Fringe!

This week sees the start of the 32nd Victoria Fringe Festival. Wearing my Intrepid BoD hat I (along with my fellow directors) will be in for a busy couple of weeks.

I naturally associate the month of August with fringe festivals, having been so many times to the Edinburgh Fringe over the years both as a performer and a spectator. Now, the Edinburgh Fringe is enormous and seems these days to be spilling over from four to five weeks. Here in Victoria everything is on a much smaller scale; a mere twelve days and forty seven shows in less than a dozen venues.

I was recently reading in the online edition of the Guardian an article by a journalist who had been sent to Edinburgh with the brief of visiting shows on the fringe that featured nudity – which trait has a long and chequered history. The Victoria Fringe is no stranger to such antics either – but that may be a post for a different day!

The article was only of moderate interest but – as might be expected – attracted a fair bit of Below The Line comment subsequent to publication – as was doubtless the intention. The online correspondence included this offering which rather caught my eye – from a poster going by the sobriquet ‘TheLonelyDivorcee‘:

“I went to the first Isle of Wight festival in 1968 when the headline acts were Jefferson Airplane and Fairport Convention, both of whom were fronted by naked women. Nobody thought it significant or indeed some sort of massive step forward in equality.

That was partly because people were a lot more open minded then, and partly because we were all out of our minds on LSD/Magic Mushrooms. I say ‘minds’ but really we were just a single mind collectively experiencing ourselves and the universe as unified, ecstatic matter.

In fact most people also spent the entire event entirely naked and due to our youth and the drugs, in state of high sexual arousal. As a result many happy unions were formed between men and women.

This occurred despite the complete absence of ‘safe spaces’ and ‘gender neutral zones’.

When I arrived back home to my parents I was completely changed, much to the disgust of my father who, when he was the same age as I was then had become paralysed after being shot down over Bremen during a 1000 bomber raid on the Nazis – note these were real Nazis, not just people who didn’t recycle their rubbish.

I can’t help think my generation has had the best of it. When I look at my Grandson who’s around that age he doesn’t seem to have much fun. OK, he’s got a £150 pair of jeans, an IPhone and a useless degree in drama – with the debt that comes with it – but there’s no culture other than consumer culture and an increasingly authoritarian attitude towards sex and relationships.

I’m in good health, but I reckon I’ve got about 10-15 years before I will return to matter, and frankly I’ll be glad to be gone as I believe we are entering new puritanical age, and that is not for me.”

If I say that this struck a chord the gentle reader may well understand why!

Happy fringing!