My "funny" SEPTEMBER 11 / MELBOURNE FRINGE story. PT.1
Tragedy + Time = comedy they say? Well let me tell you about the first time I took part in the Melbourne Fringe Festival. It was September 2001…
I knew from my early teenage years that I wanted to perform in some way or another, but I had no idea how to go about it. Being from a regional country town I had no networks or mentors and didn’t come from a showbiz family, although my great Auntie once knew a guy who was in A Country Practice or something and even though I'd heard of his name and recognised his face, there was no way I was going to call him and ask him to put me in showbiz. The idea of going to drama school sounded boring, but looking back, I just didn’t like the idea of going to more schooling and being told what to do or paying attention or reading text books. The signs of ADHD nobody saw were there, but I just summed up my lack of interest by saying "actors are wankers."
I stand by it.
Careers counsellors in small towns were not trained to give students “hope” or to “follow their dreams”, they had ‘get a trade’ on their list of advice for non academics like myself.
I’d already spent most of my days after school and weekends on the tools (shovel and broom mostly) on dad’s building job sites or at the farm knee deep in cow dung rounding cattle up in the rain, so the idea of a trade sounded horrible. I was working behind a bar pulling beers and feeling lost, my skills were developing without realising it, dealing with heckling from the bar flies while I learnt to pour the perfect beer helped my confidence.
I landed a job in community radio and that allowed me to find my voice so to speak and learn some mic skills and what an 8 track and reel to reel was, but I still had this burning desire to get on stage even though it'd upset my pensioner fan base.
I signed up to a comedy course that I’d seen advertised in the newspaper classifieds so I figured that must be how you got into comedy. Also it was called the Pete Crofts Humourversity and as the proud owner of Chauffeur So Good he had me at the pun! Every week for about 6 weeks I drove to Brighton and sat around a table with 5 others as we got told things that went in one ear and out the other and were given print outs to take home, I still have them in a concertina brief case, so if anyone wants to learn how to be a comedian let me know. I can sell them to you.
At the conclusion of our course, the group of mismatched people from all backgrounds who otherwise wouldn't have bumped into each other in social circles (including a clown & a priest among others), decided that we’d try writing a comedy play and put it on at the Melbourne Fringe festival. What could go wrong?
We met up at each others homes over the coming weeks or months, this was before email was a commonly used thing and long before social media folks! We had costumes, a set built, tickets went on sale and the show was due to open around mid/late Sept 2001. Now I don’t know how good your memory is or if you’re a bit younger, what your history is like, but a week or so before the comedy play I was in and 1/6th co-wrote, something happened in New York which you might remember… it made the news in Australia even before the internet!
Some say you should never forget what happened.
Terrorists hijacked planes and the rest is history.
The world were glued to TV screens as 24/7 news coverage played the footage, interviews and the beginning of "the war on terror" and airport security and travel would change forever.
Well guess what the show we wrote was all about?
Our "comedy" play was set in an airport bar (I played the barman because I actually was a barman at the time so I knew how to stand around and I also did a little stand-up set to intro the show) and the storyline? Well by pure coincidence, it was all about a terrorist with a bomb at the airport wanting to blow it up… lolz!
Our one time production company was called SMASH’N because they were the first letters of our names and the show was called Finally All Together At Last, or F.A.T.A.L as it read on the photocopied flyer that thankfully has been eaten by silverfish and no longer in my possession or to my knowledge exists online. Only a few photos of the cast we took on a polaroid below!
There is no footage of the play because video cameras back then were so big we'd have had to remove an entire row of seats to fit one in and that would have halved our venue capacity in the narrow makeshift room somewhat bigger than a cupboard above a Chinese restaurant in the CBD.
We put on a comedy play about terrorist at an airport with a bomb at a fringe festival one week after the largest terrorist attack the world had seen. If social media existed we would have been cancelled. Our ticket sales reflected this, but thankfully our careers were not impacted either way.
We wrote this show in the year before 9/11, we weren't to know (or were we?!), we put so much work into it, we drove many kilometres to meet up and work on this, we were amateurs but very proud of what we’d made, were we going to cancel it? Hell no! Was it too soon? Most definitely!
Did we win an award? Did we get standing ovations and sell out? Hell no!
We all have our memories of 9/11 and remember how it impacted our lives, but for me, it put me off every wanting to do a show at the Melbourne Fringe festival again! And until this year, that is exactly what happened, and guess what? 9/11 would once again play part in my preparations!
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