Ja Bitsie! Nein Bitsie!

Home again, home again.

I had the most fabulous time!

Combination of incredibly interesting place; absolutely fascinating event; the world’s most gracious, brilliant, and tolerant (heh, heh, heh) hosts; adorable cats; and perfect weather—shifting cloudscapes, cool, in the 60°s. I was happy to come home—which is always the sign of a great vacation—but I had the distinct impression of having left a part of me in Edinburgh, perhaps in the form of a small china Patrizia doll that’s even now taking its place on the dusty shelves of the Haunted Antique Shop on upper South Bridge Road.



The Edinburgh Fringe Festival has long been on my bucket list.

I like performance art—but I find most stage plays incredibly boring because they’re so predictable, actors in front of a proscenium, being moved on vectors like game pieces. Zzzzzzzz—thunk!

Ninety percent of the Broadway shows I’ve seen fall into this category, so I’ve more-or-less given up seeing Broadway shows because why should I pay $150 a ticket to have my eyes glaze over, right? Honestly, if the words are the thing, I can get more out of reading them.

But the Edinburgh Fringe Festival—the world’s largest arts festival, so Wikipedia kindly tells me—is filled with the most interesting, dynamic performance art because it’s un-juried—there’s no band of snotty gatekeepers passing judgment on what is or what is not art. Consequently, creativity thrives. Every conceivable art form is represented from conventional theater to cabaret, circus, opera, dance, stand-up comedy, one-man shows. The very streets are a performance venue, but the official venues are makeshift stages inside every building that fire codes allow to entertain a crowd of more than 20.

I ended up spending $150 to see six shows that I will remember one way or another for the rest of my life.

And the one thing they all—save one—had in common was that they created a kind of alternate reality that you entered for an hour and a half, and came out feeling—changed… They added to my set of cultural referents. Like I have been walking around murmuring, Ja Bitsie! Nein Bitsie!, to myself for five days now because that was an ongoing motif in this fabulous show called Famous Puppet Death Scenes, which I will not even attempt to describe because honestly: You had to be there.

Oh, wait!

There appears to be a Vimeo:

Watch on Vimeo

Famous Puppet Death Scenes Trailer from The Old Trout Puppet Workshop on Vimeo.

Interestingly enough, the one show that did not work was the hot ticket of this year’s Fringe, which was Ian McKellen—you ❤️LUV❤️ed him as Gandalf!—declaiming various great speeches from Hamlet while not-very-good ballet dancers pranced around him.

Though I did covet this dancer’s beanie:



Alas! It was not for sale at the venue’s gift stand.

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And then there was Edinburgh itself and Scotland, where I had not been before, and with which I instantly fell in love.

My infinitely obliging hosts took me on a tour of the countryside, a five-minute drive away from their spectacularly beautiful and cozy home, and my Gawd, it was so enchanting. Sheep! Strange 19th-century instruments at the top of steep hills that offered you guidelines to every landscape feature in a 50-mile radius! Wild heather blowing in the breeze!

Watch on YouTube

This is not an ancient circle of standing stones (although it is very near a verifiably ancient standing stone and close to Cairnpapple Hill, a ritual burial mound for more than 4,000 years.) For his 50th birthday, a farmer’s family and friends decided to build him a circle of 50 standing stones—and I mean, can you imagine a more enchanting birthday gift?



Edinburgh itself is a remarkable place in every conceivable way from its antiquity to its grim, fortress-like beauty to the immense friendliness of its residents.



I am one of those people who really likes to talk to strangers, an attribute that in the U.S. is often viewed with varying degrees of mistrust—understandably so because, in the U.S., so many random strangers turn out to be predators.

But in Edinburgh, I was able to indulge this proclivity to its full extent and actually got flirted with on several occasions—most notably while waiting for Famous Puppet Death Scenes to begin when a most handsome, age-appropriate, twinkling-eyed man chatted me up with no attempt to disguise his appreciation of my wit and physical appearance.

And this made me think that perhaps my certainty—That part of your life? Over!—is not necessarily true but merely a reflection of my distaste for contemporary American courtship rituals.

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Anyway, I could dither on endlessly except I have a ton of errands I must do today, including (shortly) toddling on over to my garden to see the devastation that eight days of 90° heat and no rain has wrought.

But, yes.

The trip was fabulous.

And I will leave you with this photograph:



My fantasy is that this gentleman worked all his life as a civil servant but dreamed of Art and in his declining years wrote a play about the friendship between Cezanne and Gaugin, and invested his entire life savings in bringing it to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Though, of course, who the fuck knows?