Edinburgh Fringe Festival, 2023

Fuckin’ PIE

I haven’t been out of the country in quite a while.  A long time before COVID, even.  I’ve fucking had it with the United States.  Fortunately, I got invited to Scotland, to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I was only too happy to go, being a Scot somewhere in my DNA. 

First I had to replace my expired passport, which was only slightly more difficult than trying to sneak into the United States through the Gulf of Mexico and being sawed in half by one of Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s barbaric human-sized, spinning saw blades that he strategically placed along the border to mulch immigrants into bone meal chum.  Suffice to say that after finding out that gruesome detail about a red state leader taking his cues from the Spanish Inquisition, I was only too eager to get off US soil; preferably somewhere I wouldn’t see any Republicans, because I don’t want to get shot. 

I was invited to Edinburgh, Scotland, to meet with a theater producer interested in having me collaborate on a production of my deceased boyfriend Kevin’s rock opera.   This was exciting, because Kevin (Gilbert) was a genius, and his original music really deserves a wider audience than he was able to develop, since he died at 29.  I was gung ho. 

On the stopoff at Heathrow airport in London, I saw something I have never seen in the states before, even in Brooklyn, even on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, where Al-Qaeda had their offices: 

A (seemingly) fundamentalist Islamic couple:  she was slim, intense and obviously intellectual —  head to toe in flowing black garments and veiled, driven by intense energy.  Her lover was dressed like a black-bearded, black-shirted metrosexual.  The two were holding hands, whispering to each other in intimate ways and swaggering through the airport like Bonnie and Clyde.  You could smell the ideological gunpowder on them.  They didn’t give a fuck - they were flaring with all kinds of anti-Western sentiment, and it made them look baller. 

Naturally, if I was a TSA agent, I would detain them for days, because they have too many good reasons to blow up the West, and they looked all too wonderful and willing and able to do it. 

The producer funding my trip, Al, turned out to be a lovely chum of a friend of a bloke who likes to tip a pint.  We tipped quite a few, in all kinds of pubs with bagpipes and pictures of dead Scots on the walls. 

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is, for all intents and purposes, Burning Man for global theater nerds.  The mood is zany, beer-drunk and colorful against the cobblestones and gothic intricacies of an otherwise ancient Scottish town.  The walls everywhere are plastered with bright posters upon posters for literally hundreds of shows — usually One Man or One Woman’s hilarious struggle against drugs/menopause/divorce/some physical or mental handicap/transphobia/narcolepsy…choose any human frailty - someone at Edinburgh has overcome it and now has a 90 minute one-man show about it.  There’s also Baked Shakespeare and Drunk Shakespeare, for those who hate the bard. (The best title, as Big Al and I decided after several days, was a play that we didn’t see:  “A Shark Ate My Penis” — which we figured was about one man’s hilarious struggle around being gay, or trans, or something.)  

Theater is EVERYWHERE in Edinburgh.  It’s crammed into stone alleyways and packed into the back of sweaty little pubs from the 1500s.  About half the people on the street have glitter on their faces for one reason or another.  It made me feel less stupid for having been a drama major, which is a lifetime first. 

First Al and I went to see an improv show by a group calling themselves the Oxford Imps, which after a couple half-pints of Tennant’s lager we took to calling the Oxford Twats — a bunch of early twentysomethings who did all of the dumbest and most obvious improvisations taking place in laundromats.  No improv team should ever take the suggestion of a laundromat, ever again.  There is no more joy to be had in that location.  It’s finished.  It’s over. 

Many of the performers are internet stars who don’t seem to have quite figured out how to perform live in front of someone other than their phones.  Live, they look like they largely look incapable of handling human attention, like they were just fished out of a deep sea cave. 

Al and I quickly set about a course on How to Speak Scottish, which I  picked up from watching the Scottish comedies “Limmy’s Show” and “Burnistoun.” 

“Ye PIE.”  This is an insult.   “Ye ROCKET.”  This is also an insult. 

“Feckin PIE,” Al would say.  

“Yir the feckin pie.  Fook,” I’d say, as we made our way through the packed astro-turfed beer gardens. 

We ended up going to a magical restaurant called “The Outsider.” Everything was perfect about it, especially the waitress, a Northern Scot who looked like a young blond Isabella Rossellini.  We flirted with her as the fireworks went off over Edinburgh castle, centered right in the big window before us, which was spooling a gentle breeze into the restaurant, in spite of the location’s typically Scottish disdain for air-conditioning. 

 Isabella confided that her heaven was Ibiza; she just wanted to get off work and go there. “I got off the plane, it was like heaven,” she said, her eyes aglow.  “Everything was white.”   

I could see her screaming white teeth cackling over a pile of cocaine on a chrome hubcap on a white fur couch - her in a mirrored bikini, taking shots of Malibu out of a plastic ice tray, disco balls springing from her fingertips. 

I knew in my mind’s eye she was not my future wife, but I loved her all the same for her white carpeted, sparkling kaleidoscopic world. 

Since we were the last people in the restaurant, a rat opted to boldly scuttle around the restaurant floor, zigging between booths. 

The bearded Argentinean manager swiftly made his way to our tableside. 

“Look,” he said. “It is a very old restaurant.  It is part of the charm, this rat we have no control over.” 

Al and I agreed. 

The hotel breakfast consisted of some steam trays packed with strangest meats I have never seen — black puddings, from the look of them.  Great sweaty arm-sized gobfuls of meaty meatness with that terrazzo look of having been pulverized beforehand into blackly blooded, tooth-sized bits of fat and naked sinew.  This was the food of my people, my ancestry…and despite its atavistic character it was fucking appalling.  It may as well have had a red beard. I wasn’t going anywhere near it. 

—- Edinburgh, Scotland, 2023 

Artwork: “Get Me The Fuck Out This Salt Marsh,” oil on canvas, Cintra Wilson 2023.