Personal fringe attendance has dropped a bit for me at this point in the week. Combination of shitty scheduling and personal tasks always seem to wipe out one or two days in week 2 but this year is worse than most.
Tuesday night I caught my favorite performance poet (not suprisingly a short list anyway) Mr. Jem Rolls at the King’s Head. Jem was in his usual fine form though I imagine I’m easy to please while full of Half-Pints Bulldog Amber and a plate of Scotch Eggs with Curry Fries. His command of language and pure intensity always blow me away and after every performance of his I attend I can’t help but wonder if I would have enjoyed poetry in school if it had been someone like him.
A hearty thank you to the King’s Head staffer who found my Cell Phone after it dropped from my pocket and who announced it to the crowd, and a hearty fuck you to the other staffer who told me that they hadn’t found one even after that announcement.
Unfortunately the vast majority of shows started exactly as Jem ended so we were faced with waiting around a solid 2.5 hours for something we’d actually want to see or going to do something else. We voted to go see Dark Knight which, despite my hatred of Batman Begins, was excellent.
Wednesday was another slow day. With the downpour hitting off and on I decided to take my Mother (who is on crutches) to another show. We voted for The Shakespeare Show at PTE for accessibility reasons and Monster Theatre didn’t disappoint. It wasn’t quite up there with the best of Ryan Gladstone’s plays (Napoleon’s Secret Diary is still my fave) but the quick tempo and mixture of jokes were enjoyable. The woman who played most of the other parts (Tara something… mind blanking) was especially good at playing off of Ryan and swapping between characters. Unfortunately we called it a night after that and hit the BDI on the way home.
Tonight being the Bomber game I won’t be seeing anything either so I’ll have to hope to catch up on the weekend. Here’s hoping I can get a solid four or five in on Friday again