Time to get Fringy

It was cool to sit there with our kid, watching the ping pong balls drop onto the stage; hundreds of them, as the acrobats avoided getting hit by the ping pong rain.

Ping pong and acrobats. Both on one stage. Who thinks of this stuff?

It must be August in Edinburgh, when the Fringe Festival hits town, the population triples, and the smell of hamburger cooking is already wafting into my office as I come in in the morning.

I’m not a hard core Fringer who sees multiple shows a day, or even one show a day. In the past 3 years, I’ve seen about 20 shows and all but one of them were seen with our kid, so I’d say I’ve kid fringing, or kringing (and cringing) over the past few years.

Even though I’m not hard core, I like the Fringe. I like the completely bizarre costumes I see people wearing as they walk around the streets of the city. I like everything in the center of the city covered in posters, like we live in some sort of imaginary world. I don’t even mind the tourists who stop inexplicably to take a picture of something that I don’t see as picture-worthy.

I like that for one month a year, you can see just about anything you could imagine on a stage; I’ve seen a guy get kids to laugh so much about boogers while every parent in the audience looked disgusted; I’ve done several kid ceilidhs, seen improvised musicals, David Sedaris, non-improvised musicals, W. Kamau Bell, incredible physical performances, Tig Notaro, bubble performers, and some performances so bad I’ve walked out 10 minutes in (along with 2/3 of the rest of the audience). The phrase ‘meh brand’ means something in our house entirely because of a show we saw several years ago.

That being said, I also like coming home on August days, being completely removed from the fringiness of the city, on our little street where you would have no idea the population had grown by 3 times, and where you wouldn’t know that acrobats avoided getting hit by ping pong balls at about 3:15 this afternoon.

Photo courtesy of The Pleasance