So the Fringe For All was on Monday May 28th, once again at the dark, noisy and crowded Cafe Campus. But at least it's no longer smokey. I can remember coming home and barely able to tolerate the flyers, and myself, as soon as I closed the front door. But the smoking ban means we come home clean.

As always, as many flyers as possible were saved afterwards, as I detail below. [LATER]: The sorted flyers are at the Fringe office, I gave them to Travel Julie, though she wasn't sure what to do with them.

There have been years when I've found copies of the list of who was to perform, but no luck this year. Hence there'll be no public record of who got on stage. It's just become too much trouble to follow who's who, and keep a list. How I hate that venue.

I got there about 19:55, and the place was already filled. It's always amusing to get to the table by the door be greeted by new and eager volunteers who can't know I'm not just the audience. They asked something about whether I wanted to sign up. Some years, they've not let us in till the press is finished with their buffet and in place, but not this year. So not much choice of seating, with the prime ones reserved for the press. On the other hand, it didn't actually start till about 20:20, with a short film that likely is the Fringe commercial for this year.

It was the usual routine, the MCs fill some time while things get adjusted, announce the next act, the act comes on stage and does two minutes (I thought it used to be longer), with a blinking light to warn them that their time was about up. Thankfully, we didn't get much of a show, that at least one year seemed to stretch the evening endlessly. On the other hand, there were a lot of acts, and even at a few minutes each, it goes on and on. The intermission was about 22:00 and seemed longer than 15 minutes. And of course, the usual emptying of the ranks, at least up front, at the intermission, which meant I could move from a stool to a chair with a real back.

Maybe it's because this was my twelfth, but it all seems so routine now. Most of the acts just did a snippet, rather than the attempts at attention that we used to see. Amy Elizabeth Blackmore doing Pussy Galore (was that name chosen after the not quite theme of James Bond?), came out in a string bikini, which trumps the show from New Orleans last year that I said "features the best performance in a bikini that I've ever seen at the Fringe". She came out in a robe, and seemed to tease us with whether she'd take it off, reminiscent of See Me Naked in 2002, and oddly it seemed better than someone coming out looking like they were going to strip. And yes, the bathing suit seemed to work better than if she'd been naked, maybe because I expected her to be naked underneath. Amy started out as a volunteer, before she was an adult, and did So Cruel, Teenage Wasteland in 2001, which puts her close to being a Fringe Oldtimer.

I don't recall any other nudity, though one guy sort of dropped his pants (and I can't remember which show). There was at least one show, and I thought two, where it implied there might be nudity in the actual show, but again I don't have names (and that seems wrong, just like nudity in commercials it all fails if the show can't be remembered).

Flyering was way down. At least one act tossed flyers down from the balcony, which has happened before, and some acts left the stage to leaflet, but they seemed to concentrate on the press. I got only about three that way, and I was sitting up there to the extent that Anders thought I'd suddenly become press. The fact that there weren't that many flyers remaining afterwards is testament to the lack of flyering. I'm of mixed feelings, since the space is too lousy for it to really work, and it seemed like it continued to be done because it's something you do, yet for it to not happen also seems to be a bad thing.

There were no real gimmicks this year. No cupcakes being passed out, no real out of the ordinary gimmicks, though Clean Freak did have a sponge with their flyer wrapped around it. But there was only one, and it wasn't a new thing; Come Clean in 2003 also had similar sponges, and I know I found more of them afterwards. One show, adulteres did have hard candy attached to their flyer and they were well spread around the venue.

In sorting the flyers for Wichita (that has Mike Patterson in it), I spy a hand scrawled "Mike loves Monika" (well, there's no love, it's a heart with an arrow through it). At first, I thought it might be someone lusting after Mike Patterson, then I wonder if it's just someone using it as a scribble pad (like the time I got a Fringe Buck with someone's phone number on it). I set it aside, thinking I'd mention it to him the next time I see him. But then I notice more scribblings as I work through the pile of flyers. And they are all done with the same pen, and more or less the same style. "Bowling", a smiley face, "Doggie!" (with a drawing of a dog), "Super!" (no, two of them), "Nice!", "Dandy!" (no, three of those, though one lacked the exclamation point), and "Special!". So it must be a marketing scheme, to personalize the otherwise glossy flyer.

It ended sometime around 23:30. I didn't record the time, but I recall that I had all the flyers by about 00:05, and that took some time.

For the eighth year running, as many flyers as possible were saved after it was all over. In 1999, when the Cafe Campus was first used, I saved some flyers from acts I liked, and Janis Kirshner was rescuing flyers for a show she was involved in (so I added her's to the ones I was already saving). In 2000, I decided it was just easier to save them all. And no, I don't make origami out of them, or use them to start fires, I sort them out and get them back to the Fringe office so the artists can make use of them.

It's not easy. One doesn't want to grab them too fast, when the potential audience might want them still, yet the staff at the venue is pretty prompt about cleaning up, and they just come along and sweep the flyers into garbage cans. I've tended to wait too long, so they get to at least some of the flyers. Two years ago, when the Fringe For All was at Club Soda the staff was more helpful, even coming up with a box for me to collect them, and even handing some to me as they cleared tables. This year, I likely jumped into it a tad sooner, and I didn't really see the Cafe Campus staff tossing them much before I got to them. Though perhaps the Fringe finally mentioned that someone is likely to salvage them so they could hold off a tad.

It's always a surprise that the acts don't grasp the concept. Sometimes I see them digging around for their own flyers, but they don't catch on that grabbing them all and sorting them out is a better way to do it. I did have some help this year (and I think last year) but it wasn't from the troupes.

I don't grab them off the floor, having decided they will be too messy. I try to avoid the ones that have been used to clean up beer spills, and the ones used to wrap gum up.

In the early days at Cafe Campus, there seemed to be loads and loads of flyers, even with the staff tossing a lot. That has tapered off, as the acts have realized they were just sitting there. It was still a big haul, but it seemed spread over more shows.

These are in no particular order, though it's skewed towards the larger number first

And I never know how to interpret the count. Obviously, some troupes are just careless, dumping flyers everywhere (the one with the largest count even had an elastic around one bundle). But do low counts mean the audience actually kept the flyers, or that most landed on the floor, or that the acts didn't hand out many? Finding only one of some of them, that seems to say something significant, even if it's not clear what.

Goto Main Page