You'll never guess what I've done. I put a USB memory stick through the washing machine. In a trouser pocket, together with assorted odd socks, teeshirts and a baseball cap.
You'll never guess where the only copy of all the files for tomorrow's performance was. Yes, I see you're there ahead of me - all 11 songs were on the stick. RNS, WAV and SES files, plus lyrics.
However, do not despair, because as well as being stupid enough to shove stuff into the washing machine without going through the pockets, I'm also stupid enough to leave the washing machine unplugged.
So, I have a completely dry memory stick, and the gig is still on. And my clothes still need washing.
The last time I had to spend a week in London, the jobcentre made me fill out a form promising to continue looking for work there. This time, in the new streamlined civil service, there's one to describe the purpose of my time away, and another to log any paid work I do there.
This saturday is set aside as a single day in London, getting to know the rest of the play's cast, and the first complete rehearsal with (we hope) all the actors in the same room.
Topping and Butch are a caberet duo who've built up a following around the world in gay communities. They were playing Portsmouth tonight, and Simon M effusively recommended seeing them, so we went and exerienced the act.
I was led to expect a gay version of Flanders & Swann - well, a gayer version - and that's not far off the mark. It's a traditional combination of risque jokes and songs, the latter written to well known tunes - Toni Basil's Mickey rewritten about David Beckham, I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper rechristend to I Lost My Heart to a Gay Club Bouncer.
Though the references are contemporary, the style is incredibly old fashioned - music hall smut that often wouldn't be out of place in Round the Horne.
They are highly professional and obviously old hands at carrying an audiance. In these days of commedians abusing the audiance in the name of "involvement", Topping & Butch do the decent thing of making the willing audiance members feel special (while at arms length), and not forcing themselves on the rest of us.
Unlike some performers in the same brackett, they constantly update and change their material - some songs are rewritten to reflect current media events, but retaining the same structure and catchphrases ("Nevermind, nevermind", "And all that jazz") for long-time audiances to join in with.
Cheesy, silly, and hopelessly camp, but politically quite good and very competent. An awful lot of supposedly naughty but really quite nasty and tedious drag acts could learn a lot from them.
I reckon I'm getting pretty good at throwing household bleach at old clothes. Two unwearably old and battered pairs of cutoff jeans are now covered in lurid white bits, and a teeshirt now looks like a culture of bacteria under a micrtoscope.
What I could try is getting a pair of those cheap, thin jeans that Tesco flog for UKP5, unconvincingly dyed white in parts to make them look old, redye them a strong saturated blue, then bleach the hell out of splotches of them. Result: a strong constant blue with bits of high-contrast white. Something for when I have some spare time, anyway.
I'm rather thinking of singing piebald on Sunday.
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