I really enjoyed this gig. A throwback arts cafe of a venue, an excellent host in Chris East, and a really top quality lineup of improvisers, character comedians and alternative stand-ups. I would happily book any or indeed all of them for one of my own shows.
This was only Horse Passports’ fourth ever gig, which seems absurd. This was our best in terms of how relaxed we were on stage, and a bit looser in terms of what we said between sketches and how the the performances themselves went.
There’s a lot that we need to improve on, and I think we need to be a bit more judicious in our choice of material; but that’ll happen.
After the show, we hung out with Leslie Ewing-Burgesse, who it turns out is a mutual friend of me, Vix Leyton, and Scatman John. Well: perhaps not the latter. But it was great to talk to her about Mr John – and his strangely poetic last words – and Garfield’s penis and lots of other important things. I hope our paths cross again.
The night before, in a different city, I saw Selena Mersey do her Madonna/Whore show. It was brilliant as always, and she’d been having a tough week mental health wise. I loved how open she was about this on stage – she really owned it.
And I loved hanging out with her and my friends afterwards too, and generally feeling like I had finally managed to carve out some kind of existence in Brighton. It gets harder the older one gets; her boyfriend is too young to have heard of Pulp, for example.
There’s a lot of tough stuff I’m dealing with at the moment, so this blog post is a reminder that I am still managing to do good things in the midst of it all.
jamesofwalsh 