My mother always said “never air your dirty laundry in public”. I thought she meant don’t fling my knickers at Tom Jonesnever imagining I'd expose them for an entire audience to gawp at when on stage myself! The show started as a blank canvass invitation from Tom Johnson of Chelmsford Civic Theatres to do a quirky Saturday night variety cabaret. I looked for a hook to link my musical diversity and ‘wordsmith’ material and literally found a peg! The idea that as washing hangs on a line, music is written on the (stave) line (as well as in the spaces); so too words, whether lyrics, poetry, prose, emails or speech. But lots of things are ‘on the line’ and I’ve only time to air some of them today… On leaving home for university in 1979, I had my first dose of D.I.Y. washing though saved my teddy from the usual public hanging my mother gave him! And rather than write an essay on Wordsworth while my smalls (and bigs) were getting acquainted in a revolving can of hot air, I wrote a poem on the lines of an A4 pad that life was “like a tumble dryer”. That thought went on hold until 2006, when my battered rotary line inspired me to consider that what’s on our washing lines, in our laundry baskets and washing machines also reflect our lives, the clean and the dirtier aspects, wears and tears, loves and loses… life is a cycle- what goes around comes around. History changes and repeats itself too! The material chosen today reveals some of this. I was going to call the show On The Line but The Laundry Of Life Pegged On The Line was a better fit, albeit longer… and quirkier! It has tumbled in circles, shrunk, stretched but does not have a definitive version, for like our clothes and the laundry process, it can be chopped and changed to suit the occasion, with more or less colour, sparkle and tone. I didn’t want to create a story or ‘stage persona’ out of my readings about Her Indoors though that may happen ‘further down the line’! To keep a cabaret and theatrical feel, I opted for ‘moments’ of character, comments, poetry, songs, readings, voiceovers plus personality and ad-lib. Included in the full load, are some borrowed songs, collaborations and reworked ideas,  but mostly my own mixed bag of literary, poetic, lyrical and musical laundry, a little inspired by life as a proverbial multi-tasking woman- juggler of domestic engineering duties and the rest. Poetry spans 30 years and readings are rehashed columns I wrote for The Edge Magazine between 2001/2. I’m told there’s nothing quite like it!

Enjoy the show! Dee Mardi