Dreamers hit the Edinburgh trail

A small, dark-haired woman is staggering across departures at New York’s JFK airport, weighed down by a couple of suitcases and a backpack. She has travelled 2,500 miles, but has an ocean to cross before she can even begin to contemplate her new life of stardom. To help her on her way, she has stowed 1,000 needles among her luggage.

Meet Olivia Rhee, the still not-very-famous “singing acupuncturist” en route to the Edinburgh fringe. Brimful of hope, this morning  when she sets foot on British soil for the first time, Rhee will join thousands of others whose greatest desire is to find stardom over the weeks ahead.

It is easy to be cynical about the Fringe, all those slick comedy promoters and TV executives who fill up the city; the student luvvies so roaringly drunk for the first time in the their lives. But among the 21,000 performers who arrive, there are hundreds of dreamers who woke up one morning, and took the miraculous decision to abandon their job, or sell their house, or leave their partner – or any combination of the above – to prepare for their shot at fame in Edinburgh.

Rhee, 42, is one of that fearless breed. “I am so much closer to my dream now I am a performer,” she says cheerily, ahead of her second long-haul flight. “Every step further along makes me a little bit happier. Just having the opportunity makes me smile. I am on my way.”

In any other August, she would be working acupuncture clinic, founded in 1975 by Hak, her father, when he moved his family from Seoul, South Korea to Las Vegas. But while Rhee studied hard to become a qualified doctor of oriental medicine, her career has never quite been enough to douse that needling desire to enjoy the limelight.

Her Edinburgh debut is a mixture of stories and poetry, song and dance, but for all that, Adventures of a Singing Acupuncturist, ironically enough, might see a little pointless. Nothing of the sort, retorts Rhee, who has been rehearsing in New York for a week.

“I know four guitar chords, I can play the congas,” she says. “And I do have feet. I can’t really call myself a dancer, but I do a kind of freestyle. People look at me and point. There is a unique quality to it.”

If Rhee has all the optimism of the Fringe virgin, Lynn Ruth Miller, 78, is a grizzled veteran by comparison.

Professor Miller - in an earlier life she held the chair of humanities at the University of Toledo – had never performed on stage until her Edinburgh debut five years ago. This year, she flies in from San Francisco with a portfolio of shows and turns, including her unique rendition of that Sex Pistols classic, Anarchy in the UK, which ends with her throwing brassieres into the audience. Sid Vicious would have approved.

But the performance to capture Edinburgh’s heart is Ageing is Amazing, her one-woman burlesque that celebrates the sagging glories of senior citizenship. Conforming in almost every degree to Sam Goldwyn’s dictum: “Start with an earthquake, and build up to a climax”: it opens to the tune of the Strip Polka as Miller slowly undresses.

“If my mother knew I would be stepping out with tassels on my nipples, she would be spinning in her grave,” chuckles Miller, who has worked her way through two husbands (“both my own”). What on earth makes her stand up in a room full of strangers and disrobe? She has no hesitation. This is all about love.

“I go to Edinburgh, I make people laugh, and they stand and cheer,” says Miller. “It is as good as any orgasm. This is approval and love beyond anything I have ever had. In San Francisco I am an old lady; in Edinburgh I am something.” 

Peter Buckley Hill promotes the Free Fringe - a roster of over 300 shows with no admission charges – and sees more hopeful and hopeless acts than most. Very few of the dreamers will fulfil their expectations, he warns.

“The fringe is entirely fuelled, and financed, by performers backing their dreams – the wastage rate is high. People do succeed, but only by working hard at what they do all the year round. It takes a lot of effort to make your performance sound effortless.

“The overwhelming majority go away disappointed. Either they don't know how small the fringe audiences are, or they believe against all logic that the world will beat a path to their door. If you're a leaf, even quite a good leaf, you go to the forest if you want to hide, not if you want to stand out.”

After years of effort, some, a tiny handful, come into this year’s festival with a sliver of a chance, that finally the breakthrough will come, the reward for so impetuously leaving a former life behind.

Kate Smurthwaite, 34, was head of strategy for a hedge fund, who gave up finance six years ago to become a full-time stand up. Jools Constant, watched his marriage collapse and threw away a successful building business, employing 12 people, as he set about turning himself into comedy performer and writer.

“It has given me a new life. For the first time I feel ‘this is where I should be,” says Constant, 42, who lives in a single room, somewhere in central London. “I made a clear-headed decision to lead a life where I expressed myself, and which was rewarding. I found it among people that I like and respect.”

Smurthwaite, like Constant, she has acquired a healthy audience on the London stand-up scene. She has no regrets about swapping the dreary world of finance for the adrenaline rush of performance.

“I went back to my old job for a while – just three months,” she recalls. “After a couple of day, I was thinking, ‘This is just so not me’. I’d found stand-up, and was so thrilled and happy to be doing it. It’s strange to look back and think, ‘Why did I put up with a job I hated so much for so long?’ You’re young I suppose, and you have to be earning money. Instead of doing something that actually inspires you.”

Others are less sanguine. Like Rhee, Danny Hurst, from London, has turned his own life into art, and brings a comedy drama, I Was a Teenage Rentboy to the Fringe. It really is based on his own life story, the grubby assignations and the street-walking that funded him through college.

“It’s more cheerful than an average episode of EastEnders,” he says diffidently. “I’m not looking for stardom – all I want to do is make a living as a performer.”

And that is true of all these magical self-made artists. Each one craves wider recognition of the strange new talent they’ve discovered in themselves. Miller has set her sights on appearing on a big comedy club bill. Smurthwaite and Constant would love television to come calling.

And Rhee? In her mind’s eye, she is already hosting a TV chat show, the kind of thing that gets syndicated around the world. Like Ellen Degeneres?

“Yeah, I’d see it as a bit like Ellen. With good guests to talk to and some nice songs.” And acupuncture? “O yeah. And acupuncture.” It’s the stuff of dreams.

Comrades, this is from beyond the pay wall. It ran in the national edition of The Times, last Friday. Lynn Ruth, if you're reading this - that's about half a million readers.

How many women does it take ...

“This is an empirical point. It is intensely annoying when you read that there aren't enough of us. There are so many women on the Fringe, from people like Lucy Porter, Sarah Millican and Pip Evans, to comedians who are just starting out. We're not a rarity. People should stop saying ‘Oh, there's a lady on stage'. Just say, ‘There's a comic - are they funny?” Treat us the same as you would a male comic.”

So says Susan Calman, the moving spirit behind a protest by women comedians. Read more here: Ladies.

Pic by James Glossop.

Wind turbines - a blot on the landscape

David Bellamy, the broadcaster and environmentalist, has lambasted the Scottish government's “baffling” decision to approve the construction of the huge Clyde wind farm in South Lanarkshire, describing the project as “an enormous blot on the credibility of Scotland as a green place”.

His comments are a stark contrast to those of Alex Salmond, the First Minister, who last week announced the scheme as a step on the road to making Scotland the “green capital” of Europe. A total of 152 turbines are to be installed in clusters in the South Lanarkshire hill near the village of Abington, close to the M74.

Bellamy is one of that small band of environmentalists who doesn't believe in global warming. Read more at the Timesonline, Blot.

Over at the Edinburgh Fringe, I can report that I have met Lynn Ruth Miller, my favourite septuagenarian stripper, who quotes Browning: "Come grow old with me, the best is yet to be." That Lynn Ruth - she's a rum 'un.

And hats off to my colleagues at the Scotsman, whose unrivalled coverage of the "Fringe ticketing fiasco" led them to quote an apoplectic spokesman for the Ladyboys of Bangkok. Spokesman? Spokesman? Spokesperson surely.

Heard the one about the kid on the Fringe?

“Adults tend to keep quiet when kids are on stage. But if I did get a heckler, I'd have to deal with it - think of a couple of comeback lines, or hand them a colouring-in book or something like that,” said Eros, who debuted on the Fringe last year with a walk-on part in a children's comedy show.

That experience planted the germ of an idea, and next month he returns with Problem Child, a 50-minute set of his own. “I've been writing new stuff all the time, so I have way enough material to fill it out,” said Eros. “It's about pointing out the stupid things that adults do - then they go, ‘Oh yeah, he's right, I do that too,' and they laugh.”

The tale of a 12-year-old comedian, who is on his way to Edinburgh. Read more here: Kid on the Fringe.

Eros is just one of thousands of peculiarly-driven people who are about to descend on the city. I wrote recently about the 75-year-old stripper from San Fransisco who's heading to Edinburgh(a story subsequently picked up by Jay Leno, and by a number of US papers), and there are many, many more all with tales of their own.

A year ago, I had a proposal for a TV documentary about some of these fantastic people accepted by one of the bigger independent production houses, but unfortunately knocked back by the BBC. It's worth it though, I think. So if anyone out there feels like funding a book or a film don't hesitate to get in touch, because there is a great longer piece to be written about the eccentricities, dreams and ambitions which drive these folk on.

The Fringe is not the only show in town. Hit the link here to read a story in the Times at the weekend, about the £5 million cloud hanging over the Edinburgh Military Tattoo.

PS: Overwhelmed by the publicity which has come her way since my article in the Times, Lynn Ruth Miller, the ageing stripper, has proposed marriage to me.

Loudon proud

Scotland on Sunday, 27 July, 2007

Some collaboration this. Take the playbill at face value and you’d think the songwriter Loudon Wainwright had sat down and worked hand-in-glove with novelist Carl Hiassen in the stage adaptation of the author’s Lucky You. But you’d be wrong.

Before this project, one of the most anticipated productions of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, Wainwright had walked past Hiassen’s thrillers whenever he’d seen them in airport bookstores. He’d never even picked one up, still less read a word. Even now the two have not met, and they have no immediate plans for a big hello. “I’ve a sister in Florida. Maybe I’ll go see Carl while I’m down there,” muses Wainwright diffidently, who’s talking at his summer home on Long Island.

When at last he was persuaded to read the novel – by the TV comedy producer, John Plowman - Wainwright was instantly hooked. The action focuses on an eco-friendly lottery winner called Jo-Layne who is pursued across Florida by two robbing rednecks. Along the way corporate greed, indifferent government and a poisoned environment have their bellies exposed in the darkest of comedies.

The result of their long distance relationship, is a stage play drawn from a bitter but hilarious novelist, enlivened by three songs penned by a writer who could have been Hiassen’s long lost creative twin, so close is their shared vision. “His book was truly funny and scary and funny and scary are two of my favourite things. In combination they’re always good,” reckons Wainwright. “You know, the world is a crazy place. Like me Carl can veer into pessimism, realism. I tried to put that into the songs, because its territory I’ve explored a bit myself.”

Just a bit. Over the best part of four decades, Wainwright has been the archetypical singer-songwriter, the One Man Guy of his own song. What sets him apart is his focus. Few writers are as funny, clever and articulate; none are as remorselessly personal.

His August album release, Recovery, features a re-recording of tracks from his first three albums including School Days (musings on college life) Drinking Song (about being drunk), and Motel Blues (the aftermath of a one-night stand), all mediated through Wainwright ironic eye. Some, he admits, he had to re-learn, “they’d just faded from the repertoire” but rediscovery was a revelation, and the recording sessions were a joy.

He has written so often about himself over the years, that anyone familiar with his work feels they know him. On the Acid Song, we laughed at Wainwright’s antics after he dropped a tab of LSD for the first time in ten years; we chuckled when he unwittingly tried to bed a lesbian in Synchronicity; we suffered when he was left bereft by the death of his mother. But in all this navel-gazing, is it an exaggerated version of himself described in the lyrics?

He chews over the question for a second. “I don’t know if it’s an exaggeration – it’s a variation. Certain things are changed to protect the guilty. But it’s a personal account, condensed and crafted and tailored to elicit the a response that I want. I had an acting teacher who once who said ‘You can’t just speak to camera and put it over to people just like that. There has to be a heightened reality.’ That’s true about writing and performing songs - it’s a heightened version of the person I am.”

Inevitably, when the subject matter is so often close to home, friends and family are drawn into the firing line, and named in his lyrics. He ticks them off on a list: “My parents, my kids, my sister, my brother, ex-wives, present wives, future wives. They are all in there. You know, they make for great song fodder.

“The people in my life are the most important in the world to me. I think about them all the time. I love them – they frustrate and infuriate me as I do them. So it seems perfectly logical to me that they’re in the songs.”
Perfectly logical too that Rufus and Martha, the children from his marriage to the folk singer Kate McGarrigle, should fire some shots back, now they have established themselves as successful artists. Rufus’s Dinner at Eight ruefully picked over the relationship between father and son, but kept matters fairly clean. Martha came up a whole lot dirtier with her song, You Bloody Motherfucking Arsehole, dedicated to the father who left home when she was a baby. Some title. What on earth did he make of that?

It was like taking a blow in the solar plexus, apparently. Three years on, Wainwright can hardly get the words out. “Arrm …well you know … it’s a very powerful … emotional statement. I myself have been making powerful emotional statements, so if you dish it out, you gotta take it. I mean, it is a natural thing. Martha’s mom and I split right after Martha was born, so that is a personal tragedy. For everybody. Anger is certainly there and understandably so.”

So “a powerful emotional statement” – how did he respond when he next met his daughter? “Arrm …I can’t remember. How’s that for a diplomatic answer?” He retreats: “Man the torpedoes!” Wainwright simply doesn’t want to talk about this. But it’s a fair bet that he doesn’t have the song as a ringtone.

What he might have said is that his own work is rather more subtle. History, the album written in the wake of his father’s death, exposed all his own emotions, but delivered a universal message. The song Four by Ten was about the wall that’s built into any loveless marriage, though his fellow feeling was with the father: “Once it’s up it won’t come down/ And mom's a queen and dad’s a clown.” No wonder so many heterosexual men of a certain age turn up at his concerts.

Well that’s a fact, he acknowledges with a laugh. “You know I am a guy, so I do write from that point of view. I know absolutely that some women enjoy the songs but it doesn’t surprise me that men show up at gigs and some of the women are dragged along kicking and screaming. I’ll meet a couple after a show and she’ll say ‘I’ve been subjected to your records since 1976. Thanks a lot!’ But I like to think, I hope, that some of the songs are just about being human, about being a person.”

After he debuted in 1970, for years he produced an album of original work every 18 months or so, and toured relentlessly. It’s not like that any more. These days Wainwright records a whole lot less and acts a whole lot more. He’s moved from New York and is mainly based in Los Angeles. Building on his training – he studied acting at university – he’s racked up an impressive list of credits in TV and film over the last six years, appearing opposite Ewan McGregor in Big Fish, and playing in Judd Apatow’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

All the while, the songwriting has never stopped and although he had a cameo in Apatow’s latest movie, Knocked Up, his most important commission was for film’s score. “As good as he has ever been” ran a New Yorker review of Strange Wierdos, the soundtrack album: “He has not only retained his sharpness of wit but has also learned to cut with greater skill.” It’s a tribute to Wainwright’s genius, and his ability to channel himself into his work, that songs created for a teen comedy about a pregnant girl manage to shift the focus onto a poetic middle-aged man with a paunch.

He can’t always control his emotion so well. He shares a memory of his father, “a journalist and a great one too,” with Life magazine. “I did a show up in Maine not too long ago and stayed in a bed and breakfast. They had a couple of old issues of Life there. I opened one up at a column my father had written, about our dog being put down - that would have happened back in the early 1970s. I was just overcome. I knew the writer and I’d known the dog. I was in bits, sobbing away. I took that article, I copied it and sent it out to people.”

On top of his work for Lucky You, these days he’s prodigiously busy, what with the album, promotional gigs, and the acting. He’s happily married again – to his long-term partner, Ritamarie Kelly - but there seems to be a sense of urgency around his work. He laughs at the notion, and quotes a song from Strange Weirdos. “I’ve been Doing the Math,” he says.

“I’m going to be 62 soon and you’re never too young to die anyway. I do want to get some more work done. I love the job. It’s still exciting write a song, to get a commission, to act. But I wanted to be in show business. That was my dream and it came true. My life is a cinch, incredible. All I have to do is get rid of this paunch.”

The bare facts of ageing

False teeth, sagging breasts and varicose veins might not combine in a conventional image of the body beautiful, but a 75-year-old stripper from San Francisco believes that she can storm the Edinburgh Fringe with a show that will explode society's obsession with youthful good looks.

Lynn Ruth Miller, a former journalist who has only been stripping for three years, said that she was “living the dream” in an act that celebrates every fold and crease of her body, “revelling in the disasters” that the ageing process wreaks.

“If you want to feel old and inadequate, that's up to you, but there is a choice. I look like an old lady, I know I do, but I never suffer pain, I never get tired and it is so exhilarating to communicate with people. When I'm on stage, I'm talking to the world, saying, ‘Don't sit in your rocking chair - get out there and live',” she said.

For her show, Ageing is Amazing, Ms Miller has devised an eye-catching opening sequence that echoes Samuel Goldwyn's dictum: start with an earthquake and build up to a climax.

Emerging to the tune of the Strip Polka, over the next four minutes she sheds a robe and several chemises, to be left standing in front of her audience clad in billowing underwear, elaborately decorated with a fringe, bells and feathers.

Those who have seen her performances are rarely left unmoved. “I swear the audience went completely bonkers when this crazy lady stripped down to her granny panties,” one admirer wrote.

To read more about the sensational Ms Miller, go to the Times online: Old age stripped bare.

Five times bigger than Glastonbury

That's the boast of the organisers of new comedy festival, which has been established on the Edinburgh fringe. It should make £1.8m in sponsorship for its promoters. But not everyone's smiling.

Read more at the Times online: Few laughs in comedy festival

Visa fee hits arts festivals

The Times, March 6, 2008

Organisers of the Edinburgh International Festival and fringe, the Promenade concerts and many of Britain’s best-loved and most celebrated arts festivals are staring into a financial black hole because of changes in immigration rules which are being brought in by the Home Office.

Under the government proposals which are due to take effect this autumn, many international performers will be required for the first time to purchase a visa, at an estimated cost of £99 each. Orchestras, ballet and theatre companies, travelling from countries outside Europe, such as the USA and Australia will be hit by charges which could amount to thousands of pounds.

The proposals have provoked outrage from leading figures in the arts, who accused the government of precipitating a financial crisis and in failing in its own agenda to promote multiculturalism.

“This is like a massive, unbudgeted tax on internationalism in the arts. It’s crazy,” said Graham Sheffield, the artistic director of the Barbican in London. “Take an orchestra like the Los Angeles Philharmonic – you are talking about thousands of pounds on your budget. The potential for catastrophe, for it being very much more expensive and bureaucratic, is high.”

Paul Hughes, the general manager for the BBC Symphony Orchestra, warned that the changes would take their toll on events such as the Proms.

“It is likely to bring fewer artists to the country. For people bringing in whole orchestras, it will have an enormous impact. Other than as a pure money-making exercise for whoever owns the department of visas, I can’t imagine what the benefit is to anybody,” he said.

Under the current rules, visiting performers from “non visa national” countries such as the USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia who play at festivals designated as “permit free” do not require a visa to enter the United Kingdom. Costs are also held in check for visiting orchestras, ballets and theatres who are able to tour under a work permit which costs just £190 and applies to the whole group.

A Home Office consultation on the arts ends on March 10, but under “Tier 5” of the new points-based rules for immigration, costs are expected to rise exponentially. As well as visa expenses, it has been propsed that each organisation will require a “certificate of sponsorship”, effectively a guarantee of good behaviour from its British promoter.

Though the cost of this is likely to be set at just £400 per company, each member of a touring party will require a certificate. The amount of bureaucracy that this might entail was mind-boggling, said Mr Sheffield.

“We are already having to row extremely hard not to go backwards. This is going to be a nightmare. They will have to employ several thousand civil servants just to process everything,” he said.

The Home Office changes are being made as part of a five-tier points-based immigration system which came into effect at the end of last month and effects all incomers from outside the European Union. Based on the Australian immigration model it is designed to ensure that “only those with skills the country needs can come to work and study,” according to Jacqui Smith, the home secretary.

However, arts organisations accuse the government of including the arts and entertainment industry only as an afterthought. The changes to the immigration system were a huge and important exercise for the counry, said Chloe Reddaway of the National Campaign for the Arts, but “the arts didn’t fit the model” she said.

“Instead of providing an arts and entertainment category that was specially set up, we are being squeezed into boxes that were never made for the arts sector. Everyone has been trying very hard to make that work but everyone keeps coming up with the fact that this is the wrong shape for the arts and entertainment. The sector is not generic, it rests on individual cases, and that is what the new system doesn’t accomodate,” said Ms Reddaway.

The Edinburgh Festival and fringe are vulnerable to the changes. The International Festival commissions work from a wide range of non-EU based companies and will be hit by a huge rise in costs under the proposals. Organisers of the Fringe, which last year hosted more than 2000 shows from all over the world, can expect a massive rise in bureaucracy – if performers are prepared to come to Scotland after costs go up.

A spokesman for the International Festival said the festival was “taking part in the consultation and taking a close interest in this issue."

What has bemused arts promoters is the government’s apparent abandonment of its ideal as Britain as a cultural hub.

Ms Reddaway said: “Think of the government’s creative industry policy, the Olympics, their interest in international trade and transferable skills, and the their diversity agenda. This policy runs completely contrary to all of that.”

The first changes to performer regulations were introduced last year and saw a rise in the cost of visas for countries including Russia, China, Cuba and India which have “visa national” status. Last night the Home Office said that no decision had been taken about whether to replace blanket visa covering groups such as orchestras with a system under which every group member must have a visa.

* Joint by-line with Dalya Alberge