Halloween or no’; She was a fright for sore eyes!

That is the 15-year-old who would turn up at our's back then in the early eighties, on a Friday night, straight off the bus from Cumbernauld with her big brother Craig. He was going out with one of the girls I shared a flat with. His wee sister, still in her school uniform, would then disappear into my room and so began the costume ritual that was fancy dress enough for any guising.

Lots of humongous hair, blonde and back combed rigid, enough eye-liner to choke a horse and invariably something black that looked like it came from a cross between Paddy’s Market and the party shop.

Now all these decades later, she’s living and working in America and Craig Ferguson, the brother, has since become one of its biggest TV stars. Back then Craig Fergusson played drums with front man, Peter Capaldi in their spooky band called ‘The Dream Boys’ who fittingly for Halloween, cut the single ‘Bela Lugosi's Birthday’. Meanwhile my girl band Sophisticated Boom Boom used to support them at Maestros in Scott Street. Craig, Lynn and all of us rockers would hang out with the Art School Students there on the weekends.

It was a magical time and I remember Lynn not wanting to go home.

She’s coming home soon though, as Lynn Fergusson’s piece ‘Turns of the Tide’ for the Play Pie and a Pint series at Oran Mor starts rehearsing on Monday; And this week’s good news is, the awfully funny comic actor Julie Coombes and me, like two Halloween hopefuls, with their party trick, ‘gied it laldy’ for the producer and director and were given the best treat ever when we were told we’d got the gig.

Occasionally an audition comes along where it’s as if the words just lift off the page and pop into your gob. Maybe I could hear Lynn’s voice in the lines because by the late eighties we were both doing the Comedy Circuit.

Whilst she penned and performed in the duo, ‘The Alexander Sisters’, me, Kate Donnelly (Frances from Still Game) and Peter Mullan were doing the rounds of the Unemployed Workers Centres with our political satirical comedy sketches and calling ourselves Redheads.

Lynn always made me hoot with laughter although we did have our moments of soul searching too, and now reading her script, that mixture of wit and wisdom is there in spades.

The ‘Turns’ of the title are sisters Sandy and Rose both on the wrong side of fifty, who have been treading the boards their entire lives doing their double act ‘The Heather Belles’. When we meet them they’re now treading the decks of an Ocean liner still singing, ‘Donald Where’s your Troosers’

I met Johnny Beattie my ex-faither in the street and told him about it, thinking it would be right up his street. He said he hoped it would float the boat of the Oran Mor audience. Reminding me, and not for the first time, about the various men’s clubs he’d performed in where they left ‘no turn un-stoned!’ The role demands that Julie and I wear mini kilts. So, if Lynn’s play doesn’t make you laugh you can be sure this wee treat should do the trick.

THIS WEEKS HIGH FALUTIN CONUNDRUM

On no occasion allow a feline mammal with an ebony pelt to meander from one side to the other of your current trajectory.

LAST WEEKS HIGH FALUTIN CONUNDRUM

Individual homo sapiens residing in translucent non-crystalline solids; made from a fused mixture of silicon dioxides and phosphorus pentoxide; would be ill advised to lob chippings from a larger mass of aggregate minerals that make up the earth’s crust.

Answer:

People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

YOU KNOW YOU’RE OLD WHEN:

The ‘post’ inviting folk to your gig used to be ‘pinned’ with Blu-tac.