Skip to main content

More about Performing

  Don't psyche yourself up to go onstage - company prayers, shouting of slogans, whatever it is. If you go onstage psyched, you'll be in a fake frame of mind and will never get to the truth of what you're presenting.  Do your vocal and physical workout, check your props, put your frock, slap and hat on, go onstage. Start your performance from wherever you are in your day. If what your start out with onstage is wrong, you can shake it off.  If you start out psyched, you will never do so. 
  I performed at Sexpo over the weekend and shared a dressing-room with a sumptuous line up including Des O'Connor, the Folly Mixtures, Felipe Reyes, Lolo Brow and the Dreamboys. It was all but silent and still backstage. Ooh La Lou occasionally offered around the packet of Oreos included in the rider; one of the Dreamboys needed a pair of scissors to nick the top of his vest making it easier to rip off; I asked if the embargo on my use of a Dreamboy as my onstage Warrior might be lifted at the eleventh hour, and LoLo wondered if the embargo on any of us touching the punters included throwing a condom at them from onstage? 
  One other performer, let's call her Leigh di McNeedy, did try to get us to join in with her psyching ritual.  She was letting us off lightly this time: she once spent a good twenty minutes talking a full dressing room through the contents of her Ford Kia sized make-up box at the request of absolutely none of us.
  'Wooh, last day of Sexpo, guys, let's smash it!' 
  We had another Oreo, the Dreamboy found some scissors, Lolo was given the go-ahead to throw her condom.
  'Wooh, guys, wooh - yah - last day of Sexpo, guys!' 
  'Finally!'  I said. 
  Leigh di McNeedy turned eagerly to me, hand held for a high five. I shook my head at her, and indicated Kelly, the show's producer, who was standing in the stage right wing opposite with Lotan Carter.  

                                                     Lotan's knee...

  'The dreamboys' boss says okay you can use Lotan just this once,' Kelly had just mouthed to me. 'But mind his knee!'
  'Wooh,' Leigh said lamely, and pretended she'd put her hand in the air to check the fall of her costume sleeve. 

  It's a lie to psyche, as I said - and, it has to be asked: if you psyche, what else do you lie about?
  If you're Leigh di McNeedy, apparently, you lie about being brilliant at twerking. You talk the stage crew into letting you demonstrate twerking for the ten male contestants who will compete to win a Twerking Butt Sex Toy worth £1,000. 
  You demand a fee for giving the demonstration, actually. 
  What?!
  You refuse to twerk after all, the piss-takery, if there's no extra fee in it.  
  No, you don't want one of those twerking bottom things instead what would you do with it..?
  Oh, sell it on Ebay, can you? 
  Brilliant idea! 
  So, being Leigh, you go onstage to demonstrate twerking for a grand's worth of sextoy. 
  You can't really twerk. 
  You demand to know if we watched you, did we see you, oh my god, you were twerking, like, for a whole track?  
  And you've fully deserved this thousand quid twerking bottom thing to put on Ebay. 

  Tell you, Leigh, who was watching - Nemesis.
  But let judgment roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.
  Or, put another way: Ebay doesn't allow the sale of sextoys. 

  
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Some Favourite Books - But Please don't Lesbify Dame Agatha's Denouements

  I'm too tired to read anything new so have been round the libraries taking out my default-setting books to read over Christmas. These include:    The Pursuit of Love , Nancy Mitford.   The blood-stained entrenching tool displayed above the fireplace, child-hunting over Shenley Common, Jassy traumatising the local children telling them the facts of life.  The scene at the Gare du Nord where Linda sits on her luggage to cry and meets Fabrice always takes me back to the first reading of the novel, sitting wrapped in my Welsh Tweed shawl, in a tiny bedroom on the eighteenth floor of a high-rise in Kennington.   The Pursuit of Love is romantic, hilarious and bleakly eccentric.    Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady , Florence King. When I entertained troops on the American base in Kandahar, four South Carolina army captains made me an Honorary Southern Belle. Madame Galina, they said, in all her unreasonable, high-blooded,...

My Mate Jamie-Ray Hartshorne

     I've been noticing that alongside photos of Jamie-Ray being a lead in Altar Boys , creating Change My Body UK TM , working the door at Freedom - and clearly asking people passing by wherever that rockpool may be to snap a double-bicep - this sort of thing is cropping up on his social media:   We're in The Diner, Jamestown Road, Camden.  He's between tour dates of  The Bodyguard,  and meetings to discuss sportswear and creatine endorsements.  The latter, he says, being all about making his product better.   Between sips of his peanut butter milkshake (he's allowing himself dairy today in my honour - I don't quite know how to take that) he says in his soft Brum, 'I've signed up for a major Muay Thai event in Thailand next February.  I'm going up against one of the Thai fighters.  That's the only real way to gain any respect in the fighting world.  That's why you've been noticing the combat photos.  I...

Where do Babies Come From? How we Learn about Sex...Book Just Launched on Amazon Kindle

                                                                      Click to buy the book 'My spoken material is about the facts of life,'  I was explaining to the Mother Superior.  'I've been asking people what they were told, how they were told it and did they ask questions. Terribly funny...'    During my Where do Babies Come From? talk at the Metrodeco CafĂ©, Brighton, a  superfluity of nuns stopped at the window to listen.  In the street later that week one of them glided up and said how much they had enjoyed hearing me sing.  ' And we wonder, might you please sing something for our charity evening?' I said, of course, sister.   The nun nodded.  'That's very good to hear.  But just to correct you: not sister - but  Mother  Superior.' She then ...