Confessions of a Mayfest carpetbagger

I CAN'T remember his name, but he was Hamlet's puppet master in the

stupendously wonderful production by Yugoslav group Teatar TD for the

first-ever Mayfest.

After the show we got talking. Well, talking is a bit of a misnomer

because he was (and still is, I hope) Croatian. He spoke no English and

I, you will be unsurprised to hear, am very challenged indeed in the

Serbo-Croat department.

After a couple of jars, I taught him to say ''I don't speak English,

can you help me?'' and assured him that in the Saracen's Head bar he

would find people who spoke Croatian.

He taught me the same in Serbo-Croat and gave me the address of a club

in Zagreb.

A couple of years later, while on foot-soldier duty with the Tartan

Army in Zagreb, a few of us decided to go to this club. I should have

known by the way the taxi driver was looking at us. It was, of course,

the city's only gay club and I eventually found that my erstwhile friend

had taught me the Croatian equivalent of ''I speak f-all Croatian, you

bastard. Where are the pretty boys?''

I hope to run into him some day to duscuss this.

* DURING the '84 Mayfest, the second one, I saw and heard a trio of

oboe players in the Kibble Palace. They were playing by the pool and the

audience was on folding chairs in the blaes floor of the atrium. The

music was wonderful but I don't remember much more than five minutes of

it as my attention was distracted by one of the players -- and a drip.

This drip would either drop into his instrument or splatter on his

forehead or slither down his neck. It never missed. It came about every

20 seconds and after five minutes of it he was a nervous wreck. Much of

the audience was by now watching for the drip, but he was oblivious to

this. Blowing and fingering away, his eyes would turn roofwards,

searching for the source of torment. Just as he turned his eyes to the

music -- Plop! Down his neck again.

When the music finished, a large amount of the tumultuous applause was

not for his dazzling smile, not for his accomplished performance, but

for his amazing forbearance.

* IT WAS an early Mayfest featuring Whoopi Goldberg. I and a chum

(nameless, for a reason you will discover) were in the bar after the

show when she caught us looking at her.

She came bustling over and, seizing my friend by the ears, kissed him

long and passionately for what seemed like several minutes. This, I

might say, was reciprocated with some vigour. As she broke away, she

asked, somewhat hoarsely: ''Think you'll remember me?''

As my chum is well married, I'm the only one he can talk to about it,

and he dreams about her still. He calls his fantasy ''Makin' Whoopi''.

THERE was a day-long and hilariously exhausting production of The Slab

Boys Trilogy at The Citizens for the first Mayfest, during which there

were decent-sized intervals when one could slip into a local Gorbals

hostelry for a dry sherry and a tea biscuit.

More than several of us citizens of No Mean City decided that this was

a right and proper course of action and, as the day wore on, the

on-stage dialogue got blacker and funnier and the off-stage cheering got

louder and happier.

I, of course, was not inebriated, though I had been teribly

over-served. I could almost walk at the end. I woke up, some hours

later, on the floor of the Mayfest Club with the pattern of the Mitchell

Theatre carpet embossed so deeply in my cheek that it took days to fade.

If you know the Mitchell carpet, you will know the horror thus

occasioned. Thank God the colours didn't come off too. I pretended later

that I had done it deliberately as a tribute to Stoddarts carpet

factory, where the Slab Boys is set, and earned a brief (I hope) but

well-deserved reputation as an eedjit.