Short and Character Building

Man, this is a strange existence and no mistaking. In 24 hours, we went from sitting and miserably analysing why we lost the crowd last night (turns out there were some drunken arses in the front row who annoyed the rest of the audience) to being chuffed to bits about the show and everything to do with it. We did two strong and funny shows (I broke my own personal best (or worst) by corpsing so hard at Willie that I actually cried), got two great reviews here and here, and found out that we're being interviewed by Lauren Laverne for BBC Radio 6 on 16th and have a talent scout from the Montreal Just for Laughs festival coming to check us out on 19th.

So. Effing. Stoked. The ride starts here.

Sven arrives...

Firstly, the sensible stuff. I watched Andrew O'Neill who is and was, as always, ace. By far and away one of the most under-rated comedians on the circuit. Also Josie Long, who is getting all the press and praise she deserves because she is brilliant and, more importantly keeps getting better. If you haven't, see them.

We had a tough audience tonight. Lots of them, but somehow about two thirds of the way through the show, we lost them and never got them back. Being behind a puppet screen means that we can't see the audience, and as a result have no idea what we did or didn't do to make them stop laughing. So we went to the pub to have a quiet post mortem pint to see if we could work it out. It's now about half five, so you can guess what went wrong with that plan. Sven got involved. I could explain who Sven is, but right now sleep seems more important, so I will end this by saying that Will, Kitty and I have just walked from a random roundabout where we got kicked off a bus we probably shouldn't have been on in the first place, which at any other time in the world would be weird, but in Fringe terms is fairly par for the course. Willie will probably blog this and make more sense, but I'm typing this to keep me awake while I eat Bacon Tastys. And I have the weekend to look forward to...

Thoughts from near the end of week one.

Is it Thursday already? Crap, time is going fast over here. Last night was a pick up from Tuesday in some ways--though we had a small crowd for the Arts show, we had a decent crowd for Oppressed People, and Stewart Lee was in the audience, apparently. Only the one review out so far, though we did have this article in the Scotsman, which is pretty good. Sadly, I don't think there were any pics attached, which would have made it extra special, but I have yet to go out and by the paper itself.

Yesterday was a miserable shit ass terrible horrible rainy Scottish day, with the rain switching between heavy and pissy little drizzle. It was impossible to get dry all day long, and there was almost no one up on the Royal Mile to hand out fliers to. Thus, I went to see some theatre at the venue--a production called 'Alexander', which is a play about our Greek friend in two parts. I saw part one, and what I learned was that Greek men were pretty good at A)Shouting, and B)kissing each other. The whole thing was written, directed by, and starred by a nice young lady who encouraged us at the end of the play to book her show. It was kind of like a Greek Lounge act.

Hopefully today the weather will be better, and we'll start getting some crowds in. We've put tickets on the Half Price Hut, which should get us some play, and I'mma send the boys out flyering and Kitty in a low cut shirt just as soon as they get up. We've still got nine boxes of fliers, with about 1,500 fliers in each box to get rid of, so it's bidness time.

I hope you're well, and it's not my baby.

-W

The Come Down

Wow. How quickly the mighty fall. After a kick ass opening night, we found ourselves last night with about nine people in the first show, and seven in the second (five of which were freebies from our venue). To be fair, we did a small section of the show in the city which ended up taking up a lot of our time, so we didn't get nearly as much flyering done as we should have, but it was a pretty sad scene nonetheless.

Today, we pick ourselves up, dust off, and start flyering to try and get some bidness.

In somewhat better news, we got a good review from some students, right here

The Day After (the Night Before)

It felt like the Fringe last night. Opening night of both shows. 11:15p.m. and 12:15 a.m. First show very nearly full, second show sold out. Some of the people from Paradise Green, our venue, came and represented well. They love us, and they love drinking, so they were nice and loud. Oppressed People, shown up here for the first time since last year, went down great (though a quieter crowd than Arts). We sold twelve pounds of badges, which was a couple of drinks. We drank those drinks across the street at Dropkick Murphy's, where Monday night is two pound a drink night. Several venue type people ended up hanging out with us, and the result was our first stumbling out of the bar at 3a.m. night. We waited for a bus, so then got bored and took a cab. Total cost for bus=5 pounds for the 4 of us. Cab=18 pounds. Let the games begin.

Kitty looking suave and subtle.


Won't you drink with us? Two Will's and a Christian (pronounced Christie-Anne). She's Irish and her Dad owns the Guinness factory. Will's only 18. I look inbred. We had fun.

Kitty in Great Peril.

Apparently, at some point, it was decided by the gays that Tom has the gayest ass (shown above).
By the end of the evening, I had sold Kitty for Five English Pounds. They were good times.

The Cock tails

Will is omitting one of the most important details of our cocktail excursion, and that is the drink names.

Jammy Dodger
I thought this was the gayest name on earth, until Will informed me that it's actually the name of a cookie here. A GAY cookie!

Froots Manuva
Huh? Is this some misguided attempt by the Scottish to replicate a terrible Brooklyn accent in print? So, would that make it a Fruits Maneuver? What the hell is a Fruits Maneuver?

Bull Master
This actually reminds me that my new American friends, Eli and Kate, told me that KFC had a product here call the Box Master. Both sound like an ill fated sexual maneuver....Oh, sorry, I mean "manuva."

Woo Woo
Yeah, I see the leprechaun!!! Will actually had one of these. I'm not sure, though, if it is the one that tasted like tires or the one that tasted like Cabbage Patch dolls.

Polish Bullet
I know there is a little ill will towards the Polish here, but, come on. That's just insensitive. Or is it like the Silver Bullet? A frozen, yet, not very bright train crashing through Edinburgh? If that is the case, I'm all on board.

-Kitty

The Cocktail Show (Sunday Preview)

So as you can see from the previous post, Sunday was 'The Great Big Cocktail Show'. While we here at the Shitty Deal Puppet Theatre Company do not endorse the consumption of alcohol before performances, it was our best performance yet. Hmmmm.....

And now, some photos.

Remember how I said we were opposite an Irish Bar and a Sauna? Well here they are. Dropkick Murphy's and Merchant Street sauna. Note the slogan of Dropkick's "Crack is Cool". Yes. Yes it is.

This is the Elephant House, with a big sign saying that this is where Harry Potter was made. It was only later we found out that everywhere in Edinubrgh is where Harry Potter was made. HARRY FRICKIN POTTER!!!1!10!
A bunch of stupid Greeks outside our venue. We hate Greeks. Hate em. So before the show we had almost no money, and went out to one of the few places you can get cheap drinks in Edinburgh--the vodka bar, Revolution, where you can get two cocktails for five pounds. Andy wasn't so sure--

But Kitty was totally up for it.
The gang all joined in--
But after a couple of cocktails, it got weird. It's when Andy gets that look in his eyes.
This was an hour before the show. There had been too many cocktails. There was only one person to blame.

It always seems to come back to Kitty. All that being said, it was our best show to date. So God Bless Cheap Ass Cocktails at the Revolution.

Waterloo Days and Cocktail Nights

The Duke of Wellington, when asked about his recollections on the Battle of Waterloo, stated that he "must have put his cloak off and on again a hundred times"* because of the changeable weather. Sorry, Arthur, but that ain't nothing compared to what's going on in Edinburgh right now. The endless, and seemingly unpredictable, cycle of sunRAINsunRAINsunRAIN makes flyering on the mile an interesting experience, if only when choosing what to wear. Added to that the fact that our venue is a sweatbox of a crypt with sweaty actors, audiences and melting stage lights, means that by the end of the day, I'm a sweaty mess, but my hair looks cool. Small mercies.

I finally got to watch a couple of shows yesterday: Comedy O'Clock, a portmanteau show featuring four standups, including Nick Helm, who is a wonderful MC, and Catie Wilkins, who is so filthy in her set that in my mind she and I fell in love just a little. We also saw a guy called Donald Mack, whose show Adventures of an Orgasm Donor (or, according to the venue posters Orgasm Doner, which sounds like an exciting kebab), made me laugh so much that the poor guy had to interrupt his set until I had shut up. Highly recommended.

The final preview of our new show had a good, and loud, crowd and went very well, possibly due to the cheap cocktails we'd been drinking beforehand. I'm sure Willie will post pictures of these fine beverages in due time. Only lack of money forced us to curtail our cocktail consumption, which is probably a good thing, since by the time I got to bed I was so full of Red Bull that I couldn't sleep, though a combination of a kitten attacking my toes, the seagulls outside doing some sort of all-Hyena version of Macbeth, and Kitty snoring like the creaking of an old pirate barque may have had something to do with it. Thank god for the iPod, says I.

Since this blog seems to be rapidly descending into mutual cast insulting, I'd like to say that I love all my fellow cast members and their stupid faces. Only time will tell how long this will last...

* I may have got this quotation a little wrong, so don't bother flaming me.

???

I don't know who any of these people are or how I became involved in this misadventure of tastless, rambling bull-c*nt juice, all I can say at this point is that I was once "The Funny One" of this queer quartet ('Queer-tet'...yes. Boom shakka-lakka etc) but that this
year, the mantle has been laboriously and unmitigatedly been passed on to the witty McKitty, probably due to her boobs, her skill with a pair of knitting needles and because of thing she does with a baby lamb that has gaffa tape over it's mouth and cannot speak nice words as a result. Stupid lamb.

Everyone loves Kitty, though most of everyone knoweth not why. Probably because they're as drunk as she is when they make up their minds that they like her so much, and can't remember the specifics of the joy she brought, only that they joy tasted fine.

The less said about Andy the better. If you insult him he likes it. If you compliment him, he likes it. If you f*ck him up the bum with a spade (a digging implement, not a black person) he likes it. (Note to black people: don't sleep easily on that say so of mine, I don't know shit). Andy loves people who can't spell or get grammar wrong. Srsly.

There are cats here. They make me sneeze. They make more sense than I do, though less sense than the rabbits.

Shut up Willie. Shut up and suck my balls gently.

This is the Edinburgh Fringe. Not it's not s think you keep milk and cheese in. That's a fridge.

Itakemyleaveofyou.

Tahm.

Booby McEverybodylikesmebestsosuckit Throws Her Two Cents In

Or would it be 2 pence. I'll have to check my ziplock bags.

Kitty here! First of all, you boys can suck it! If it weren't for me, nobody would remember you from last year.

Well, let's see, what to add. Things seem to be falling into place quite well this year. Last year was so new and so overwhelming, for me, perhaps, more so, not having been out of the US since I was a teenager (is there anything grammatically correct about that sentence? I'm sure Andy knows). We seemed to spend the first week running around like drunk children taking it all in and trying to figure out what was going on. This year is is old hat. Why, it's day 3 and we've already been drinking at the Underbelly (sloooooowest bar EVAR) twice!

Will and I also trekked over to another venue bar with Jack and Carys (God, I know I'm spelling that wrong) where we were mistaken for Irish Comedians. That's right, folks. Irish Comedians. The thing is, normally Will and I would joke around about this with the fella' doing the mistaking for a little while, but we were tired and crazed from the drive enough to turn into sarcastic little shit heads about it. I think Andy is rubbing off on us.

Andy and Will keep talking about schmoozing "the hotties," but in real life, Andy calls them "the babies" which is gross and makes him sound like a pedophile.

I am already annoyed by foreign keyboards. I actually had to ask a stranger where the @ was the other day. Everything is so damn different. So, I get that English people are TOTALLY unable to use ANY of the same words we do (plaster=band-aid, torch=flashlight, junction=intersection, the list is endless and they ALWAYS correct you when you use the "wrong" word (well, at least Andy does)) but ONE LETTER?! REALLY??? You absolutely can't have ANYTHING the same????


OK, where was I? Oh, I don't know. Let's talk about last night. Last night we went to the Underbelly where we met three crazy drunk vegan Glaswegians. I'm not quite sure how, but we ended up talking about Ox tongue and apparently slamming ones glass on the table is a terribly Glaswegian thing to do.

I also left my notebook on the table and, while I wasn't looking, this was written on it.....*ahem*

"Kitty has multiple wombs. ('uteri'...that's plural.)"

Thank you for that nugget of trivia Andy and Tom.

OK, I'm on the Fringe office computer and they are bound to kick me off soon. More non sequitur ranting later, I promise.

-Kitty

A view from the Englishman.

Not that the Axis of Evil is at all competetive, but I thought it my duty to at least attempt to post on here before Kitty. Only when I click 'publish' will we find out if I've been successful.

Being back at the Fringe this year is weird. In one way we're all older, wiser, and just a teeny bit more professional, yet it sometimes feels like the last 11 months have ceased to exist and we're just picking up where we left off at the end of last year's festival. Only my hair is longer, Kitty's boobs are bigger, Tom's beard is gingerer, and Willie...okay, Willie doesn't change, he merely morphs between solid and liquid states depending on how many times he corpses during the show.

I did my first long stint flyering on the Mile yesterday and loved it. Early in the festival, everyone is almost eager to hear about your show, so you don't get c***s being incredibly rude to you because you offered them a brightly-coloured piece of A5 paper. The sun was out, and, as Willie so kindly pointed out, my policy of targetting gaggles of giggling hotties worked like a charm. Alas, it is fateful in Edinburgh to rest on one's laurels, so it is my onerous task to repeat said policy again this afternoon. Oh well, if that's my cross to bear...

Hmm. I think I like this blogging lark. I may do some more in a day or so. But only after Kitty has.

Oh, and Willie was right. I do know everything...

Day 3, Sunday (In the A.M.--Jesus's time)

Right. So far, so good. Last night we played to around 35 people, which was a pretty good crowd, and it was a pretty good show, and the laughs were pretty good, so that's pretty good. Still looking for ways to tighten up the middle bit of the show, but like the legs of a Spanish hooker, it opens and closes with great gusto as long as you've paid.

I realize we've come this far without suitable background. This is the Edinburgh Fringe. It's like theatre summer camp with booze. We're performing two shows this year, both Shitty Deal Puppet Theatre, entitled (in no particular order) "The Complete History of Oppressed People Everywhere", and "Complete Guide to the Arts". We're performing them in a 42-seat house in a dingy little theatre in the basement of a church off a dirt Edinburgh side street opposite an Irish Bar and a Turkish sauna. We fucking love it. When I say 'we' I mean the four puppeteers. There's me--Right up there! Who's the handsome fella? Who? That's right. Me. I get to say that because I write the blog. You don't like it? Suck it. Anyway That's the top of the Shitty Deal shirt. You want to see the rest, buy a ticket. I'm American, and so is--
Kitty, shown here in her finest Bengals morning-wear. Though this photo may not reflect it, everyone likes Kitty when she's dressed, which is not as often as we'd like. Kitty makes friends wherever she goes, which is nearly always Dropkick Murphy's, the bar across from our venue. Kitty once nearly had her nose broken by--

Andy, who despite being English, and it being way too early in the morning, has here managed to pose like a supermodel. Andy knows a lot about just about everything, and boy does he tell us! Andy has a unique flyering technique on the mile, called 'Schmooze the hotties'. Andy likes the puppet show, but would rather be doing stand-up, cause he gets more face time with the ladies. Andy says 'It's hard to pull behind a puppet screen.' Andy is roomates in real life with--

Tom Butterworth. Tom Butterworth, as you can see here, is frightening. If you say his name three times while looking in the mirror, Tom Butterworth will pop out of the mirror and kill you. They say Tom Butterworth hides at the ends of rainbows, only instead of having a pot of gold, he has a pot of Weapons Grade Anthrax. Tom Butterworth once shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die. Elderly people, walking by Tom in the street, feel a vague sense of their own mortality. Children get lollipops. If we don't make it home, it was Tom.

Andy and Tom are English, but we don't hold it against them. It just means they talk funny and drink tea. We're currently drinking tea in the house of Special--

Who was kind enough to let us stay with her. She can't be seen because she's in the witness protection program for mercilessly slaughtering and mutilating the body of Tigger in 1968, because she wanted to find out if his bottom was really made out of springs. Bouncy Bouncy!

So that's the cast. There are some pics of the show in a previous post. We've got one more preview show tonight (Sunday) and then tomorrow we start both shows at 11:15p.m. and 12:15a.m. back to back. This makes us a late, late show. We run up until the 26th of August, and during that time our lives will consist of flyering during the day, seeing some shows, doing a late show, and then a late late show, and then maybe drinking. Will we survive? Will we ever manage to make any money? Will Kitty ever post on this blog? Who knows! Stay tuned and find out!

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words (Preview Day 2)

So here's a six thousand word essay. Some shots from the venue on our second day. Shout outs to Geology Jack who took some photos from backstage. All shots taken on my flash new Finepix Z.
A backstage look. Holy Christ on the Cross, Batman!

Check out that ass crack on Averill. Good work, son.
There's Kitty. She's got lots of papers scattered everywhere with random writing on them. You know who else has lots of papers scattered everywhere with random writings? Schizophrenics and homeless.
Dan McKee, who has hair. Tom, who has a hair fetish.
The stage is set.
Fucking Dinosaurs. Fuck yeah.

Kitty's promised to blog tomorrow. I think she's a liar. Till later,

W