These are your boots on cobblestones, realizing that they’re a lot more slippery in the rain. These are your legs on hills, of which Edinburgh has many. Too many. These are your eyes on theater people.
On mimes.
This is your brain reminding you of how much you don’t like mimes.
Or clowns.
Or people, really.
This is your brain trying to process ancient architecture, dramatic clouds, eighteen million drunks, intermittent deluges, chronic sprinkles, bright sunlight, a cornucopia of smells, and occasional stilt walkers.
These are your eyes taking in garish, rouged, painted, pancaked and glittery. This is your jaw, slack at the acres of cleavage, bleach, dye, and stilettos; at the false, purchased, stuffed, pushed-up and exhibited.
This is your head filled with jugglers, female impersonators, performers and costumes.
This is your body, dodging traffic, umbrella tines, gutter-spouts, strollers, and pushy adolescents.
These are your ears on whistles, screams, shouts, guffaws, random choirs in the middle of the street, singing at the top of their lungs whilst playing banjos; on whining, barefoot children, on hucksters, ranters, wailers and salesmen of every sort.
This is chaos.
This is far more Americans than we’ve seen in this country before. Since they’re mostly drunk and/or shrieking, this is not necessarily a welcome sight.
This is insanity; smells, jostling, shrieking, staggering, spitting, snogging, puking, smoking, humanity.
This is the urge to flee.
This is Edinburgh, on the first day of the Fringe Festival.
…Any questions?
(With apologies to all those earnest Partnership for a Drug Free America commercials.)
Ah, Edinburgh. On a good day, this city is overwhelming and packed with professional divas, throngs of shoppers, and rubbernecking tourists from all over the world. The Fringe is a see-and-be-seen festival, like many of the ones that take place in San Francisco, where people come for miles to see what they assume will be a freak-show. Apparently, the crowds were less than expected the first day of the Edinburgh Fringe, for which we are grateful!
Holler and G’s invitation to join them for the day to see a Terry Pratchett play was welcome. The theater venue was intimate — and airless — but the players knew their Pratchett, and it was good fun to watch a dramatic interpretation of Mort. Still, after wandering the city afterwards, we realized we prefer our kind of fringe, which is the lurking-on-the-edges sort, to the Edinburgh Fringe. It was clearly named after the “lunatic fringe” and it’s as close to that as we ever wish to go!
– D & T
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
And now you can cross “Attend the Fringe” off your life list!
Ugh those photos are enough to keep me away from Edinburgh till October!
I was thinking of attending the festival this year, but…well, you’ve basically just described my worst nightmare.
Eh, Katie, you might be more a non-hermit/non-grouch sort. You might entirely embrace it. But fair warning: it was the first day, and pouring, so the numbers were down. It apparently “gets better,” so we were told.
D’s coworkers told him only “posh Americans and Brits go to those things.”
Hm!