Fringe III

The past two days I've been occupying myself almost solely by seeing shows. On Friday I also went to Adelaide's art museum for a bit before going to a amateur-ish show called "Sin City" about the fall of vaudeville and the rise of Las Vegas. The best part about it was the 5 man xylophone band. I kept thinking, if CJ were here he'd be telling me that he wants to learn to play the xylophone. After that I wandered around the main Fringe center, where the Garden is and all the restaurants. I watched a couple of street performers (this weekend is the Buskers- aka Street Performers- Festival), two guys who stripped to their underwear and wrapped themselves up in saran wrap and tried to escape. It was more comedy than any kind of magic or acrobatics. They called the trick the Cling Wrap of Embarassment. After eating dinner and wandering I went to two late night shows at The Garden- and one of them turned out to be far and away the best thing I've seen so far. It was called Tom Tom Club and featured six pretty hunky guys doing beatboxing, drumming, and insane acrobatics, plus a real DJ mixing things live with all kinds of crazy equiptment. It was so fantastic- I don't think I've ever seen anyone beatbox live and to watch guys flying up in the air to it was even better. Very very cool. After that show I went to see what was sorta the female version of the same thing, called La La Parlour's "Tarnished". It was a burlesque/acrobatics show, with a little comedy and dancing. Also very good, but not anywhere near the Tom Tom Club.

Today I volunteered in the afternoon, helping put up decorations for the Fringe Family Day which is tomorrow. I also went to another show at The Garden, called "Men of Steel" which was also great. I'm starting to think that The Garden is the place to see shows- they seemed to be screened for a certain level of quality. So Men of Steel was a bizarre puppet show, three puppeteers using cookie cutters, kitchen utensils, and food products to tell crazy stories, while making Kung FU movie type sound effects and unintelligable dialogue. Sorta hard to describe, since I've never seen anything like it before- but very very funny and unique!

Tonight I'm actually going out with people at the hostel for St Patrick's Day! Yay!

Love,
Emma