My cup runneth over.
Miss Vaz in Costume. Photo:©Katarina Kojic. All rights reserved.
As some of you may know I am currently performing my one-woman show ‘Unladylike: The pitfalls of propriety’. The show is about a woman who is fed-up of living with the pressure of being a ‘lady’ as it is defined by modern society.
The show is supposed to begin at 8pm. The audience starts to trickle in about 30 minutes before then, and because I perform in costume (see above) I am banished to a closet like space off-stage until show time. Because this closet-like space does not have a toilet my last opportunity to purge my body of waste is 730pm. As a big believer in the 8-glasses-of-water-a-day theory I go the extra mile to stay hydrated and moist on show days, which means that by the end of the show the only thing I want to do is pee.
All of this is quite manageable and I am not complaining. Yet.
However (here we go) sometimes we are forced to start late. And once we had to start 25 minutes late. Sitting back-stage I continued to sip on warm water, breathing deeply, and trying to ignore the growing need to pee. But at 8:15 I started to worry. This was not usual and so at I texted my generals (door staff).
‘whats happening?’
‘big group late. 1 person here. promises the rest will be here in 5’.
‘are the late people all Indian?’
‘yes’
FUCK. This was very bad news. Holding pee for an hour and a half was one thing, having to hold indefinitely was quite another.
The thing about pee is that the more you worry about it the worse it gets. Plus I wear a dress that requires me to hold in my lower abdomen, and with a full bladder this was going to be beyond painful. My head started to hurt. What the hell was I going to do?
8:18. I looked around the closet and spied an empty paper cup in the dustbin. “That is too disgusting even for me” I thought.
8:19. Headache worse and now my eyes had started to water.
8:20. Fuck that; the bloody show is called ‘Unladylike’. I picked up the cup, dropped my undies, positioned cup to avoid spillage and peed like a fucking horse. I then wrapped it up in several plastic bags and put it back in the dustbin. Sorry Producers Club.
I didn’t think much of this until yesterday when I finished reading Tina Fey’s article ‘Lessons from Late Night’ (This month’s New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/03/14/110314fa_fact_fey) in which the delightful Ms. Fey explains, amongst other things, the difference between men and women comics. Apparently the men pee in to cups.
Miss Fey you may be right about a lot of things – just not this.
Tickets are on sale for shows on March 18, 25 and 26. Come listen to me pee backstage. www.unladylike.eventbrite.com
hey, you gotta do what you gotta do. we women folk believe in convenience!
Or you could wear a diaper. Really. They are underrated.
FH! i have to do that!!
Likewise, I wish somebody had passed out cups and kleenex before the show. That’s how hard we laughed. You were/are terrific. Thanks for a very well-spent hour!
I think you were absolutely brilliant!!! laughed my pants off!!
I am so glad you came to the show. Thank you for being an energetic laugher!!
Great article! The funny thing is, I didn’t think about the title of this article again until after reading it. Oy.
I am stealthy like that trollan.
Hilarious, I hadn’t thought about that headline either. Good one!