Drawbacks to being a Drag Ballerina living in the Country

Two and a half hours of travel to London via a bus and two trains meant it was too far to go back for forgotten bits of costume and my backing tracks. I had a pair of stage manager Zoe Hunn's leggings wrapped around my head like a turban and danced my opening ballet solo to a dubstep remix of Cilla Black singing Step Inside, Love.
As I made a careful study thirty years ago of how a swan lands on water, folds its wings and preens its feathers, and muscle memory has kept these movements in my body, I can't guilt-freely just sit for hours watching the swans on Thorpeness Meare and tell myself it's for research.
I had to hide my tutu bodice in a pillowcase when I took it down to the laundry room in case I bumped into the German gay couple holidaying in number five and we got all sisterhoody over the beading and frou-frou. That could only end - as it always does, right? - in them inviting me for drinks, telling me about getting so carried away they dance on tables in Mobel Olfe. Hans will share that he was disowned by his mother when he came out and was only allowed to stand in the street and watch her funeral cortege pass by. And when he is crying in the kitchen, Klaus will tell me about being blackmailed by a Brazilian escort living in Colchester who makes his own guava paste, is learning decoupage at evening classes and hits him.
The village shop doesn't stock Tracker Bars.

Comments

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 Café, 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 ...

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

Search This Blog