FESTIVAL FEATURES | Alan Warner
We had turned up in civilian dress, more or less. I had on my leather waistcoat with the faded Deep Purple and Rush patches, sewed on in the 80s; my big fat arms wobbled out of the two arm holes but it kind of pinched me under my honking oxters. We’d stashed the wheelchair in the VW and now Tidy sat next to me in that silver temptress dress, but she wouldn’t let me hold her hand. We had taken seats a bit further back from the . . . orchestra pit, ha, ha. I’d had a white and a black pudding supper after the pub, in the hope of squeezing through a few rippers during the understated sequences of the guy’s act. Yet it was with a kind of unease that I was staring down at the paper tract which had been placed on each seat when you tried to sit down.
MARSHALL DRAW
After his ecstatically received shows last year, your favourite Lawmaker returns to the mean streets of Edinburgh. Can we safely say, the only comedian on today’s circuit exploring his Texan Hebridean background. Get ready for another skewed, surreal look at the world about us. In bolder print and capitals, the i nal line read:
HILARIOUS!
I would be the judge of that. This loser had his own website and he was even l ogging a DVD: The Drawl of the Draw. Where the Prairie Meets the Moor. The photo had him in his ten, or i ve, or twenty gallon Stetson, with a six-shooter in a holster strapped to his thigh. Thing is, I started slightly. I frowned. I looked hard at the glossy image of the man: he was much older than most of these wimpy clowns who you can still smell nappies off. Except for that Al, the pub landlord thimgmy-bob. That fellow’s okay. He’s funny. He’s alright that guy. But what was it about Marshall Draw that alarmed me? Slowly rising in volume through the amplii er system, came the sounds of horse hooves approaching over hard ground: clippity-clop-clippity-clop, then the nag whinnied. Appropriate and I was impressed. Slowly, Marshall Draw walked onto that darkened stage, lit by one single spotlight. Well when I say on-stage – obviously, these stages had no wings, so he had to walk down the aisle between the chairs to step up onto the stage. I hate it
24 THE LIST FESTIVAL 14–25 Aug 2014
when audience members turn and watch a performer enter this way, before he or she reaches the hallowed space. Their heads followed Marshall Draw like a nosey aunt watching a pregnant bride walk down the aisle.
Marshal Draw had that Spaghetti Western / Lee Van Cleef look well down: high boots with clicking silver spurs, a great black frock coat, but his big beaming Scottish face didn’t i t right under that i ne, well-brushed Stetson. He held his right hand at the ready to draw, hovering his knuckles over his revolver holster which was secured round the thigh by that lanyard of leather. I have to admit I was quite excited. Suddenly he made as if to pull his gun, but when he removed his hand we all saw the empty holster. He leaned towards the microphone and said, in a cod Texan drawl, ‘Oh, I done forgot they went and kept it at Heathrow airport.’ Nobody laughed. Literally, tumbleweed for a cowboy. I made a point of letting out a long mocking, honking laugh – a sort of mating call by an ailing pelican. I thought that was a good joke. What the hell was wrong with these puddings? I always liked laughing at what nobody else did and remaining, with a profoundly mournful face, staring straight at the comedian during their crowd-pleasing punch lines.
Marshall Draw simply went on, ‘There are these two kids in a i eld where they’ve demolished a house. It’s not Iraq.’ (He pronounced it: Aye-Rack). ‘There are all these roof tiles. Round ones and square ones, just lying around there on the ground. One kid says to the other, “If I threw a round tile and then a square tile up in the air, the round tile will take longer to come down than the other.” Well, the other kid rightly says, “Why that is rot, we was taught that at the old schoolhouse. They’ll come down at the same time.” “Oh no they won’t,” claims the challenger. So this kid makes his point. He throws a round tile up in the air and he counts: “One, two, three,” and on the count of three the round tile hits the ground. Then the kid takes the square tile and he throws it up in the air. The other kid counts: “One, two . . .” and exactly on the count of three, the square tile hits the ground. “See I told you that was rot.” “Let’s do it again,” says the other kid. So he throws up the square tile. “One two three.” The tile hits the ground. Then he throws up the round tile, “One two three.” It comes down. “All right, one last time,” the throwing kid says, and he throws up the square tile and they both count, “One, two, three,” and it hits the ground. Then the kid takes the round tile and chucks it up in the air. “One, two, three, four, i ve, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven . . .”’ Draw slowed down his counting, ‘Twelve, thirteen.’ After quite some time Marshall Draw in his Texan accent had counted to 79. The audience were now extremely restive but they sighed. This Texan Lawman had got their goat. Someone at the rear of the venue pushed back his chair and departed. Other audience members turned to watch this guy’s leave taking. After the man had gone, Draw dropped out of the Texan and said in a Scottish accent, ‘That was my agent. He can’t stand me. As you probably know I’m not really from Texas, I only moved there from the Isle of Soay after Johnny Cash became President. I am a registered schizophrenic.’
There was something so familiar about him and I struggled to square it in my storm-tossed mind. Meanwhile Draw abandoned the counting feature but did not deliver rapid-i re one-liners to get the pace of his act moving; instead he reverted to his Texan drawl and began to tell a long, strange, compelling anecdote, an eerie chronicle, about driving alone in his ‘Aloominuum ’gator car,’ across ‘Them evening lands,’ and ‘Those Dixie States’ – and of encountering a good old boy in a strip bar in Douboisville County, where, ‘Even the roaches were walking out on them dancing girls.’ At the bar he was invited by the good old boy, back to his coastal home in Biloxi, a mere three hundred miles south, ‘For a nightcap.’ He was big on the details, which I respect. The Biloxi guy asked Draw to follow his own vehicle – a sinister tow truck – and both