I’ve come down now.

At least I think I have.

Well, my hair no longer smells, that must account for something? Smells of what, you ask? Oh, you didn’t, did you? You just wanted me to get on with the story. Well, let’s start where all decent stories start – a journey.

Friday afternoon, Sweden, late October, and we’re in a car, driving some two hundred kilometres to the capital in order to see one of the last performances by the Blue Man Group in Sweden. At this point my brain was attempting to flee my skull through the membranes of my nose, and my right lung had ruptured at least twice in the last week. Well, maybe not ruptured, but it did feel like it. Add to this the wonderful snowfall, and the car’s incessant complaining that it was, in fact, cold outside. See, the car is smart, it knows things. It knows that it’s cold on the road. Even when I see the snow in the air in front of me – the white layer of powder covering the grass along the road – the car sees fit to tell me, by means of blinking and colour changing signals, that it Is. In fact. Cold outside. So, given the misery I was feeling, I certainly wasn’t looking forward to traversing our unsigned and unfriendly capital in order to find a place to park said metal imbecile for the night.

Fortunately, I succeeded with plenty of time left for the late evening show, allowing my companion and I to make the short acquaintance of a lovely piece of grilled food, followed by a decent cup of coffee and a quite lovely slice of pie at a small café up the street from the theatre.

The thing that strikes me most about our glorious capital on a Friday night is the horde of yellow-jacketed policemen stomping feet in the sleet and snow, looking suspiciously at the strange fellow in a long coat and wide brimmed hat. Tough for them, I had pie – and midst coughing and sneezing, I fail to get lost on the way to the theater.

Settling in at second row, we are greeted by the sight of plastic coated seats, a plastic one time only poncho and a way too bright spotlight in the face, however this is soon forgotten as the hall fills quickly, and people are soon looking at the messages that fly by on the red led displays. “Turn off your semaphores”, “Do not photograph, record, sketches are okay” and quickly thereafter the messages change, this time interacting more with the audience, greeting people by name; thanking them; happy birthday and then finally, yelling happily at the poor girl in the back, the one with the headache.

The show begins. Paint-drumming; the audience roars, soars and the paint flies everywhere. For the following hour, I’m mesmerized, stunned and sucked into the show; a mix of new (Swedish) material, loneliness and Internet, games of attention and attrition – paint and marshmallows. It turns into a blur of easy happiness – marvelling at expressions, light and rhythm. That is, until they invite the poor girl from the audience onstage. I almost pity her, but she manages the awkward dinner with such flair that I’d never expected it from the beginning. The gestures, the awkwardness and the jealousy played out in a perfect harmony of improvised sketchwork, until their chests all exploded into a spray of yellowish banana goo.

At this point, I was already wearing the plastic poncho. However, this wasn’t much protection from a solid coating of mashed banana in my face, hair and inside the neck of the poncho, where it slid in and meshed in a perfect solidity with my hair.

The smell…

Well, let’s not talk too much about it, please.

The remainder of a show continued in a different, banana-tinted blur, paper coming everywhere and engulfing the audience, the ending with KLF’s ‘Last train to Trancentral’ with the wonderful cover-drumming of the pipes, accompanied by the smell of drying banana and the itch of my hair sticking to my neck.

I could write more about the struggle to get to the car before it was locked away for the night, or about the awkwardness of visiting McDonald’s at one in the morning, attempting to wash up in their bathroom stall and getting the remaining banana from my shoulder. I could write about the glorious feeling of a hot shower once we got back home. Or about the buzzing I’ve been having in my body for the last couple of days. The high intensity. “Let’s do things!” The incredible urge to beat rhythms on pipes, to throw paint at everything and watch in amazement as it splatters. The urge of dipping a person in paint and using them as a brush.

Oh yes, it’s very real. Very true.

I loved it, every second.

Even if I hate bananas.