Mess Around Edinburgh – August 8 “Lennie and The Jets”

Hello

Tonight’s show was pretty much all about a ten year old called Lenny. And my amazing sign interpreter Catherine.

Basically, I started the show by explaining to the crowd that I’ve never done Mess Around with an interpreter before, because I wasn’t sure how hard it is to interpret the madness of adlibbing. I asked the crowd if there were any words they’d like to see signed, and one woman shouted out “doggy style”.

So Catherine signed it. And Lenny in the third row applauded a lot. So I dragged him on stage.

In the next half an hour I pretended to be a ventriloquist with Lenny as the dummy, negotiated a fee for him with his Dad/manager, and was clearly the straight man to the wise-cracking Lenny. To the point that I used Lenny to re-enact one of my favourite jokes:

A travelling salesman goes up to a house and knocks on the door. The door is opened by a ten year old boy in a smoking jacket, holding a pipe in one hand, a glass of brandy in the other, and wearing sunglasses. The salesman says “Hello little boy, are either of your parents home?”. The boy looks back and says “What do you fucken reckon?”

Of course, Lenny played the part of the boy, and looked like this:

It was then time to move on to Honker-related issues.

Honker is the name of a stuffed toy given to me on opening night by an audience member. It was intended for my baby daughter, but is now fronting a campaign to raise money for the Royal Hospital for Sick Children.

Since last night’s show:

Audience member Laura created a facebook page for Honker here – www.facebook.com/honker.adamhill

A Twitter account has been created for Honker here – twitter.com/honk4honker

And the Just Giving account for the Sick Kids set up by Tom here – www.justgiving.com/AdamHillsHonkerSickKids

has already raised 580 pounds.

Brilliant.

I asked Lenny if he and his family would take Honker for the day tomorrow, and photograph him in front of a variety of Edinburgh landmarks for the facebook page. They agreed, and promised to return for my next show on Tuesday night with Honker and the photos.

It seems that a journalist from Edinburgh Spotlight was also in the show, cos they collared Lenny and Honker afterwards, wrote an article, and offered to take them around Edinburgh tomorrow. You can read the article here – www.edinburghspotlight.com/2010/08/fringe-fun-honker-adam-hills/

I have a day off tomorrow in which I plan to a) contact the Royal Hospital for Sick Children and let them know what I am doing b) contact Anne Marie from NHS Lothian and drum up publicity and c) contact Irn Bru to see if they can help us out with sponsorship.

I’ll let you know on Tuesday how all of it goes.

Honk

Adam