Showtime!

Is it Monday already?

The weekend passed in a haze of crazed activity with Friday daytime devoted mostly to practicing for the show and bumping into my host’s furniture, pausing for cups of tea and short bursts of performance-related anxiety and further punctuated by encouraging text messages from friends and family.
As the evening approached I pulled myself together and packed a bag with my stage outfit and donned my grown-up dress to drive to my aunt’s big birthday bash in Wandsworth. By the time I got there the house was heaving and I slunk upstairs to one of the many bedrooms to put down my bag and found my grandfather sitting peaceably on his own with a book and  a glass of white wine. I felt rather envious of him escaping the somewhat intimidating crowds below so I stayed and chatted with him for a bit before braving the throng, but eventually had to take a deep breath and jump in to the sea of 150 of Aunt’s closest friends, sloshing dangerously around on at least double that number bottles of wine and the party had only been going an hour.

It was fun, loud, but thankfully quite brief – I repeated my ‘what I have been doing in the last six years’ story at least fifteen times in the space of an hour and a half, and then I escaped into a taxi and went off to the club.

Once arrived I was slightly surprised to see a giant queue of bald, buff men outside stretching around the corner and it was only just eleven o’clock.

I did mention this was a gay club, right? It’s not like I was doing a star turn at Spearmint Rhino..

I waltzed up to the front and told the bouncer I was doing the PA and was promptly shuffled inside and to the palacial dressing room adjacent to the stage which was about the size of a disabled toilet cubicle.

But it did have it’s own chandelier.

In due course Graham the Hair God turned up and we got down to the serious business of curling my blonde locks into a bouncy mass of girlyness. While he did that I sang along to myself on the iPhone to get in a bit of last minute practice.
Time was ticking along and we were getting closer and closer to kickoff and inevitably I had to go to the loo.

Only trouble: No toilet in dressing room and the ladies loo was on the other side of the stage so I’d have to come out, fight my way through the crowd and then back again.
When I peeped out the club was RAMMED. And I mean completely packed with huge, sweaty, bare-chested blokes all boogying with abandon.  I couldn’t face it.

I also couldn’t hang on.

AGHH!

Graham offered to go out and guard the door so I could wee in the sink but I couldn’t quite bring myself to do that.

Fortunately the sound man appeared at that point and he solved the problem by taking me out of a side door and back in through the front of the club to a secret toilet (secret loos!) that only special people got to use. I tried not to think about what else happened in there. Just held my nose, did my wee and rushed back out again.

Then IT WAS TIME.

Gulp.

They introduced me and I stepped out.  For a moment I was slightly weirded out. The crowd was right up against the stage looking up at me expectantly, and one guy in the middle already had his camera out (YouTube, here I reluctantly come).  Then the music was a bit quiet in my monitors so I had to signal the sound guy to make various adjustments so I could actually hear what I was doing, but within about four seconds it was all as it should be and I got straight into my routine.

The great thing about gay clubs is that you can camp it up with no fear of sounding silly. I LOVE that.

“Are you ready to get sweaty?”  I shouted.

The roar was deafening.

I’ll take that as a yes, then.

As soon as the drums kicked in they all started jumping and I forgot any nervousness I ever had and we were away.

I had a completely fabulous time on stage and to my utter amazement and delight the crowd knew all the words to the songs and jumped up and down to the choruses punching their fists in the air. (I had zero idea that this was going to happen. I thought I”d be struggling to get them to pay attention, to be honest.)

I did forget all my carefully choreographed moves, but I had such fun that I really didn’t give a shit.

I was up there for ten minutes which was both very long and very short, and at the end I thanked them and curtseyed and blew kisses (ooh, I’m such a DIVA) and they all cheered and clapped and I ran off into the dressing room, giggling like a six year old.

SO GLAD IT WAS OVER.

After that everyone on my guest list started to pile into the dressing room, like some college prank when you try to squeeze as many people in a phone box as possible. We stood around having drinks and chatting and by the time we left it was nearly 3am. I got home closer to 4 and then couldn’t sleep for an hour.

Hilariously enough one of the club staff told me that a very important promoter had been by to see me and that ‘big things’ could come of this.

Fifteen years ago I would have been ecstatic to hear that and I might even have believed it for a little while, but for me, that life is in the past. I don’t want to be a pop star again, I don’t want to do loads of gigs, I don’t want to go to nightclubs and prance about on stage at 1am (well, except for the next night when I went to Guilty Pleasures with Liberty London Girl, but that was for fun, not work, and is partly why I’m comatose today). It’s nice to be a performer maybe once or twice per year so I can remember that I know how to, but on balance I like my life better now.

I spoke to Five and Two last night and they told me that they loved me, missed me and wanted me to come home so they could give me a hug.

Now THAT’s what I call music.