Finding your Fringe Hobbit-loving audience (+4XP)

So I’m in a band called Tripod. We’ve just arrived from Australia for our fourth visit to that international carnival of What the F&@k, the Edinburgh Fringe/Comedy/Arts/Writing/Drinking/Whatever-the-hell-it-actually-is festival. My memories of my previous times in Edinburgh are magical, hazy and strange. Invariably on the plane home I feel like the woodsman who ventured too near a mushroom ring, and now finds himself blinking awake with worn-through shoes and a beard that wasn’t there before, recalling tattered fragments of a dream of a crazed yearlong dance at the fairy ball.

It would probably at this point be appropriate to mention that I’m pretty of into all that elfy wizardy sort of stuff. Okay? Okay. We understand each other. Okay.

Edinburgh is one of the most physically and emotionally gruelling things that an artist can do (aside from informing your parents of your career choice). Also it’s a budgetary arse-ache of the highest order. So you wanna be pretty sure. Firstly: Is it the right show?

Long Pause

I certainly fucking hope so. Maybe I should let you be the judge. Lemme take you through it. Our show is called Tripod versus the Dragon. It’s kind of like if Richard Wagner gets asked to adapt the Ring Cycle for a Broadway audience as a vehicle for the Three Stooges. And it’s mounted on a budget of, like, thirteen dollars and a bottle lid.

You’d come to that, right? Well, I certainly bloody would. As I’ve already mentioned, I’m pretty into that sort of stuff. I’d definitely come, if I got wind of it.

Which is the other thing about Edinburgh: How do you get the exact people who would dig your thang to get wind of your thang? This show has a ready-made, Hobbit-loving audience out there. We just have to find them. (NB: non-nerds love this show as well. Don’t be scared. We will gently pamper you into a light froth no matter what your elfy wizardy credentials).

I’m sort of working up to a mini-story here. The other night I’m surfing the net (lately I’m trying to get over my World of Warcraft addiction by reading heaps of World of Warcraft blogs. It’s not working). So I’m poking around and I see an article on Druids, which looks interesting (to me). I click through and, wierdly, I’m faced with my own face. The article starts with an embedded clip of Tripod, right there on the World of Warcraft website. I’m getting that displaced woodsman feeling again.

Anyway it’s not a big deal, except in light of my nagging back-of-mind fears about getting the right people to hear about us. It really felt like one of those moments that, if it may not prove God, at least strongly suggests a completely random, implacable universe that is in no way sentient but is nonetheless trying to tell you that all things are connected and it’s going to be okay.

Hope it is. Fingers crossed. If I disappear, look for mushroom rings.