Iestyn Edwards Wonders...is it Lumpy or Runny?

  Relieved to hear that a certain international showgirl is refusing to go abroad this Friday. I can keep swinging my ageing legs right up to the moment I go onstage in Denmark, and not have to stand with my ear to the auditorium wall to hear which of my lines she uses before I do go on.    Though, as it says in Ecclesiastes, there is nothing new under the sun, the archaic subject matter I have chosen to lampoon in my interactive drag ballet routine has given rise to some originality.  But certainly not enough to spare.  As TV producer Piers Torday once quipped to mentalist Chris Cox:   'Don't worry that your new show's taking this long to write, love. Madame Galina has written one new line every eighteen months for thirty years and that's done her!'    And she doesn't want others using any of those forty-five lines.   Yes, I know, it's easy for me not to have to steal from others - again, the archaic premise of my act has seen to that. ...

  Reminiscing about the making of Black Narcissus Kathleen Tynon said that the lighting team had created all the atmosphere she needed to play her role. Marie Kearney has done the same for the Stage at Cafe de Paris Christmas shows. And Andrea Biondo, aka Pedro, noise-boy, knocked me up a garage  version of the Sugar Plum Fairy to dance to. Performing last night in a dreamlike atmosphere of singing pinks and hushed blues took the taste away of the truncated Christmas ballet performance I gave at Asprey's of Bond Street.    Playing the Queen of Hearts in an Alice in Wonderland installation, I was already on notice for terrifying children with my bellows of 'Off with his/her head!" And for telling them, when they asked, that the Cheshire Cat (for some reason not featured in the installation) was at the vet's.  At the Mad Hatter's Tea Party I was doing the Croquet Calypso with the Six of Hearts and the string quartet sped up unasked.    'Too fuckin...

 A poet, a cellist and I were asked on  radio at the Hay-on-Wye Festival to quote our favourite lines of poetry.  The poet's was, Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. The cellist's: For god's sake let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.  MIne: Buy one, get one free.   In the Aldeburgh Pumphouse I took part in a round-table discussion of great masterpieces that are in some way flawed. A musicologist in sandals and an egg-stained smock put forward the Joy is drunk by every creature section of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, saying it was unapproachable music, more so in the joyous and immediate light of what had gone before. A unpublished writer wearing Laura Ashley and Lily of the Valley sighed over the clunky exposure of Mr. Elliot by Mrs. Smith in Austen's Persuasion. I, in my Sue Ryder jeans and Primark black v-neck, thought that the Bend and Snap scene should have been cut from Legally Blonde .    I haven't been...

  Zinka Milanov said that a performer must know his or her limits. 'If you are a cat, then you are a cat; no matter how much you may hanker to be a dog.'      We've all done it - for whatever reason gone up for things we can't manage.    I once took on a performance of Haydn's Creation when my voice was misfiring in the no-man's land between high baritone and high baritone with a cold. I certainly didn't have the low notes for By Heavy Beasts the Ground is Trod.      But If I didn't sing on the day before the performance, I told myself, my voice would be not so much sweet and low as cold and low and I might just get away with it.    We rehearsed all afternoon. By the time I went on my voice was hot.   I was bothered. And  bribed two basses in the choir.    'When my part dips below this note,' I said, pointing at the score, 'put your copies in front of your faces, please, and join in. ...

    As I often have need to remind people: It Wasn't God who Made the Honky-Tonk Angels!   Terry Edwards, Country singer, rough edit...   I made my Country debut with a troupe of all-singing, all dancing animal puppets, featuring an emu that belted out "Anything You can do I can do Better" while a giraffe behind it took its knickers off...   The night I made my debut as dad's gimmick, he didn't forewarn, he simply took me down to the Ponderosa in Portsmouth and brought me onstage.    'I thought you'd get nervous beforehand and wouldn't be able to go through with it,' he explained.    I had one caveat: being carried centre stage on his shoulders.  I was four and felt that this was undignified.  Yes, for ten months I had carefully hidden from him and mum that I could walk, I said, but I was openly walking now and could get myself onstage, thanks.    Oh, but it looked cute my being carried, apparently.   ...

   As we near the end of the year a performer's thoughts will turn to the dreaded self assessment tax return.  Eight years ago I made a pact with myself never again to put myself through those two days of surfing receipts; forging official contracts for looking after Lady Carter's pug Mr Timothy; wondering if I would get away with claiming for two pints of Fullers Honeydew, bought to silence a city boy smoking outside the Rising Sun in Cloth Fair, after he saw me help myself to some of the festive flora on the railings of St Barts church to arrange in my hair having forgotten my tiara for a Christmas gig at Club Kabaret .    I now do a mini-tax return each month when my bank statements come, and simply tot up the running total on April 6th when I submit my HMRC self-assessment return.    Of all the self-employed professions, performers and cab drivers most frequently underpay tax; ergo they are the two professions most likely to be audited by HMRC ...

                     Champain Landscapes on Instagram      'I know Carl's not old,' Lady Waring said to me. 'But his wife's been having things to do with one of her drivers at the catering firm, which has really got to Carl and his gardening's slipping. And you would stay so well in with Lady Draven when she gets back if you've done some edging and planting.  Just some of the simple work.  You are living there rent-free.'    Leaving my full-time singing teaching job at the Guildford School of Acting in 1995, I moved into Lady Draven's house in Thorpeness. Just for her and her family to have the comfort of somebody being there at the top of the house if need be, and really only for the summer till I got myself fixed.    I stayed on into the autumn because, truth be told, I had nowhere else to go. I would never have stayed otherwise. Before I moved in Lady Draven was all footl...

  'Don't blurt about the police caution again...don't blurt about the police caution again...'    The woman on passport control at Trondheim airport was blandly staring at my passport. And I was having a word with myself, not wanting a repeat of the Kandahar Military Airport incident with Sergeant Asil on the ongoing transfers desk...      Asil was powerful in the chest, with black gelled hair and a slightly slow left eye. When the Combined Services Entertainment tour approached check in for the flight to Camp Bastion he was dealing with a bald, late-teen.    'But Asil, how can it have not got here by now?' the teen was asking.   'You know I don't control how quickly stuff gets here from the UK, Farnsey. I don't put anything personal on any kind of priority, either.'   'But it got sent two weeks ago.  What's in those sacks over there?'   'Maybe your parcel, for all we know.  But we can't go rooting through it ...

  You know when your internet provider, trying to embarrass you, asks what you've been trying to download that may be leading to these slow speeds?   I always answer:   'An album of Peruvian Nose Flute favourites beamed indirect from the server up the left peak of the Nevado Huascaran.'    Or:   'The complete collection of Joan Hickson as Miss Marple - minus the Four Fifty From Paddington  because of the mistake with the plot - dubbed into Seychellois Creole for me to learn the lingo. I'm off to perform for the Saudi Prince on the Baie Lazare Mahe Island again and only ever want to pray in the cathedral dedicated to Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception in the native language.'     Or:   ' Pissage, Fistage and Bummage Volume Six: Beechy Head Volleyball Man Slags. '   I've been able to vary this last example since meeting the hoorahly fun Topco Toyz reps at SexpoUK. I know fully well that the woman in the holid...

  'Suzie with the LED crystal light nipple tassels is number twenty-two,' I told Squirrel, techie on last Friday's SexpoUK cabaret show. ' You mean Howard, who's modelling the jewel encrusted vintage gas masks vamped for breathing play.'   You know what I said about always being ready to perform?     With just enough time to take off my XXXL pyjamas from over my XXL tutu, last Friday I was thrown on to narrate the lingerie catwalk show on the main stage at SexpoUK. The last time I took over something so last minute when I was eleven and Nigel Godfrey, singing solo next to me at Southwark Cathedral, fainted midway through Wash me Throughly .     'Ladies and gentlemen, we have La Carissa now.  If she carries on preening her boa just there she'll have her car keys taken out of the onyx bowl by the front door. Ah, Marian again, ladies and gentlemen, from the Ukraine; thinking we won't remember she wore that same dress the first time she came d...