SMUT STAND REPORT: August 17, 2015 (Edinburgh, UK)
WHEN: 3 hours (3-6pm), August 17, 2015. WHERE: On Grassmarket, Edinburgh, UK. OUTPUT: five full-length pieces, including one each for a pair of sisters (they didn’t witness each other’s interviews, but wound up with mostly the same tastes); a cowgirl scene for a short, plump middle-aged lady in a pantsuit who was THRILLED by the whole process; and a vicious little “plow position” piece for a young (subby) woman who didn’t look old enough to know about any of that stuff, but when she opened her mouth and started talking about it, then, yes, clearly she well knows her thing.
I haven’t written a Smut Stand report in over a week, but let me assure you, I’m out there, every fucking day from 2 or 3pm to 6pm, when I have to close up shop and get ready for my show at 7:05. This is really the only way I promote my shows here in Edinburgh. Some days I get no paying customers but a lot of brochures flying into hands; other days it’s all business and fewer brochures. The dueling demands of Smut Stand at a festival—promote the show, and then actually make some grocery money—can be tricky, but really, I just enjoy talking with people about sex, whichever way the interaction goes.
I do wish there was some way for me to better sell to the people who come up while I’m working on something else and don’t have time to wait. Like, they say they’ll look for me on another day, but I know I’m losing some of them. Maybe I could have a little display scrapbook of “off-the-rack” microsmut that people could flip through and purchase for £5. Hmm. Gotta find more ways to make impulse buys easier!
Sometimes it takes a while for a location to wake up to the fact that I’m there; I mean, usually it takes at least 20-30 minutes before someone steps up and orders something, sometimes as long as an hour. Yesterday I didn’t even have a chance to roll the first sheet of paper in for the first warm-up piece, before a young woman from Chicago stepped and said, “I’m in.” She and her younger sister had seen my show in the program book already, and when they saw the stand, she knew right away that she had to do it. Some people are like that. Her sister had been a little more tentative, but I guess when she saw how happy her big sis was with her piece, she didn’t want to be left out.
The best part of today’s session was both a properly festive sale—one couple in a straight, double-date group bought a commissioned work for the other couple to celebrate their 25th anniversary—AND a learning moment for me. The woman in the couple used a wheelchair, and I found myself having to think very rapidly about what was the relevant information that I needed, and what would be the best way to ask the questions to get that information. This lady had clearly lived a while with her condition; her matter-of-fact attitude about the information that I needed pretty much mirrored my matter-of-fact demeanor when asking the other questions, the sex stuff that made her blush a little. She had some kind of disease that was getting worse over time; it weakened her, and on some days, like yesterday, she had a struggle to even move her arms. So her husband needed to move her into position, and he needed to do all the hard work. “I get to just lie back,” she said with a smirk. “Oh, and we do like 69, but he has to be on top, of course.”
She liked the outdoors, but the wheelchair made that really difficult now, she said, so I placed the scene in their enormous backyard, with him rigging up a special sex hammock, sitting on a stool between her legs, then eating her out until she dripped on the grass.
That was a fun piece to work on.
*****
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