Teacher, Teacher!

One of the many advantages of living in the UK, alongside Waitrose home delivery (O-ka-O-ka-DO) and stab-wound-free public transport (except in Tooting where bloodstained shirts are all the rage this season), is the plethora of musicals and shows which ooze from every street corner. A cultural injection just waiting for you to excitedly present a pale cheek. And the other night, I did just that. And in fact, I wasn’t the only one.

Showing in a theatre in the heart of Camden, and described as “Cirque du Soleil without the Disney and disinfectant”, we, being the intelligent individuals we are, expected something a little different - astounding acrobatics but without all the bright costumes, which, in hindsight, is pretty much what we got.

Imagine if you will, the horror that befell Yours Truly as the house lights dimmed to the painful hack-sawing of a perfectly decent cello by a rather unsavoury looking character, and a sudden glaring spotlight revealed our first acrobat ambling across the dingy insipid little stage. Naked. Like the chef. Only nakeder and ten times hairier. And as this was a woman, I was a more than a little disturbed.
Inching over to a laundry basket, she proceeded to pick out pair after pair of large ‘granny pants’ (so *that’s* why I went) only to hold them to her nose and inhale deeply in a quest to find a relatively suitable and odourless pair. This took so long I nearly whipped my own off and hurled them on stage in an effort to cover her up, but I think red with polka dots would have been a tad gaudy for her.
Poen finally put away, but mammarys all a-flap, she took to the trapeze as the audience gazed up in horror and I scrabbled for the program to see if we were watching indeed ‘Acrobat’ or actually a production of ‘Milkshake’.

As winter follows autumn, so too does penis follow poen and it was only a matter of moments before a man appeared on roller skates, his various appendages flying willy-nilly (ahem), taking great delight in shaking them and wiggling them with obscene pelvic thrusts as he roared around the stage, before starting to extract silk scarves from his bung-hole like Sodom The Magnificent. When he too took to the high ropes, I shrieked, squirmed and closed my eyes, convinced I was about to witness the world’s first ‘castration by rope burn’ incident. In what was an hour of sheer horror, I sat agape as the ‘meaningful’ and ‘arty’ acrobatic display played out its course, with only one question on my mind: are the ‘2 veg’ all that huge??