The Food of Love
You'll be eager to know how the Ilkley Literature Festival Fringe event went, no doubt, if you read last week's post about the preparations. It was every bit as wonderful as I'd dared to hope, and then some.
OneMonkey took loads of photos of us
The sun was warm, the breeze not too strong (though we did have a moment of concern with the pages of music at one point - mostly the clothes pegs and bulldog clips did their job). Past and present members of Ilkley Writers turned up to support us, and a couple of Wharfedale Poets for good measure. Add in the various other friends and family, festival-goers and passers-by and we had an impressively large audience - I did a rough headcount at some point and got to 60, the steward thinks there were 70 (plus 4 dogs) - sitting on benches, standing on the grass and generally having a pleasant Saturday lunchtime.
For those interested in glimpses behind the scenes, here's a photo of a couple of pages of my script (it happens to be the end of the pop song tribute, Variations on the theme of young love):
Stage directions are hand-written so I don't accidentally read them out, and there's a list of the pieces that come after that and before my next one.
Everyone seemed to enjoy it, several came up afterwards to tell us so. I was still excited hours later, but that might partly be relief that it didn't rain, nothing blew away, and the audience could hear us OK. Emily and I spent the rest of the day with tunes from each other's pieces stuck in our heads, and I've inspired Keely to dig out some cassettes from her youth. If you've been round here a while you'll know how much music means to me (hence, I suppose, this entire event) so I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself.
The general cry was 'When can we do it again?' so plans are already afoot. If any of them involve a recording I'll point you at it, but in the meantime I'll leave you with another picture of us and you can either remember what a lovely time we all had, or imagine what it was like to be there.
Roz York, Emily Devane, and JY Saville in her trusty old biker jacket (Black Sabbath hoodie hidden by music stand)