ve already fucked it up 2019: Entry 4

Hello August! 

It was the day before the official start of the Fringe so I spent three hours going over my show after a breakfast of croissants, nuts and adrenaline. 

After skipping the gym, I have hot chocolate with my festival wife  of several years and runner of the show Funny Cluckers, Ian Fox. We talked a lot about illogical fallacies and Fitbits. Apparently, you can “make friends” with other people who have Fitbits and compete via the app in terms of how many steps you take a day. You can press a button to cheer them on or another to taunt them. Taunt is a perfect word for socially acceptable bullying in Silicon Valley, I suppose. I  look forward to leaning on that button in the future.

Ian and I go to do a tech run, find my flyers and my posters at my venue Cabaret Voltaire and I am proud to report that mine are some of the most legible out  there on the street. So much so, within seconds of looking at it,  Ian points out that the quote about me  on the back of my flyer from the extraordinary Tony Slattery,  one of the original members of “Who’s Line is it Anyway” is printed as a quote from “Tom Slattery” instead.  A quick google search reveals that Tom Slattery is the English translator for Final Fantasy video games. It’s a stupid mistake on my part but who cares? At least it’s not a quote from my mom.

I then went and saw one of my favorite comedians that works on his feet, do a preview. I sort of wish I was the kind of comic that could “just work it out on stage” . I have done so with bits and pieces, but never whole chunks. I really enjoyed the preview and with any luck schedule-wise, I’ll watch the finished product at the end of the month. It is probably silly,  but I enjoy having heroes at the Fringe, it adds to the magic of it all and makes the “job” more fun. I don’t want to be like my friends that work at Disneyland or Universal Studios and can no longer enjoy it the way they used to. 

I had forgotten to eat most of the day and have to be careful to not let that happen. I then went to the Free Festival launch at the Three Sisters on Cowgate where there is free food. I recommend to a fellow comic who is at the Fringe for the first time to buy a bag of crystalized ginger  at the health food store for when his throat will inevitably get sore. He was skeptical so  I tapped the shoulder of another comic I told to do the same last year. This other comic sang the praises of crystalized ginger and hooked up my friend with a weed dealer so he could experience the healing powers of ginger for himself as soon as possible.

I then went home and called my boyfriend who teased me for still having heroes in comedy. He didn’t use the words” having heroes” he said, “ having a crush” but whatever.

This blog will not be checked for spelling or punctuation just like Chortle.

I’m doing the Edinburgh Fringe this year and I’ve already fucked it up 2019: Entry 3

Hello from Edinburgh! 

After taking yet the wrong exit out of Edinburgh Waverley Station , I have found and settled into my digs for the month with my portable rice cooker. 

My host has requested that we not charge phones or chargers overnight as “these things are known to cause fires”. Fair enough. I am now worried that my portable rice cooker might start a fire because it is called  the “insta-shef” and anything that spells “chef” with an “sh” probably has a warning in the small print about it “catching phire easily” 

I had a preliminary walk around town. I love this time of the festival when everybody still has hope and hasn’t seen a flyer for their show in the gutter yet. The venues are still setting up  and building things, even the paid venues are, which always surprises me. 

I ran into the lovely Paul Currie about sea swimming and had a chat with my friend Lucy about possibly joining something that has a sauna or steam room for the month. We’ll see how that goes.

Oh the plans we make just before the fringe starts! Everyone I know is thinking about going to the gym while they are here but that is never going to happen.  I’ve been here less than a day and my Fitbit has already orgasmed 5 times.

Just before I went to bed, I bought tickets to a preview for  show for the next day that I knew I would not have time to see once the festival got started. Previews are the best.  They get loads of people because the tickets are half-price or cheaper and I love being around fellow frugals, they are smart, savy people eager to laugh.  When my boyfriend bought me an expensive gift for Christmas, it made me happy. It made me even happier when he told me he had searched for vouchers online and got it for 30% off.

I went to buy the ticket when I realized I couldn’t find my wallet. It was missing from my bag and I panicked. I first thought I must have left it at Tesco’s.  “Every Edinburgh there is a disaster and losing my wallet before the festival has even started is mine. Maybe one of my flatmates stole it while I was in the shower! I knew this room was too good to be true!” I called my boyfriend and he told me to relax. He loses his wallet all the time. It’s no big deal.” Which is fine for him. I am not the kind of person that loses their wallet. I’m he kind of person that gets hit by a bus triple checking in the middle of the street that she has her wallet in her bag. 15 minutes later, I find the wallet under my bed as it must have fallen out when I took out the shopping. This is going to be a long month.

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

Click here for details about my 2019 Edinburgh show.

I have been here for less than a day and my Fitbit has orgasmed 5 times already.

I’m doing the Edinburgh Fringe this year and I’ve already fucked it up 2019: Entry 2

Here we go...

Now on the train to Edinburgh after a day of clean up, packing and a lovely pickle tickle from the boyfriend before I make like Harry Potter and take the train from Kings Cross.

It’s as I get to Kings Cross I realize I haven’t downloaded my tickets and the internet in the station is shit so I take my enormous suitcase which I’ve packed a portable rice cooker and food storage stuff in the hopes I will cook more at home this festival. Where the hell do I get my optimism? I will be eating chips constantly in three days. 

I go to the Starbucks outside the station and order a chai tea while waiting for my tickets to download on their WiFi. 

Once they are downloaded, I head back to the station with a messenger bag, backpack and pushing a suitcase large enough and heavy enough to carry two dismembered bodies while holding the very hot chai with the same hand I am pushing the suitcase with spilling the chai everywhere. My suitcase is drenched in hot tea and my hand is burnt. But I do not let it go. This tea is coming with me on my 4 hour train trip, it is my pacifier, a pacifier that burns my hand. I have an image of me on the train looking carefree with a Starbucks. I am not carefree but I will have the Starbucks dammit. 

I pour tea on everything all the way to the station. My suitcase looks like it has been pissed on by a dog from a balcony. 

A woman dressed in red and looks like she works for the train line offers to help me with my bag and rearranged everything  in the luggage area with the deftness of a Tetris champion and that is when it is apparent she doesn’t work for the train line. She is just another passenger being very kind. Nobody that worked for a train line in this country would be that helpful without an eye-roll and a sigh. 

This daily blog will not be checked for punctuation or spelling so forgive me like you do Chortle. 

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.

Famous People in Japan

Being a Westerner in Tokyo has it's perks. One of my elusive favorites is spotting famous people from back home. Stars look so cool, calm and "king of the world" until they arrive in the Land of the Rising Sun. Once they come through customs where they've been shown a picture hard core porn and heroin needles and asked, "Did you bring this with you?" A look of, " What the fuck is going on!?!" sets in on their faces and doesn't go away until they are back sleeping in their own beds in the old country. My first hour in Japan, I saw Sting. Rather, I would have, had I not been in the toilet. All of the other exchange students saw him walk through the gate. ( Apparently, he owns a house in Japan somewhere.) One of the students yelled, " Hey Sting! You're great!" Sting looked at him, decided the student wasn't dangerous, smiled, waved, and disappeared into the crowd. ( Yeah, it's possible for white people to do that here.)

One of my friends stood behind Ray Charles in immigration for a minute until an officer recognized him and called him by name as they opened up a new line for him.

Another friend saw Aerosmith spill out of a McDonald's one morning in Kabukicho, Tokyo's pink district.

I will forever have warm feeling for Downtown's legendary Matsumoto Hitoshi for telling Janet Jackson she never " wanted to talk about anything interesting on his show. Will you please talk about the nipple slip!? You know that's all we want to talk about!" and how well the interpreter managed to ask her something about the weather instead.

I will never forget how a reporter asked the then Governor of California Shwa-chan, who was on a tour to promote California produce to " take off his shirt and flex his muscles for us." (He would not.)

My biggest celeb sighting was a few summers ago at Shibuya crossing. The busiest crossing in the world with over a million people using it a day. shibuya crossing The area is full of 25 year-old girls in micro-mini skirts year-round. Not a single one of them has cellulite, not even a hint of a dimple. I know that because when, in the corner of my eye, I saw cellulite in motion that didn't belong to me, it stopped me. I had to get a better look at this otherwise skinny person in a hot pants. That's when I realized I was looking at Tayor Swift then with a string of flowers in her hair and her entourage flanking her. At the time, she wasn't that famous in Japan but the poor bodyguard treated every single passerby in the crossing like a potential threat. He really need not have worried about them. He should have been walking behind her.

In Memory of Jon, the best boss ever

This week, my boss unexpectedly died of medical complications. He is without a doubt, the best boss I've ever had and he is sorely missed by everyone who knew Jon, especially those who were fortunate enough to work for him. He was a master in the powers of persuasion. I will never forget his soft voice asking me, " Would you mind doing such and such, Spring?" Then, after I've agreed to the request, he'd turn to a manager and say, " Spring said she'd love to do it."

He looked out for all of us and always brought the staff American sized bags of candy we'd almost forgotten existed, such as the frosted pink and white elephant crackers and Reese's peanut butter cups as souviners from his latest weekend trip to Guam.

A fellow techie geek, he was always helpful with personal computer problems, and if he didn't know how to fix it, he'd let you know who could. When I was contemplating buying a NetBook earlier this year, he offered me his old one for ten bucks, saying, " I've got a better one now, I've just been using that old thing as a flashlight." He even recorded the Macy's parade for me , the whole thing, when I commented that I kinda missed watching it. He always approved every staff request happily, in a country where heming and hawing and a dash of guilt is often a prerequisite for any approval given by management.

I will miss sitting with him in the office chatting and joking about TV shows, the eccentric people in our lives and the random information he'd gathered living in Japan some 30 years. ( i.e. Japanese and East German dentists used the same material for fillings and crowns so if you're of a certain age and go to an older dentist in America, he'll assume you've lived in East Germany.)

My coworker worried, " Do you think he knew how much we loved him?" I think he did. When it was announced last month in the break room that he'd be transferred to another office in 2012, it was met with a barrage of "That sucks!" and other expletives I won't write here. I remember Jon smiling at that.

Jon, we miss you and will never forget you