It looks like I've been hosting birds of paradise. I've been finding pink feathers everywhere, and just when I thought I'd caught the last one, another appears. The feathers come from a boa - a prop used by my alter ego, Someone's Mum, in a performance of Sweet Thunder on Thursday evening.
Hoover is one of those trade names, like Jacuzzi or Escalator, which has a solid place in language. I've just Googled Hoover and found this definition - 'to suck something up as if with a vacuum cleaner'.
I've been sucking up feathers, but, vacuum or not, it isn't easy. Barbs on feathers are covered in barbules which act like tiny hooks on the carpet. Linoleum would've been an easier surface to clean. I nearly resorted to getting out the Sellotape, or some of the ever-resourceful Jay Walker's (Lucy Aphramor) double-sided sticky tape, and using this as a means of capture.
In the show, the pink feather boa is given to me by the gorgeous Ms Beeton (Amy Godfrey) as a symbol of allure. It's a device to allow me to dispense with my pink rubber gloves, to transition from overstretched cleaner (equivalent to Shakespeare's Nurse) dusting 'the world's stage', to lover (Shakespeare's Mistress).
That the boa has been shedding ever since is an irony Carol Caffrey (Director) hadn't anticipated when she had the brilliant idea of using this and other pink props. In the end, I've had to get down on my hands and knees to pick reluctant pink scraps off one by one.
Threesome will be appearing in Sweet Thunder, a Show in Three Layers at this year's Edinburgh Fringe. Details here:
https://edinburghfestival.list.co.uk/event/487296-sweet-thunder-a-show-in-three-layers/
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