Here is an example of a typical conversation I encounter during the Fringe in Edinburgh.
ME: Hi, I’m Jo Gill. We spoke on the phone earlier.
Random journalist/manager/promoter: Oh, um, yes?
ME: Yes, I’m representing Rick Shapiro.
Random journalist/manager/promoter (looks strangely with suspicion and fear)
I thought you would be different.
ME: Do you mean brunette, older and less attractive?
Random journalist/manager/promoter: Yes.
There’s no group of human beings who’ve suffered more from bad PR than blondes. From children’s toys to films, the advertising industry and Paris Hilton inc. have succeeded in building the image of the dumb blonde.
I am naturally classed on the hair dye scale as a ‘dirty’ blonde, which can be seen as a light brunette – it’s all in the perception. However, I dye it lighter. I’ve always tried as a blonde to challenge people’s perceptions – to be intelligent in spite of my glaring blondeness. I have succeeded in gaining a Masters from Edinburgh, and not in your typical ‘blonde’ subjects, but in the heavyweight arts category of History. I have learnt a foreign language within a year, and chosen to live abroad. I’ve always had that middle-class pseudo-rebel urge in me. That borderline interesting trait has always driven me to do things like dye my hair a slightly blonder shade of blonde. That urge also drives me to follow the road a little less travelled, which perhaps explains my move to Brussels and my desire to work with New York based producer Calvin Wynter, and comedian Andrew J Lederer on future projects at the Edinburgh Fringe. I have sold enough shows, drunk enough free drinks, and handed out enough flyers in my day to know a little bit about how the fringe works, but now I’m looking to shake it up a bit. My British personality works well in contrast and in concert with New Yorkers. I’m not entirely sure why that is, perhaps it’s the unspoken ‘special relationship’ that exists between the UK and the North Atlantic. That explains ‘the what’, but what of the how, where, when and why? Here’s how I got here.
As a historian it’s the littlest facts of life that interest me. As a journalist, it is the most interesting angle to take, the strange, the obscure. My life is a mess of people and places, and the best way I can untangle it is by viewing it as a series of journeys and destinations. For each I have used a different mode of transport. A train to Brussels, a plane to Holland, a car to Scotland, and a bike in Oxford. So, here I sit on a train – the Eurostar to be precise - running from the sexed-up St Pancras station in London and hurtling towards Brussels at 300km/h. At Brussels Midi train station I am hoping the catch the next connection between the Eurostar and the Gravy train. While waiting for this connection I am occupying myself with what I know best, comedy. I feel even more qualified as a comedy connoisseur with the hop across the pond. There are certain cultural agitations that you expect when moving to Northern Europe – but the difference in humour is one you are never fully prepared for. Brussels is even more of a comedy conundrum stradled as it is between French and Flemish. However, I believe this makes my comedy sense more acute, and by filtering what international audiences find funny you get to the core of what humour is. I now have a great respect for translatable amusement. In fact, one of the most interesting things about living in a Brussels is finding my French personality. Many people recognise that you take a slightly different personality when you are forced to express yourself in a foreign language. A University of Texas study found that you are affected in terms of extroversion and neuroticism. So, apparently I will take on characteristics of the nationals of the language that I speak. All of a sudden I can hate ‘ze Anglo-Saxons, but love the Royals, and have a penchant for food that when stepped on makes a ‘squelch’ sound and should be left on the bottom of your shoe rather than fried in garlic and butter and called a delicacy. I have to say, when it comes to food the French have hired the best PRs in the world to spin what is essentially slime into a delicacy – Just say Escarg-NO. I am currently living with my fiancé, an assistant to a French MEP. Yes, he is a frog, but the happy relationship that began from flirtatious xenophobia did not begin here, but in the lush bogs of Holland.
Travelling further back in time, I remember very clearly taking the plane between Edinburgh and Amsterdam. It was a Monday flight and therefore mostly empty of obnoxious ‘staggers’ treading the path to stag nights, red lights and cannabis cafes. I was at the beginning of my year abroad, studying in Holland as a part of my degree course. The only people I knew in Holland were ‘Boom Chicago’ a comedy sketch group from the US, who I’d met on the PR path during fringe 2002. I’d like to make some nostalgic note about how innocent I was, but really anyone going to Holland is aware of the consequences. I was sharing what was essentially a cave with a Spanish girl from Barcelona. As a science student she spent most of her days experimenting on mice, except that she hated harming animals, so her supervisor was charged with cutting off their heads at the end of experiments. Studying in Holland gave me a chance to mix with proper foreigners, the nice ones, who like to speak English, and don’t scoff when you attempt their native tongue. It was pretty much a yearlong intercultural party to rival Eurovision in kitschness and hilarity. So, I have mostly fond memories, and it would be one of those ‘best year of your life’ type clichés. However, the most important event that happened here was meeting my now fiancé. He was a geeky French law student, and I was the wild Brit. There is nothing more attractive than being exotic, and outside of the UK I was. We met whilst living in the same building – he was helping a friend to move rooms, and I was living in the same corridor. We began talking about Brussels funnily enough, and then he asked me to see a Tim Burton film. I didn’t quite get his Frenchness at first, and what seemed to me and my American friends to be stalking was actually seen as legitimate wooing by latin types. And so, I fell for my stalker. From this point on my days in the UK were limited, and my other love affair, with Edinburgh would be interrupted.
I arrived in Edinburgh in my parents’ car in the summer of 2001. I was familiar with the city since my mum’s family is based in Blackhall. I don’t remember many summers of my life spent in places other than Scotland. Subsequently, I don’t have many sunny holiday snaps to share. It’s almost certain that Edinburgh has formed me more than any other place I have called home. It has a sort of tough love aspect to it. I think this has to do with the fact that you truly do experience four seasons in one day. But I love the geographical diversity, the history, the smell of heather mixed with whisky and vomit and the sorry sound of bagpipers carried on the breeze. The first two years of Uni were academically miserable, as the staid and uniform courses were held in the dystopic towers created as educative spaces by 1960s architects that surround George Square. I took steps towards my love of film by joining societies, and quickly realised I hated students. I joined the team at the Filmhouse, and found a safe place for pretentious film buffs outside of academia. I also worked as a PR representing Icon films, which is owned by the patron saint of Scotland, Mel Gibson. I got my first bitter taste of fringe pr as a flyer girl, but quickly inserted myself into the world of comedians, agents and promoters by blagging my way into any and every comedy and tv party. Here lies the trick of the blonde. But, I moved between both film and comedy for the rest of my time in Edinburgh and the fringe, being around but not a part of the Bedlam Theatre helped. It just happened that my graduating year was full of talent, Al Smith and the Penny Dreadfuls being the major players and moving their way up the BBC food-chain despite the major budgetary cuts. However, there is no escaping my tepid background amongst all this glamour.
I have spent a large part of my life being a peddle-pusher, fifteen years in Oxford to be exact. I cycled to and from The Cherwell School every day. During the winter months I often arrived with icicles attached to my mascara’d lashes and decided early on that feminism was the best form of contraception. I believe I was nick-named ‘the ice queen’ for my lack of interest in the Cherwell boys rather than for my appearance during the winter months. Despite this torturous adolescence I managed to get four A-levels in Geography, History, English Literature and Politics. Oxford is one of those beautiful touristic towns that exists in a bubble floating free of reality. I seem to remember there was one day when suddenly there were no more tramps, and then big American corporations took up residence in ye olde tudoresque buildings, whilst the students too clever for their own good were throwing up their inheritance in the river Cherwell. It was a suffocating place, free of hassle and thus free of inspiration. I craved the filth of Amsterdam, the pollution of London and the bizarre logic of Brussels.
My journey of a thousand miles, clearly began with a single step. It was in the commuter belt of London, that beautiful suburban ring hugging the M25 that I took my first step, said my first words and still seemed charming and sweet. I remember very little of my first four years in Harpenden. I remember a big pond though. I’ve always been drawn to water. I also remember telling huge lies about finding tortoises in our neighbourhood, and as my mum was poised to call out the animal rescue team, she discovered they were merely slugs. I stick to my original story. However, my first journey wasn’t by foot – it was through a tunnel not unlike the Eurotunnel. I doubt I was hurtling out at 300km/h but I apparently pissed off my mum. She had just enjoyed a fish supper when I decided to make my entrance, and thus at the beautiful moment of my birth my mum recalls vomiting, and then I arrived. Which offers the ideal image of the consequent relationship – painful but worth it.
The story clearly doesn’t begin there. It begins back in 1970s Edinburgh. Long hair, tartan flares, bagpipes and Jimi Hendrix, what an image. It was under these unlikely romantic circumstances that my parents met. My dad was studying at Edinburgh, and lived in a student dive in Marchmont, my mum was studying nursing at the Royal Infirmary and living in a student dive in Marchmont. As it happened, they lived in the same building and met in a hallway, sounding all too familiar. They were married in the Highlands. My dad in a blue velvet trouser suit, my mum in a sweet lace dress, complete with wedges and Abba haircut, and the priest pissed off his face on whisky, was duped into marrying two atheists in a church on the request of their parents. But this is also where the journey ends. Journeys end where lovers meet.
The train pulls up into Brussels station, where I will meet my lover. My British life left at St Pancras, and my French returns. This means shouting ‘merde’ at the football, and striking at the very mention of the word ‘pension’. I don’t think it’s quite possible that this will be a permanent personality shift, at least I hope not. I love the Scots too much, and in spite of myself, the English. I’ve always been split between the two. This year I decided I would support Scotland in the rugby and England in the football. Anyone who follows these two sports will see the misfortune of 2007. The only way to explain this is that I was having a ‘blonde’ moment.
First written for 'The Fringe Report' October 2007
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