; Mel Gibson wins the Oscar for ; Brad Pitt shows he can act in Terry Gilliam's In July an interviewer from the Glasgow Herald calls me. He tells me that, due to the unprecedented number of Chicago shows coming to the festival (twelve), the Herald will be running a five page feature on the groups and wants to set up a time and place for an interview. Because WNEP is the least known group, he'd waited until all the other interviews were scheduled (with Second City, ImprovOlympic, etc.
). In the end, he came to my regular Sunday grilling - he had never had a bratwurst - the afternoon before his flight home left. We held the interview in my living room (Phill was there to provide support).
After we went outside, hung out, I grilled food (he had five brats) and drank with the regular BBQ crowd. Myself as Buddy Jones I don't know if I was just the most colorful or the fact that instead of 'wining and dining' him, I 'beer and bratwursted' him, but when the article came out, LEVEL 6 had a center spread photo in the meat of the article and a sidebar, with my photo, entitled In Your Face: Here Comes the Ugly American The sidebar detailed that I wore a ballcap, smoked cigars, had a foul mouth, and only needed a gun in one pocket and a pornographic magazine in the other to complete the stereotypical American profile. It then went on to discuss my theater background and how first impressions can be deceiving.
It plugged both the radio show and ComedySportz and was the company's first piece of international press. As we got closer to the deadlines for money, more and more people wanted to come and as I added folks to the list (my wife, Deanna; Pat's wife; Dave Gaudet and Jill from CSz) the deals I had made began to change. The Air Canada deal was set at $165.
00 per round trip ticket but as we added folks to the list, the average price began to go up a bit, as did the price of the housing (we ended up getting hit up for a month of expanded insurance and deposits on both heating and electricity). As it turned out, I managed to get everyone there and back, with a month-long stay for app. $700.
00 which was pretty extraordinary (most other folks were paying $700 - $900 just to fly out). Production expenses, however, began to mount - flyers, venue rent, publicity packets, some advertising, posters - the costs were starting to balloon. I put most of it on my credit card or just paid them outright and my long distance phone bill for July was over $800.
00. At a certain point I just closed my eyes to it and just pressed forth, hoping that, somehow, we'd make the money back. We flew in and with the sole exception being that Kate and Alida had some trouble flying in the day after we had arrived, things went very smoothly.
The housing was awesome - everyone had a bed, there were four bathrooms, a community room (which became the room with the pot of cigarette butts, utilized by Phill and Alida when they had run out of cigarette money and needed to scrounge), and we were walking distance from HolyRood Castle , the Fringe Office, and our venue. Pat Carton relaxes after flyposting in the square (as pictured in "The Stage") Phill and Joe had a wrestling match over who got the room best for writing (Joe won) and I brought a megaphone to wake people up (which Katie took and hid). The plan was pretty simple: we'd meet in the community room every other day at 10AM, I'd assign folks to go to the main drag (just outside the Fringe Box Office) and flypost, and we'd go do our thing.
We rehearsed for the first couple of days and spent a lot of time figuring out which shows we were going to see and parties we were going to. The shows started slow but as we got some phenomenal press, things picked up considerably. Karin got us booked to sing our opening number on BBC Radio Scotland live and Jeff got a blurb in the paper for Joe got kidney stones one weekend and had to use the lovely National Health Care System and Sukow broke the plumbing in the house, thus flooding the basement.
Our 10AM meetings became me sitting in the room fuming because most people had been out partying until 6AM. We ate tons of Steak and Guiness Pie and homemade toasties. I started to feel the pressure of the money I had spent on my own, started to feel alone in carrying the burden of promoting the show (which actually wasn't true at all), became a raving asshole (complete with crown of thorns and stigmata) for part of the month and nearly had a nervous breakdown, crying uncontrollably in the rain for three hours, during our final week.
And we saw shows. Macbeth in a swimming pool done in the Kabuki style. An evening that included a black man painted green with his dick painted yellow,, dancing around and an absurdly obese woman popping the heads of Barbie Dolls off in her ass.
A Ukrainian version of Chekhov's "The Bear" that had us all enthralled. It was complete and overwhelming artistic overload. The amount of eye opening and idea stealing was the single best part of the experience.
At a strange Scottish flea market, Alida bought me a board game - How to Be a Complete Bastard - based in part on the book by "Young Ones" star Adrian Edmundson. One night, after our performance run was complete and we were slowly seeing people off and preparing to come home to the States, we all decided to play the game. A board game with reverse goals (you won if you were the furthest from completing the game) and based entirely on daring your teammates to do ridiculous things, the game was both a great drunken time as well as an awful, hysterical final hurrah in Edinburgh.
During the game: I chewed a piece of Alida's toenail off Alida used a butcher knife and cut her panties off without removing her jeans Someone (I think it was Jeff) seduced a chair as if it was Nancy Reagan Phill stood on his head and attempted to pull three leg hairs out of his leg (I thought he was going to snap his neck) And Jeff ended the game by attempting to drink a half water/half salt concoction that had him violently throw up so intensely that we thought we were going to have to avail ourselves of the Scottish Health Care System a second time. After some strange flight difficulties that ended up having Dave Wiviott and I flying home separately from the rest of the group, we were home. I crunched the numbers.
After all was said and done, I had incurred a nearly $12,000.00 debt (this after all money was paid by the venue from ticket sales). I vowed that day to never shoulder the sole financial burden on anything theater related again.
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