The Chocolate Ocelot's 2015 Fringe: Day One

Saturday 8th August 2015

As promised, I'm going to keep my Fringe diary short this year. I can't be putting in a couple of hours every day, hunched over the laptop while everyone else is out having fun. If I was going to be the next Caitlin Moran/Charlie Brooker, it would have happened by now.
So instead here are some compressed highlights, and a few crap haikus of stuff that happened to me today and shows what I saw.

Dandy Darkly's Trigger Happy, CC Blooms

CC Blooms, Leith Walk

My first show of this year's Fringe, and it's a tidy step from where we're staying. Owing to a booking snafu, we are staying much further out of the city centre this year - down in sleepy Morningside rather than the pulsing heart of Greyfriars. Thus every day will start and end for us with a minimum 30-minute hike into town, or a bus ride if we're brave enough to figure out the routes and get the right change ready.

Annnnyway, Dandy Darkly. Saw him for the first time last year. Loved his high camp macabre storytelling performance. This year he is all in glitter and tassles and rhinestone cowboy drag. Despite a couple of twentysomething twats in the third row (right next to me - v awkward) yakking at full volume like they're watching TV, it was another absorbing hour of poetic storytelling, verging on hiphop at times (excellent use of a continuous soundtrack), on the theme of America's fears, trigger warnings, degradation and glamour. He'll never get on telly, but he's great live.

I filled in one of Dandy's What Do Americans Fear? flyers as follows:

• Roundabouts
• Uncircumcised penises
• Rogue Islamic states with nuclear capability
• Islamic roundabouts with nuclear penises

American Idylls

crucified sweetheart
otis moonshine's gay werewolf
stonewall's angry ghost

Norris and Parker: All Our Friends Are Dead

Just the Tonic at the Caves, Niddry Street.

RV'd with Herself for this one. Two-woman sketch show. Got tickets coz I liked the look of their flyer, and I do like sketch shows. You know where you are with sketch shows - less likely for the performers to die horribly or get heckled. It's a safe environment for nervous nellies like me. I liked their definitions of sketch show performers: actors who think they're funny but are too scared to do stand-up. Lots of energy, great fun, 50% lovely voices. Ones to watch. Two to watch.

black catsuit sketch show

confident charmers
songs, filth, Jackie Cooper Clarke
bloody funny too

Miscellany

Stuff that happened. In haiku form, no less.

Revelation of the Bleeding Obvious

tip for technophobes
optic mouse and glass tabletop
not an ideal combo

My Microwave Shame

baffled by controls
googled instructions; no bowl
had porridge on plate