In practicality, learning names at the Edinburgh Festival is not a good idea. The influx of new people into the cobbled streets is overwhelming enough without attempting to retain the details of every fresh face we speak to.
Thousands flood the cafes and comedy shows for a few short weeks every year. Despite the rain. Despite the sun. With a few hundred comedians to choose from, I’m always surprised there are any laughs left in the city come September. Perhaps from the arts council as they calculate profit margins. Making new friends is inevitable, but I speak from experience: most will disappear as quickly as they came.
With this reality clear in our minds, it seems right that we stride through life with only the essential names and information reaching our hippocampus, to be retained for our next doctor’s appointment or, God forbid, wedding. Anything more is pointless. Entirely sentimental.
But we are not practical creatures. What is sensible is not necessarily good sense. We remember, even while rushing across a packed street to the next show/ gig/ talk/ performance (the one that starts a touch too soon for how busy the crowds are) that the man who just served us coffee was called Peter and he was a neurology student and he danced a leaf pattern into the foam with a few flicks of his left wrist. Or was it his right? It’s funny because it doesn’t matter – we will never see him again.
Definitely his left.
I was standing in my uniform and lanyard, ushering audience members into a particularly rowdy evening show for a publicly-owned broadcasting corporation. They were rambunctious, although this is an attempt to be diplomatic. Everything smelled like excitement and beer, which for some people are the same thing. The crowd was composed of 20-somethings who delighted in independent hip-hop and sought to forget about their tedious day jobs. Hence the beer. I remember smiling to myself because finally! At long last! I’d always wanted to be a bouncer on the door of a spoken-word rap battle. What a stroke of luck.
She appeared out of air, coming bounding up to me, all arms and nimble feet. Her hair was blonde and cropped to her jawline. Her eyes bore through the darkness like two floating stars. Her words rushed at me in a continuous breath: hello hi I went to my first fringe show today and I didn’t think it was a good idea because of the rude words and rude things but I have never come to the fringe before because I was too scared and I am 50 now and I think I want to go to this show because I really enjoyed today even though there were rude words and rude things and I just wanted to know if you think it is a good idea and if there will be rudeness and if I should go in?
I told her there would be swearing. And noise. That people had beer and weren’t afraid to heckle. Rambunctious. She hesitated, the light leaving her eyes. And I couldn’t quite stand for that. When the show ended and she left the tent, her feet didn’t touch the ground. Her arms wrapped around me in a medley of euphoria and relief. She’d made it, and better still, she’d adored it. As she drifted away to find her husband, I forgot, for one blissful moment, that I now needed to pick up over 300 plastic cups.
Whether we try to or not, certain parts of people stay in our memories for a long time after they’ve left our lives. Names are important – to hell with practicality. But so are the feelings that people give us as they momentarily pass by.
I’ll always remember this little lady. I just wish I had learned her name.
By Alice Florence Orr | 25 August 2016
