In America it is rare that I am met with a straight face when I tell someone I am a performer. The response I hear most often is:

“What do you do?”

I wish I had the fortitude to stand up for my art form when confronted with this question, but in most social situations I am hopelessly bashful so I usually just force an awkward laugh and crack some sort of joke about waiting tables or making lattes.

This at sometimes crushing shyness is why I pursued a career in theatre to begin with. The words that are supposed to come out during small talk always fall short when jumping from my mind to my lips. So I have made it my profession to look for them elsewhere later. In rooms just like this one.

And I do find them, whether the words are mine or not, I find them. It’s not too hard. There are trillions of them here, these rooms are temples, asylums for words that ran from the people who needed them the most. People like you.

You’re looking for the words too. I know you are. You have to be. Your every nervous habit paints a line along the road that will lead you to them. We know why we’ve come here, we just don’t how to say it.

So I will spare you my initial depthless comparison of this festival to frayed tassels on a rug, which if you look up the word Fringe is the first thing that comes up. Tassels on a fucking rug.

Instead there is another definition for the word Fringe that suits this place more. One that does not involve ornamental borders of thread, one that makes no mention of marginalised outsiders. It reads:

Fringe: Noun. a band of contrasting brightness or darkness produced by diffraction or interference of light.

This diffraction is part of a phenomenon found in nature known as a glory. It’s when an object, like a person, in a cloud of fog becomes outlined by a rainbow. The picture lasts for just a moment. Gone before you know it. But it does glow magnanimously. A halo of light in the vapour. And when it leaves, it takes with it the words that make it possible to describe.

Written by Trevor Dawkins as a show segment of “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind”, performed by the Neo-Futurists at the 2014 Edinburgh Fringe Festival.