Summer's slow death and Edinburgh

Ahh... the summer is finishing. Long days dwindle away as the sun gets tired of staying out late. The continued heat is only a ruse to lead us to believe that autumn is not on the way. But the daylight tells a different story, it is slowly changing colour from the deep yellow of summertime to the paler, more sterile, tones of winter sunlight. The change is slow, but it is inevitable. Fall is coming. However, I feel like I have already been in an extreme post summer environment. I have been cold at night, buffeted by rain and wind during the day, and thanked the lord for every sweet glimpse of sunlight I could get my hands on. Yes my friends, I have been to Scotland.

I went there with the Jazz a cappella group, "The Oxford Gargoyles," that I joined during my time in England this past year. After a year of performing concerts at everything from weddings to graduate parties, we decided to do what all struggling artists do in Britain: we went to the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh. The Fringe is a festival that happens in tandem with the International Edinburgh Festival. It has more experimental or amateur groups that could not get into the official festival because of their smaller nature. This year the fringe was host to over 250 performances (from stand up comedy to a cappella to weird weird theatre).
So anyway, we arrived on the 11th and spent most of the next couple of days practicing and flyering the town. The flyering was hellish. But we had to do it in order to get people to come to our show. The streets were packed with desperate artsy people trying to sell their own performances. The very nature of the fringe festival means that there are many people there who are putting on crap shows, so you have to know how to find the good ones. If someone came up to you on the street saying "a show on the inevitability of mortality, sir?" the really meant "a pretentious piece of crap, sir?" If they said, "a play about two lovers escaping the harshness of life through carnal sexuality" then you could be sure they were teenagers looking for an excuse to get naked in front of people. "Shakespeare with puppets" meant that they couldn't find enough actors, "Oscar Wilde with a human set" meant that they couldn't afford props, etc... Not to say that everything at the Fringe is bad, far from it, there are some very good things there. For example if someone said, "Are you interested in Jazz A Cappella?" you could be pretty sure that it was going to be good. But seriously, I saw some good shows there, it wasn't all crap. As to our show, it was actually pretty dang good if I must say so myself. We had a lot of sell-out shows and people seemed to enjoy our music (why would they buy the CDs otherwise?).

But now I am back home. No more rain, no more subway sandwiches, no more sipping cheap wine over ridiculous conversation, no more... *sigh* ... singing. Yes, I am actually quite sad about it. There is nothing like hanging out with music geeks, especially singing music geeks. Everything is a spontaneous song. Any sentence is turned into a melody, which quickly acquires harmonies from whoever is around. And the best thing is that it actually sounds good... for a while, until everyone loses self restraint and ends up taking a scat solo at the same time. Ah... scat solos... My biggest regret, however, is the fact that I didn't get to know the people in my group until last week. I knew some of them a bit, in the same way that any person gets to know coworkers they see from time to time, but not very much. In fact, if I had not gone to Scotland, I may have never bothered contacting any of them again. But now acquaintances have turned to friends and I was quite sad to have to say goodbye to them. Ah... summertime friendships. (Click the picture at the right to see more pictures from my journey. Facebook users are better off just finding them in my facebook profile if they want to leave comments).