Early April
Inveterately stylish as I undeniably am, I put on my full stage make-up over breakfast. Two-and-a-half years ago you'd've regularly found me putting it on in the very busy Pleasance Courtyard in Edinburgh, almost certainly in full view of some of my about-to-be-audience members.
I put my make-up on on the bus, the tube and in the pub. I'll put it on in meetings if I'm off to stand behind a table representing an organisation and I'm running between the two. I'll put it on bit-by-bit and frighten people during that phase where a woman removes all her features, smooths them out almost to vanishing, in order to re-apply them in, roughly, the same places as they were before the whole process began.
On the back of a bus once with my mother and my littlest aunt I started applying make-up and they both complained that it's not nice, that it is, basically, rude to apply my make-up in public. I was astonished. It's not like spitting or fishing your underwear out of your arse, it's not even like blowing your nose, surely? It's just a bit of titivation, but without the nail clippings, under-nail scrapings or follicle-loosenings which seem to be all the rage otherwise. Of course, I carried on.
And one of the reasons I carried on was that I want to subvert the strange idea we have of mystique in our culture: that somehow the bits about actually travelling around in a majority-liquid, ageing, oozing, flaking, gas-creating, blood-pumping, amazing body should be, by women, concealed. I like going out looking as I look - a woman of roughly my age with all bits you'd expect in an able-bodied woman, with no make-up on at all. And if I apply make-up I've no desire to pretend I haven't or to conceal how it's done. I mean, in my case it's often done cack-handedly with my fellow passengers running around picking up eyeshadows and rolling mascaras as they fly to all four corners of the carriage: I am not an oasis of womanly secrets which turn me into a full-on lady. In fact, I was taught my current make-up routine by a friend at drama school back in the days when you could still drink to the tube. We both had huge bottles of Budvar, I sat in a Piccadilly Line seat and she straddled me. The then proceeded to do the full make-up on me, explaining what she was up to as she went. It's more than ten years since I last saw her but I, and casting directors/first dates/members of the good British public owe Mariamne a debt of thanks.
Not to wear make-up is, for me, also a test of myself: how vain, how caught up in the male gaze, how fearful am I of how people will relate to me if I simply look as I look? How much ground have I lost today to capitalism's desire to unnerve me, in this instance, about my appearance enough to make me buy buy buy purported solutions? It's not always easy or straight-forward, but I'm buggered if I am going to be shameful about the way I look with no make-up - it's only my face - no one's got to eat off it or anything.
Breakfast is a success all round and we head for the school. 350 souls is the biggest audience I've ever performed the show to and we arrive during a squall of teenagers, milling, yelling, laughing: being wonderfully themselves, being the huge majority, owning the place. And I look at them, and I think why-oh-why-oh-why are they, almost certainly, already cursed with the idea that they should look like anyone or anything but themselves? They are full of life and potential and are fabulous to behold, as a group and as individuals. Bartelt and I find their energy infectious. What a privileged life we are leading, to be about to share our show with these gorgeous creatures of the future. Maybe it's the coffee Bartelt let me have for breakfast, but I cannot help but love them all as they push past me, a rolling boil of excitement, into the theatre building, barely noticing the middle-aged lady and her woolly-hatted companion.
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