I Bought A Blue Car Today: Edinburgh Festival Fringe

I finally took my cabaret show home.

I did three performances of I Bought A Blue Car Today at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in the Assembly Hall, the historic venue on the Mound, the former home of the Church of Scotland and the Scottish parliament. There is a statue of John Knox in the courtyard, and I wondered (aloud) during the show what he would make of me and what I had to say!

In many ways, it was a full circle experience for me. I cut my teeth at the Edinburgh Fringe as a young drama student doing cabaret in the mid eighties, with Victor and Barry.  They went on to become the festival darlings for many years. But I hadn't performed on the Fringe since 1991, and so coming back with a cabaret of my own was a really amazing feeling. I'm older, wiser and ballsier, and finally able to share it with my homeland in a show that has so much to do with my Scottishness both in content and in the style of performance. So this was good times.

Here's a little report from NY1 about my run in Edinburgh.

How to Be the Life and Soul of the Party

MAC Cosmetics asked me to write an article for their magazine about how to be the life and soul of the party, and they liked it so much that they asked me to make it into a little film.  And so I did! My friend Ned Stresen-Reuter shot it and I think it is essential viewing for any potential partier.

I Do

Ned Stresen-Reuter shot a video for our friend David Raleigh's single I Do!
The video is full of our friends and even our dogs, and we also asked people to use footage of their weddings from YouTube. 
We shot over a couple of days in August in NYC and upstate NY, and Ned and I cut it whilst on vacation on the island of Oronsay, Scotland.

Ecstacy! Trojan condom commercial

My friend Ned Stresen-Reuter and I were approached by Trojan condoms to make another film for them, this time about a new condom called, wait for it, Ecstasy! In the meeting we had about it, I mentioned that the shape of the condom was somewhat curious, and Dan from the advertising agency said 'Yes, it's shaped like a baseball bat!'.  That was the beginning of a germ of an idea...
I thought something as ecstatic needed a theme with pizzazz so we wrote a 50s style musical.  Lance Horne helped us write the music and the lovely Ricki Lake came along and played with me.  We shot it at the Box in NYC and we all had a hoot.