Please put up your hand if you would describe yourself as any of the following: eco warrior, third wave feminist, someone who is not afraid of frank discussions about the female menstrual cycle. That’s quite a few of you. Okay, then please make your way to the HollyWong. And the rest of you? Well, you need to go too but maybe just sit in the back.
Because Wong and her gutsy one woman show, Going Green the Wong Way, will stand right in your face and not move, not until she’s finished what she has to say. By the end however, you won’t want her to shut up, whether she’s talking about being a middle school activist in San Francisco or how she removes her Mooncup.
Despite a lifelong adversity to fossil fuels, Wong is a storyteller who sends sparks flying with every line. It all begins with Harold, her 1981 bubblegum pink Mercedes Benz, which was converted to run on vegetable oil, naturally, and the day that Harold burst into flames on a Los Angeles freeway.
Yes, the show starts with a literal bang but it just keeps getting better, as Wong navigates you on tour of her one woman mission to save the planet from this troublesome, and terrifying, business of climate change. Highlights of this tour will include Wong’s middle school environmental campaign rap, door to door canvassing in San Francisco and the green ways to approach your monthly bleed.(That was a test. If you squirmed a little whilst reading the words monthly bleed, then you need to man up. Wong will smell your fear.)
Oh yes, she’s a little peculiar; at one point she literally drops to her knees to demonstrate an afternoon of dry humping in Golden Gate Park. An afternoon when she abandoned pavement pounding on behalf of the penguins to give in to her own primal urges, so, you see the story does come back full circle to environmental campaigning - just.
If you haven’t been to this show, then please go see it and, for God’s sake, put your rubbish in the bin on the way out. If you have one, then take your reusable sanitary towel, inscribe Wong’s name upon it and hang it from your accommodation window in the hope that Edinburgh’s polluted winds will catch it. It’s what Wong would want.
