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. http://www.unladylike.eventbrite.com