Edinburgh Tales: #4 Chris McCausland

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At the 2005 Fringe, a few of us decided to give a late night audience a bit more entertainment for their cash than they had banked on. The setting was the Phat Cave in the Gilded Balloon, the time was about 2:30am, the target was the one and only Mr Brendon Burns, and the idea was all Mickey D’s.  Aided by a couple of Gilded Balloon security staff we stormed the stage while Brendon was doing his thing and pinned him to the ground and gaffer-taped him up good and proper. 

To the whoops and hollers of the crowd we then sat him on a chair on the stage and Gaffer Taped him to that too. Then the music started up, and out came the electric razor.  Brendon was going mental by this point, calling us all a bunch of cunts and telling us how he was gonna kick all our fucking arses. This kind of behaviour was nothing that a little tickle under the chin, a couple of nipple tweaks and a few force-fed mouthfuls of Guinness wouldn’t help. Mickey D then took the razor to Brendan’s head and started by giving him stupid haircuts. 

By this point the crowd was almost as mental as Brendon was. But nobody was quite prepared for the harp playing dwarf. Don’t even ask me where she got it, but Tanyalee Davis, who's about 3 foot nothing, came out with a tiny miniature harp.  The timing couldn’t have been better as she sat on Brendon and played him a little tune.  Brendon finally managed to tear himself away from the chair, but he was still left gaffer-taped to buggery on the floor. He started complaining, saying it was beginning to hurt him, so I thought enough is enough and grabbed his feet to drag him through the curtains and off the stage. 

OK. here’s the final twist to the story. I am totally blind, and also fairly pissed by this point, and couldn’t for the life of me remember how to get off the stage. So I unintentionally ended giving him a longer than necessary tour of the stage. It was at this point that Phil Nichol walked in to find a blind man dragging a screaming Brendan Burns in circles around a harp-playing dwarf while Mickey D was having convulsions in the corner. Phil said that was the craziest and funniest thing he’d seen at the Fringe – and coming from Phil that’s saying something.  In the end Brendon took it well. He was a far better sport about the whole thing than most people would have been. It was incredible entertainment, and he was certainly the star of the show that night.