Burns
My resolution of blogging every day has taken a bit of a kicking recently. But I have an excuse, Mark Coverdale and I made our spoken-word debut on Wednesday at Rabbie Burns night 2012. It was actually my Rabbie Burns night debut, full-stop. We did a ten minute story that actually hovered obediently around the ten minute mark, surprisingly given we’d not rehearsed.
I had wanted the occasion to be quite low-key, what with the story being quite sketchy and only just finished hours before the event. If we could get in there, get a chuckle or two and get out with our money-makers in one piece I’d have been happy. Mark, who has a relatively strong sense of occasion had other ideas. His painted illustrations arrived in stupidly large A1 form, in an ornate picture frame and sat atop a wooden easel. He revealed them one at a time (mostly) on cue to the story, dressed in a silver-buttoned jacket, with top hat and curators gloves. I wore a cardigan.
We were immediately spotted as suitable headliners and given the post-haggis spot. That’s some pressure to pile on a story about a failing party that has barely been recited before. In the end it wasn’t all that bad. I tripped over a few lines that I must’ve dropped in there just to fuck myself. But there were genuinely lovely responses to a couple of bits - particularly when they married up well with Mark’s artwork. I think we’ve stumbled upon a nice word and image combo, we are toying with the idea of writing something else and taking it to other events under the touring moniker of Billy Ballsack and the Bukkake Brothers. Watch out for us.
The rest of the night unsurprisingly followed the event rules (that weren’t announced to me pre-event) that the content of the contributions should be about Rabbie Burns and no more than three minutes long. If it was absolutely necessary to be broader in content, then you could talk/dance/sing about the Scottish. Not the brief I’d been working to for the past fortnight if I’m honest. I had three minutes that were nothing to do with Burns or his tartany-clan. To make it worse I had another seven and a half minutes that if anything were even less Scottish. It was so non-Scottish that it was bordering on bigotry.
I don’t think it’s anti-Scottish to not mention the Scottish at a Rabbie Burns spooken-word night. But there did seem to be audible shuffling of feet and mumblings from some people. I think some of my paragraphs might have implied they were leading up to me saying “shortbread”, but at the last minute veered of into something else entirely. Like a story-telling flirt. Had I known it would have this effect I would’ve deliberately written a whole set of passages that would tantalisingly skate around every Scottish cliche I could muster, getting the crowd infuriatingly hot and flustered but never actually delivering the money-shot of my using the word “kilt”.
Next year, definitely.
