August 2, 2005
TUESDAY 2nd AUGUST
It’s my technical rehearsal today. 4 hours of demented setting up of the projector, screen and props I use for my show. Tomorrow we’ll have only 10 minutes to set up after the previous act so we need to be slick. This part isn’t enjoyable. All the time we thought we’d have to go through the act evaporates into a cloud of glue gun smoke and taxi trip for bits of string. By the time everything is packed away again I’m feeling nervous and under-prepared.
I scan the Pleasance courtyard for my poster to cheer me up but I can’t see it. It’s just a sea of young bucks gurning desperately beneath wacky typefaces. ‘The Dave Monkey Laughter Box’, ‘Litchen and Frunt present Dirty Face!’, ‘The Andrews and Biltong News Hour’. I made those ones up, but they may as well have been there. There’s my poster! It’s got no quotes at all. Just a big picture of my newly bearded face and the words ‘I, Pavel’. I wanted it to look amusingly pretentious because my character, Pavel is a self absorbed East European experimental animator but in the Pleasance courtyard next to ‘Wiffle and Bunkin in Oi, George Bush, NO!’ it just looks pretentious. What will the Fringe nabobs make of my ramblings about avant-garde animation peppered with large chunks videos I’ve made? ‘Who is this TV refugee?’ they may shout. ‘Where are the mic skills he should have acquired after years in working men’s clubs?’ Oh Jesus, I’m going to be thrown off the fringe!
I go to bed sick with fear. Tomorrow is my first show and I’m crapping it.