I sit at home on my couch in Melbourne writing a reflection of my shortest yet most absolutely brilliant Adelaide Fringe festival so far.
It’s the last weekend of Fringe, my boyfriend has jumped on a plane to head over for the final weekend party and I’m here with beer, my laptop and party tunes playing from the TV (which has made me realise that Mandy Moore’s ‘Candy’ really didn’t get the credit it deserved- or maybe that beer is stronger than I thought…)
I’m a bit sad – it’s the first time I’m missing the closing weekend party since I was 17 and I don’t know if I’ll survive without getting loose on the dance floor while everyone sings along to Toto’s Africa and the DJ pauses the chorus and it’s just people screaming I BLESS THE RAINS DOWN IN AFRICA into the Adelaide parklands (happens every year, you can’t deny crowd of overtired artists what they really want)… but I had to come back to reality – it would have been far too easy to stay existing in the beautiful yet exhausting world that was this years amazingly wonderful festival!
Despite the fact that I was only in Adelaide for half of the festival, and the fact that I saw far fewer shows than I have in recent years, it was still my favourite. Without a doubt.
I’ve been performing in some form or another for the past five years and I’ve been seeing shows since I was a kid – really getting into the flow of things when I hit year 12 at school but this year was different because I got perform a show which I co-wrote with my wonderful friend Mikayla Lynch and people really loved it! That’s not to say that I haven’t been in shows people have loved before (if people hadn’t liked the other stuff I probably wouldn’t have kept doing shows…) but for some reason I was more worried about this one. For starters I was writing for two characters – I’d written stand up as myself and performed improv as a character but I’d never really, in a setting where pride and money was on the line, written for one!
I was working with some who I hadn’t worked with before and even worse, we were located in different states meaning that collaboration sessions had to occur via Skype with work flow being managed via online programs (I bloody LOVE Trello!).
Our venue fell through at the last minute.
I didn’t know if I could pull this off (I had faith in Mikayla but I was more worried that I’d make her look bad…)
But I really wanted to do it! The original and very vague idea for the show was born out of a real bad time – cold wintery Melbourne in which I was having a pretty awful time mentally. Work sucked hardcore and I was still figuring out how to make new friends in a new city (making friends is hard as an adult!) but I was heading to my favourite No Lights No Lycra regularly to keep my spirits up. It was dancing around like an absolute twat that I had the first idea – and Mikaya’s name popped into my mind – and from there, I messaged here and things…just…rolled.
Oh and the venue falling through? The AMAZING Raj House team stepped us and gave us a home at the last minute!
Flash forward to February and we’d sold tickets…we had reviewers coming…we had 10 shows booked in plus spots at variety nights and we were shitting ourselves – would people ‘get’ these two weird characters we had written? Would they get the jokes? Would they think we were being serious…was it obvious enough? Would our bits fall out of our costumes?
But it worked. It. Just. Worked.
Probably because we worked our assess off to make sure that it did.
And I saw some amazing shows. And I danced with amazing people and I drank too much beer (and some champagne that came in a can…which was…a thing that happened)
So read this please and make me feel less sad about missing the last weekend of Fringe – because I’m just bloody thankful I got to be apart of it and have a bloody AMAZING time (and maybe…keep an eye out for Cheryl and Chardee at a festival or on a computer screen near you…cough…cough).
P.S have a read of some of our sikkkkk reviews (including an beautiful **** review below)
Alicia Norton 
One thought on “Adelaide Fringe 2018 – The Best By Far”