The Fringe Family Day .


Monday 13th March


This seemed like it would be a bit of fun for my children, so we hopped on the bus and headed for town. Was this event popular! And it certainly was a ‘Family Day’. Prams, prams and more prams. Into the back of the ankle, pushing their way through the crowds, blocking exits and entry points of just about every booth and walkway. Queues and queues of them in front of every food and drink stall. Ahhhhhhh! Clearly I’m ‘over’ those pram days.

Perhaps it could have been planned a bit better, or maybe they didn’t anticipate how popular it was going to be, but ‘fun’ it wasn’t. They had organised craft workshops for the children. I would have thought the ‘free’ bit would have given them a hint of how many children would want a go at these. They had arranged a 3m x 3m gazebo for each activity, under which were squeezed 3 or 4 tables and about 30 children trying to make a puppet, candles, clay drums or kites. We waited in line, in the full sun, for about 20 minutes before realising we hadn’t moved forward an inch, and gave up. Even the ‘fun balloon animal’ line blurred into the distance. I think if they were going to offer a free family day on a public holiday they needed to assume there were going to be a lot of people.

They had organised a large shade tent in front of the stage, but this was packed, standing room only. The performances that we saw consisted of the children who had attended the dancing and drumming workshops performing with the artists. The audience became very restless as much time was taken up arranging and rearranging the children, removing screaming children suffering from stage fright, and desperately trying to get the audience to participate in some way. Those parents with ‘stars’ on the stage seemed slightly more tolerant than the majority of the fan waving, water guzzling crowd sweating under the shade tent.

We decided that perhaps this wasn’t for us and wandered over to Sideshow Paradiso, complete with ‘Tiny Top’ and ‘Odditorium – Sideshow and Freakshow’. I have always hated circus’s and Freakshows, and felt bad that I was displaying my prejudices for my children, but when the giant roving puppets appeared, I think they developed some of their own. The puppets were about 4 metres tall, with faces made out of stocking fabric and old smelly clothes. My daughter commented on the cobwebs and dust covering them. How the people inside these exaggerated puppets were able to see where they were going, I’m not sure, but they knew when to bend over to avoid the power cables strung up between the trees. The small children around us were petrified. They screamed and cried and clung to their parents, but still the puppets chased them, dangling their long dusty fingers through their victim’s hair and over their faces. I didn’t understand why they didn’t respond to these children and leave them alone, but perhaps this was the reaction they were looking for.

By this stage we had had enough and decided to leave. We had to push our way past crowds of people watching the buskers in Rundle Road, blocked off for the event. The crowds were just too deep for my children to be able to see what was happening, and by now they wanted to leave. When I read this back I feel sad that what could have been a great day, turned sour due to lack of space, resources or planning. Maybe next time they can charge a small fee to cover the costs to make this event a truly Fun Family Day.