What Would Beyoncé Do?! Read online

  How dare you?! How do you know he is not the one for me? ‘Because if he was the one, then he would like you back.’ Er hello, what planet do you live on? This is hugely inflammatory and not only inaccurate but incredibly offensive. ‘How do you know I am not the one for him?’

  ‘Well because he says you are not the one for him.’

  ‘Yes but just because he says I’m not the one, doesn’t mean I am actually not the one. He doesn’t know what’s good for him, he doesn’t know I am the one yet but I am still the one. I have to show him. Look, it’s like when your kids don’t want to eat broccoli, they don’t know it’s good for them, so you have to chop it up into tiny pieces and hide it in their favourite crisps.’

  ‘This sounds very rapey.’

  ‘It’s not rapey, it’s broccoli.’

  ‘So you are equating yourself to broccoli?’

  ‘Yes, actually, I am his broccoli, he might not know it yet but I am good for him and he will want to eat me eventually.’

  “How do you know you are good for him?

  ‘Because I’m the one for him . . . jeez, keep up.’

  ‘So you are going to just waste your time until he realises you are the one for him? Don’t you think he would know it already if you are?’

  ‘It’s not a waste of time! And obviously it would be helpful if he caught up to my oneness sooner, some men get it straight away and others are slow, so I have to play the long game, the broccoli game, oooooo, open wide, here comes the aeroplane, aka, Skype him and talk for hours, play it totally breezy, take at least an hour to reply to his messages, look gorgeous every time I see him, then on a subconscious level, he begins to realise how good I am and slowly but surely falls truly, madly, deeply in love with me. Mate, I’m broccoli.’

  This charming German man with his weird accent and odd taste in shoes had come along and just like that unclipped my wings and said go. I felt like I was a knotted water hose and someone had just released me and the water was free to flow. It’s a shit metaphor I know, but I was in love and he’s German, and they love engineering, so it will have to do.

  In August, Klaus was back from Germany and producing some shows for the Edinburgh Festival. He was helping a few acts put on their solo shows and suggested I come up and see how it all worked. I was pretty sure this was German for ‘I love you, Luisa, come and work with me.’

  The festival takes place during the month of August and the whole city turns into a great big party performance space. You cannot walk down the street without being flyered for a show, theatre, comedy, dance, the lot. Every bus and taxi has performers’ faces slapped all over them, and if you want to get anywhere in the city centre you have to allow yourself an extra ten minutes as you will be stuck in crowds walking at a snail’s pace.

  Klaus helped me find somewhere to stay for the month and offered me a job flyering for one of his acts. He was so impressive; here he was, a German, not in his own country, looking after five acts at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. None of them were big names but they were all doing solo shows and Klaus was running things! His assistant Gert was really sweet and lovely to me. She had just started dating a Danish comedian and was totally besotted with her.

  Klaus would run from show to show, making sure the rooms were set up properly and the acts were happy. He would meet me at 5 p.m. every day to hand me some flyers, then I would go out on the street and give out leaflets and say things like, ‘Fantastic comedy show, 8.45 tonight at the Three Sisters pub.’ OK, so flyering for Klaus wasn’t exactly what I had in mind as my course for true love, but it was a good start. I don’t think Klaus ever noticed how much effort I made to look good for flyering, I think he thought the tutu was to attract attention; actually it was to subliminally show him what I would look like in a wedding dress.

  Five p.m. became my favourite time of day. I was working for the man I was totally in love with, he was my boss, I was his worker, oh role-play undertones drove me mad. I thought, well if I can impress him with my leafleting technique and get him audiences every night, he will be like, wow, now that is a woman I want by my side to help me build my comedy empire. I must marry Luisa. That’s how I thought it would pan out, but I’m not very good at this whole predicting life thing.

  The Edinburgh Festival runs for about three and a half weeks and most performers do the whole run with one day off in the middle. It’s frowned upon to take more days off as industry can come and see you at any time and that’s the big point of the festival. People perform in Edinburgh so TV, film, casting people, agents and promoters can come and scout for talent. It can set you up for the rest of the year. Some acts even get a run at the Soho Theatre, which is the most prestigious place for Edinburgh acts to play in central London.

  A massive part of the festival, which every comic I met talked about, is the comedy awards. Awards are given out every year for best newcomer act and best show. You only qualify as a newcomer if you are performing your first solo hour. The pressure to be nominated for the awards has become so huge that it has started a trend of ‘trying out’ your first solo show during the festival at 45 minutes so that you can come back the following year with a full 50–55-minute bullet-proof show and still qualify as a newcomer. I always thought this was a wimpish way out as it was pandering to and playing to the industry and not for your own artistic development. Klaus had several acts just doing 45. I wanted him to have more confidence than that, but it didn’t lessen my love for him. As far as I could see from my first year, Edinburgh was all about getting an agent and TV people to come and put you on telly.

  Now there are two ways of doing Edinburgh. One is by having a big agent already and they put the money up to hire you a room for the month. They pay for all your posters, a PR and flyers; they then spend the evenings networking to get industry people to come and see your show. You are placed in one of the major festival venues, where tickets start from £12. All you have to worry about is performing; your agent takes care of everything else. You just need to get good reviews and make sure you’re nominated for the awards so your career for the rest of the year stays on track. No pressure.

  The cost of this privilege was around £12k for the month back then. Edinburgh is extortionate. Acts are indebted to their agents and/or their venues and spend the rest of the following years paying back the money by doing 20-minute spots for £80 here and there up and down the country. That is the system.

  Now to get an acting agent, you go to drama school and get picked up. In the comedy world you just need to be good at showcases. Enter new-act competitions, win then get some buzz around you as the next big thing and sign to one of the major agencies. Once you have an agent, they’re the ones who will promote you, otherwise the doors to the comedy world are closed. It is my belief that it generates an elitist system that leaves out a huge number of people who are good but who may have not been discovered because of lack of opportunity and financial circumstances.

  And that is where the ‘other’ way of doing Edinburgh comes in. No agent, no promoter, just an act who is willing to put on their show for free. It’s called the Free Festival Fringe. There are some politics around calling it the free fringe or the free festival, so to save you from being bored by the details, let’s call it the Laughing Horse fringe or ‘free shows’.

  Essentially Alex, who runs the Laughing Horse, controls several venues in Edinburgh: pubs, restaurants, bars, cafés with a function room, or, in recent years, shoe cupboards. These rooms come equipped with sound and lights but no technical staff and no door staff and no front-of-house staff. You, as an individual, can rent a room from Alex for £50. You also need to pay a £500 registration fee in order to be part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and be in the main festival brochure, but apart from that your costs are what you make them. If you need someone to do sound and lights for you, i.e. be your ‘tech’, you can hire someone. If you cannot afford to, you do it yourself. You are responsible for the design and printing costs of your posters and flyers. You put
them up yourself, you go out flyering your own show, you set up your own room, you do your own tech and at the end of the show you hold a bucket at the door and ask audiences to leave a tip. After an hour’s work, you can leave with anything from £3.10 (tough crowd) to £200.10 (great crowd), you never know!

  Something about the Laughing Horse fringe immediately resonated with me; I felt much more affiliated with it than I did with seeing people in the big rooms. Watching Klaus fill his comics’ free rooms to the rafters with audiences, I felt so excited to be watching him work. Klaus offered to come and watch me do a five-minute set before one of his shows; I took the gig. I was super nervous and panicking that he was watching and just did really gregarious material about sex but with none of the swagger to pull it off so I just looked like a screeching child.

  Some Stand-Up Terminology

  Died/Bombed: Means no one laughed, it was embarrassing for everyone involved and why would you even think that someone as worthless as yourself deserves a platform to have a voice? Stop trying to be funny, everyone hates you.

  Smashed/Killed/Annihilated: Means everyone laughed, the audience loved you, you are the funniest bitch they have ever seen, everyone in the room wanted to be near you, and you are a gift to mankind and a goddess at life.

  On this particular occasion, the only occasion, that Klaus decided to watch me, I died on my arse. He watched a bit of it but then left. That’s how bad I was, he didn’t even want to watch my whole set at his own gig.

  Now here’s a thing, I don’t mind dying on stage. In fact I kinda love it; there is a freedom in dying on stage which I only discovered once I started doing more and more comedy.

  In the early days of me doing stand-up it was all about not dying, just please don’t die, please don’t be awful. But once you die, once, twice, a hundred times, the fear is no longer about dying, so you kinda have to learn to enjoy the deaths as much as you can. Deaths can actually be quite invigorating; it becomes a ‘status-off’ between you and the audience. You are literally in the lion’s den, one woman vs a hundred booing, jeering people. It’s actually kinda fun. No heartier laugh or tighter bond can be made from comedians than by hearing their worst death stories.

  However, here in this moment, being in love with Klaus and telling him about all my aspirations to be a really successful comedian and him seeing me for the first time just die on my arse. This was horrible, I was so embarrassed. I don’t think he actually cared, comics don’t tend to because we all die at some point, but I was too new to the game to realise this.

  Besides, Klaus was always way more focused on what he was doing. Something about that felt like home to me. He was an authoritative figure who could make me feel good and then just ignore me; #hellodaddyissues. It just made Klaus more attractive and confirmed my belief that it was true love; as far as I had been conditioned, being ignored and having to work to earn someone’s affection was what true love was all about. This was catnip.

  So Edinburgh, I did the flyering job and started hanging out with a few other open-mic’ers. I was getting paid £6 an hour. I met another flyerer who worked for one of the big venues. She had access to the stockroom where they kept the flyers for all the shows. In there she found some Smirnoff vodka vouchers offering a free shot with every flyer. She stole about 200 and we split them. Oh yes, my friends, the days of feeling guilty for stealing two euros were long gone; I was on to the big money now, 100 free vodka shot vouchers. Speculate to accumulate, bitches, even in crime.

  That night I got really drunk and was high on life from not spending a penny (figuratively; literally I was weeing constantly. I don’t know which is literal and which is figurative in this sense, I must remember to ask my editor. Oh man, another thing I missed for the print!). I got talking to some guy, and it being Edinburgh and a festival filled with show-offs, we decided to swap clothes. In my drunken state I thought this was hilarious. (Someone in Edinburgh actually still has my favourite black-and-white dress.) Then I took the guy home.

  When I woke up the next morning, my one-nighter had gone, my favourite black and white dress wasn’t there and his clothes had left too. Why would he take my dress as well as his own clothes? Weirdo. Then I noticed that I only had about five vouchers left.

  Confused, I rang my friend.

  ‘Mate, how much did we drink last night?’

  ‘Loads mate, at least five each.’

  ‘What? So why do I only have five vouchers left . . . Oh fuck.’

  I had been robbed by my one-night stand. I found him two days later, with the flyers my mate had stolen, buying rounds for everyone, dickhead. So you see, karma is real!

  I told Klaus about my one-night stand hoping he would be jealous, but nothing. If anything, he looked disgusted. All right Germany, I said, I have seen your porn and I thought you would be more open-minded. Yes Luisa, but in Germany we do not sleep with people who steal from us. We are not British hahahaha.

  Oh SMH (by the way, some people think this means ‘shake my head’, but I’m going to use it as ‘shave my head’ as that’s more fun. Guys, it’s my book).

  One of Klaus’s acts was a guy called Patrice. Patrice was a 40-something skinny man with the biggest heart of gold. It took about ten minutes to see that he was as playful and ridiculous as I was. He was so impressed with my flyering skills, he offered me the chance to come and work for him.

  What my job boiled down to was to be his hype man. I would meet Patrice at lunchtime and do a couple of hours of flyering, but actually my job was to keep him motivated. Now please let it be known that Patrice is completely capable of motivating himself; he is the most selfless man I have come across. What actually happened is that he gave me the job in order to keep me motivated, but did so with the ruse that I was there for him. He could see my unrequited obsession with Klaus and wanted me to have my own thing. So my job description was to flyer, prepare the room, clear away old glasses, lay the chairs out and let the audience in so he could get in the zone for performing. Then stand by the door and not let anyone else in so he wouldn’t be interrupted.

  The reality went more like this. I would rock up, usually hung-over and either elated or tear-stained depending on the drunken escapades of the night before, dance with Patrice in the rain (welcome to Edinburgh summers) then get him to flyer his own show whilst I slept off my hangover and broken heart at the back of the room.

  The room was small, approx. capacity 50, and when Patrice only had five people in there I felt really guilty because I had done my job badly; I hated not doing well for Patrice. And yet every show, no matter how many people were in, or how much money he made in donations, Patrice would take out £6 for himself for lunch and give the rest to me. I’d make anything from £6 to £37 an hour. Every time, without fail. Patrice was an angel.

  It was coming towards the end of the festival and I felt like here was my last chance. If I was in love with Klaus and if it was ever going to work, I needed to share my devotion with him. Klaus had met some woman from Manchester and was dating her; he introduced me and couldn’t understand why I was snappy and annoyed with him. Eurgh, his girlfriends were so annoying. They were really plain Jane and had no personality; they would just look at him like he was the best thing since sliced bread.

  MEN: HOW TO TELL WHEN YOUR GIRL FRIEND FANCIES YOU

  She is with you all the time.

  She happens to look amazing every time you see her.

  She offers to work, translate, study, cook for you.

  She laughs at all your jokes.

  She disappears to the toilet for ten minutes after you tell her you went on a date.

  It got to 5 p.m. and I met Klaus in our usual meeting place. I was sarky and he told me to snap out of it. I said, ‘Look, I love you, I have been in love with you since I met you.’ He said, ‘Ahh, that’s nice, but also not true. Anyhow, you know I like Woman from Manchester.’

  I ran off crying and went looking for Patrice. Patrice had become my unlikely best friend superhero. He was li
ke a big brother who looked out for me. He said not to worry and it’s good to be honest, just go back and flyer tomorrow and you’ll be fine.

  I rocked up the next day and my German amour/employer was handing flyers to another girl.

  ‘Er, what are you doing?’

  ‘I need a flyerer Luisa, and she is good.’

  ‘But I am your flyerer!’

  ‘Yes but I didn’t think you would come back so I replaced you.’

  Fired by my one true love. I spent the rest of Edinburgh in tears and being absolutely useless for Patrice. He still paid me though. The legend.

  Despite all the drama, the next time I saw Klaus I did some damage limitation and explained that it was the festival and obviously I was just tired and emotional and that I wasn’t *actually* in love with him and obviously we were ‘just friends’. He seemed to swallow it and we continued to be just that, friends.

  The festival finished and I went back to living back at my mum’s and temping as a postwoman. I loved being a postwoman; it’s so nice to get up that early and greet people with their mail. Plus, hello, I was a really glamorous postwoman. It was getting difficult with gigging in the evenings though, so eventually Alison got me a 9-to-5 job with an IT firm, where they paid me £10 an hour and I just had to log complaints about poor internet service. I would answer and pretend to know what an IP address was and then just pass the complaints on. The job was really fun because the team I worked with were awesome, plus every Friday the company paid for Domino’s. I don’t even like pizza, but I quickly liked Domino’s. Companies, if you want to motivate your unqualified staff to care, give them free pizza Fridays.

  It didn’t matter that I was rubbish at the job; it paid for my travel to gigs. Several nights a week I would take the hour train to London and back to do a five-minute set. Sundays were my favourite, the Exhibit bar in Balham run by an old man called PJ. PJ is a character, who would fill you with confidence by saying, ‘Next up we have someone who is shit – oi Luisa, it’s you, take your bangles off, they’re too distracting. Sorry ladies and gentlemen, sometimes she gets it but most of the time she is shit, so good luck Luisa, get up now and do twenty!’ And I would run up on stage, heart pumping, all wide eyes and excited with sore wrists from where I ripped my bracelets off. PJ was really good to me, he would throw me in the deep end and I would scrabble trying to fill twenty minutes to a room of 12 or 100 depending on the Sunday. I loved every second of it, it would take me three hours to get there and back because of the Sunday train service, but I didn’t care, it was worth it and I did it religiously for years.