Selective Deafness

I have a plan to make life easy. Why can’t everything I need for my Edinburgh show be contained in the Heathrow duty free shopping experience? Especially during August for I swear half of the domestic departure lounge is full of theatre critics with expensive leather man bags and matching iPads. The internet reception must be down just now because people are looking at each others faces like this is a performance. Incessantly I try to check my emails as I have been doing in the middle of the night for the past month just in case some one forwards something at 2am. This momentary lapse of internet connectivity in Heathrow brings a moment of enforced calm until I remember that in real life too there are times I cannot get internet reception and that sick feeling starts again.

The kiosk offering samples of a grapefruit liqueur you would never buy outside an airport is near as are all the beauty products under the sun. I open up with a bit of banter to the sales girl and tell her about Charles Fox, the perfect white face cream and how I mistakenly only bought the small size and am now desperate for a pot big enough to dive into. This white stuff looks great on stage especially with yellow cream eyeliner as applied by my make up guru Emily Leonard. She then pauses, she wonders how are things going with my skin, not the show. They do not sell clown mask white cream. They are a luxury French brand.

Change of water in a new location makes everything chafe so I buy the biggest bottle of cream off her display and mumble about finding the perfect white face cream in the Charles Fox shop is a lot more fun than standing in this lady’s kiosk. Last week in Covent Garden, to find the right prison pallor for my character both theatre director Peter Darney and I end up with a bag full of fake teeth and a bruise kit that will only shift with cellotape. She cannot top that with her pocketful of soap samples.

I return to my seat and see my last blast of emails may have been unrealistic. Now I understand why the fit young Scot who during my last Fringe shouted ‘how’s you’ at me sent me up the wrong end of Princes Street. I begged to know which side was Jenners on because I had to have a hot glue gun to mend my set for a preview that instant. He had meant how am I, not how is my show.