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

  Bodybuilders often post about their 'quests'. As thought they might be Jason in charge of the Argonauts. Or Cpl Alleyn, Second Parachute Regiment , defying incident protocol in the midst of an insurgency attack to rescue an injured Iraqi child. Or Maria leading the Von Trapp children yodelling over the alps.    One of the prettier bodybuilders posted this today: Image maintenance is vital. When you take care of it you show that such details matter, and you exude that right genre of confident - the genre that will have the herd behind you!  Tell that to Queen Victoria, big-boy...   Late in her reign, Queen Victoria went to Covent Garden with Maria Christina, Queen Consort of Spain. Maria Christina was tall, slim and elegant; and according to one observer, Victoria looked quite homely and underdressed beside her.   'And down in the stalls, might there have been sighs of regret for our monarch as she stood at the front of the royal box much in the ...

  EXPERT. The legs are a feature of this table...   ME.        ...otherwise we'd be looking at a flat piece of wood on the floor.   EXPERT. If I just turn the jug over...   ME.         ...it'll be something that we in the trade call "upside down".    EXPERT.  It's a cabinet...   ME.         ...by which I don't mean the ministers in the government, but a piece of furniture against the wall of your sitting room, with sherry, half a pulled Christmas Cracker and Kerplunk! in it.     EXPERT.  Views of children are very sought after, for example...   ME.         ...for example, is there enough room in the toe in these new shoes?    EXPERT.  If this Tonka Toy were in its original box, now, of course...   ME.        ...it would be less fun to play with and you would have to accordingly muffle your ...

     Who's she?    That's not her name.    She can't need that big a bag, she doesn't do anything with her day.    Aren't his nipples far apart?   Unless she's taking her library books back.    Have they been abroad somewhere again and it's only online?   Big Ben isn't in Chelsea.    I wonder what makes them decide for or against letting their parents appear in the programme?   Where do they get the dogs from?    These party scenes are filmed at seven in the morning, like we all don't know.    With extras.    Except you can't call them that any more.     They're support artistes.    Like cleaners are ablutionary facilitators.    This early in the morning, filming done, the crew can then go on and do day-job filming.    Like on Location, Location, Location .    Or Doctors .   Or Songs of Praise .  ...

   I'm off to York this weekend with the Evening of Burlesque tour. Last time I was there was in 2000. I got off the train from Garforth and went straight to the Minster to pray.     I was up north for the Leeds 2000 Festival. I played the UK Play Comedy Tent, packed with mostly seventeen year old boys just broken up from school and off their trolleys on MDMA. Backstage I had bumped into Jason Baron, one of the Baron Brothers – the musical-comedy trio Baron Brothers based in London, you understand, not the Baron Brothers who own a plant nursery in Ventura, and guarantee their customers  A Better Sod .   ‘ Not quite Klub Kabaret this gig,’ Jason said. ‘Strictly TTMAR…’   ‘ TTMAR?’   ‘ Take the Money and Run. Get them to turn your mike and your backing track up full blast so you don’t have to hear the crowd.’   I was the opening act. My backing track didn’t come on at all. The seventeen-year-olds looked at me in ...

Me singing So in Love, and being Tytania...as you do!

    Click here for the Unbound Books site   I think there should be inter-author pledging on the Unbound Books site. We all went to see each other's shows in the Gilded Balloon, Edinburgh. Lizzie Roper and I would peep through the curtain at who was coming in to watch us in Ballet Who?! and make a note when we saw anyone else who was performing in the venue. Then as soon as we were able, we went to watch their show.    When we spotted the cast of the play where the leading character was a violin playing itself on a rock somewhere in the Shetlands we averted our eyes and tried to convince ourselves we hadn't really seen them.   

  It was in Easter week that one of my closest friends, Thea, died and I sang at her funeral.  She had asked me to sing when she had been in remission.  'And not something maudlin, either,' she had said.  'I don't want to be sitting up there on my cloud and looking down at you shouting for you to pull your daft self together!  I want The Holy City  -  and let them applaud, none of that shushing them with your hands, respectful of what the occasion is. I want the occasion to be bonkers.'    As Thea and I had been so close, when she stopped me in the Saxmundham Station carpark a year or so later and said that she was now definitely dying, she added that I must go behind her husband and make sure he didn't leave her lying out in state in the church, as he planned.    'Lying there in full view of everyone, including some people that I won't know. I'd be ashamed. What? No, not in an open casket - who do you think I am, Mother Theresa ...

  I went through a Forza Del Destino  phase recently and listened to a different recording of it every night after I had spent the day sending out begging emails for crowdfunding for my book  My Tutu Went AWOL!    I don't know if those two things were related...   Anyway, I listened to these recordings: with Leontyne Price, Martina Arroyo, Renata Tebaldi and Rosalind Plowright, awash with the beauty of the opera itself, of the singing; muttering to myself in awe of so and so's breath control, phrasing, or floated top notes. Then when I listened to the Callas recording my muttering was all: 'Open the monastery door, you stupid monk, which part of her brother's after her wanting to kill her did you miss? Oh, God, no...don't trust him, he clearly lives off nothing but his own hatred.  No, he'll still have his sword on him, don't help him...oh, for the love of all things, wasn't that just bound to happen? And look who's here now. Bit late, padre, s...

  Overnight in a sealed container soak the required amount of coffee grounds in milk. Next morning add the resultant slush to the required amount of water and bring it to the boil on a hob. Let it swirl, take it off the heat.  Put it back on the heat, bring it to a swirling boil again, take it off the heat. And repeat. Take it off the heat, then add a few drops of cold to help sink the coffee grounds. Strain into cups.    Ta-dah!    

  This is the time when we look forward to what happened during Easter Devotions somewhere in Yorkshire in 1989.  Mrs Hintley, church organist, played the required one hymn every hour on the hour for the service.     In theory...   In reality, the Dog and Feathers was opposite the church yard gate and Mrs Hintley went over there to while away the time between hymns.  She needed to be helped up into the organ loft for "There is a Green Hill Far Away".  She passed out during the second verse of "Alleluia!  King Victorious". They left her up there to sleep it off.  She beer-snored well into the Resurrection. 

  Lance, an aspiring master Poker player, believed that winning was all about being able to tell when a opponent was bluffing. For hours, stretching to days and then weeks, he watched footage of future opponents to ascertain when they had been bluffing their way through a hand.    Lance commented, 'They would have betrayed themselves in various ways - circling a middle finger on the baize, raising a glass much more slowly than normal to take a sip, tilting a free hand straight up on its heel...'   So now when Lance played, he would act upon all the knowledge that he had collated. But still he didn't progress beyond the semi-final stage in any tournament.    Perhaps if he had watched footage of himself, he might have spotted his own bluffing tic: a gentle flick at the card farthest right in his hand. 

  Recently I went back to perform at two theatres where I had previously performed in 2005. A bit sad that I'm still doing the same thing in the same places. A bit glad that I'm still being asked. 

  Trying to stay positive and not hate, but getting friends to pre-buy my book is like playing Sardines, me going to hide, and nobody coming to find me.  Please play Sardines with me...

  Whoever programmes the pedestrian crossing by the Salisbury has split Green Lanes in two. You wait for the green man and the beeping noise to cross to the middle, then wait there for the green man and more beeping to cross to the far side. I was caught out the first time: seeing the green man and hearing the beeping I assumed I was good to go right across.  I leapt back onto the traffic island as an oncoming car with the right of way braked and swerved.    The driver was ever so pleased, nicely!     Yesterday a blind man next to me reacted to people playing chicken and to the beeping coming from the far side and stepped off the kerb. I put my arm across him. 'No, stop! Those people are being naughty, and that's the ringy-loolah noise from the far side only.'   Good deed number one.    On the down escalator at Victoria a man with tufty hair and a wide-load scarlet rucksack wasn't paying attention, didn't step off at the bottom and...

   Perhaps especially when you're starting out. Take Simon. He graduated from Oxford a few years ago, set up a one-man theatre company and came to me for voice coaching before his first round of showcases. We worked on Romeo’s "Tis Torture And Not Mercy Speech".   He commented, 'I have to say I agree with the thought processes you choose to underpin the emotional journey he goes on in that speech. I have an advanced sense of structure these days. We all do. Oxford did that for us. I find I can glean just so much information immediately at the sight-reading stage.'   'That’s so useful,' I said. 'Now, just say for me again: “sight reading stage”, and remember to move your tongue further back. No…that’s too forward, it’s almost “thight reading “thtage”. No, too spread, we’re getting "shight reading shtage" now.'   In our second session, he said, 'Now is the time, I’m finding, for me to make decisions about what type of work, and th...

  At last night's gig, when I needed to concentrate on checking my tutu rigging in the mirror backstage or on double checking sound and lighting cues, I was having my ear bent about a certain cabaret producer. The one who owes me so many back payments, I'm putting him down on my HMRC form as a tax-deductible dependant.  He's now blacklisted by the gay community, oh my god, how tragic is that? They're so sick of his madness, recidivism and those hats. I know - the one with the peak, what's that about? Next a showgirl flapped over to piercingly shriek at me how I ought to have forewarned her that the squaddie I'd fixed her up with on a date (that didn't go well) was upstairs in the green room and she'd just walked in and not known he was going to be there, and she wasn't doing her special walk and didn't have any makeup on and was just wearing her old sweater and jeans and Ugg Boots and her hair wasn't done and a nail-job was overdue. And....

     An opportunity to pre-buy my diary of touring Iraq and Afghanistan in a tutu.    Shelled, chased by camel spiders, still refusing to dance the Sugar Plum Fairy under any circumstances.  Becoming mascot to 42 Commando Royal Marines - against the MOD's recommendation - falling foul of the Regimental Sergeant Major's square-bashing fixation, crowned Honorary Southern Belle by South Carolina army captain Solo.    'Our eyes and ears out there...hilarious and touching stories! Go, Tutuboy, you rock!'                                                                 Joanna Lumley   'I must thank you for your magnificent efforts!'                                        ...

  You're always so quiet crunching your dried food and you never gnaw it with your side teeth.   Actually, is it dried food?   Oh, it is.    Maybe I could have done that with a between-fingers test and not with my teeth.    Mad Max eats cat food.   Isn't that sound of chains we can hear like Marley's ghost coming up from the cellar in Scrooge's house?   You can't go outside now, sorry, it's dark.  And I saw the dog fox . It was enormous! Looks like it's had extra midsectiony bits grafted onto it.  'Oscar ran to the door!' Sorry, I used to shout that when the doorbell rang at Lady Cave's when I was housesitting, and her sheltie had made his usual dash for it to bite whoever it was.    You don't tend to do that, no. The most I've noticed from you when the doorbell rings is a slight turn of your head.    Talking of which: when I put the TV on, your head was right near the edge of the ...