I arrived at a small pub in Edinburgh and was ushered into a cosy room behind the bar. I was the first to arrive and was slightly concerned that I might be the only audience member. Some other folks trickled in and the seven of us waited for the show to start and braced ourselves for an hour of work-in-progress stand-up comedy. The show was called 'Misfit Meltdown' – the title and the poster gave nothing away and I had no idea what to expect from this comedy hour from Lauren LoGuidice.
As the show began, it became clear that Lauren was going spend the hour exploring her identity as a self-proclaimed misfit. She began by monologuing about how she was a misfit in her own family and how she had always felt like the odd one out. For one thing, she was much taller than the rest of her family members. Lauren performed some funny caricatures of her family members but some of the humour was lost on me as I lacked the contextual knowledge required to understand the nuances of growing up in an Italian-American community in Queens, New York; and based on the reactions of the other audience members, some parts of this section of the show got lost in translation to the mostly UK-based audience. It would have been nice to see photos of her family, to help hammer her point home.
Lauren continued to explore her experiences of being a misfit, for example being the only queer person in her family and wider community in Queens. This nicely segued to Lauren exploring why she felt like a misfit. Throughout her life, she received many comments about how she was taller than her family and jokes at her expense about how she could be adopted but didn't think much of it… until she did an at-home genetic test.
This revealed the answer as to why she felt like a misfit: Lauren was conceived using a sperm donor.
Lauren's story starts similarly to many who realise they were conceived using donor gametes: She did an at-home genetic test. Lauren expected her heritage to be completely Italian, but when she spotted some British heritage in the mix she started asking questions. When she compared her results to her siblings she noticed that although her genetic matches were the same on her mother's side of the family, on her father's side things didn't match up. Her parents then confirmed that she was conceived using donor sperm.
At this point in the show, Lauren explained how sperm donation worked. Since it was a work in progress show, Lauren had invited the audience to ask any questions. At this point hands went up and quite a few questions came Lauren's way. As a reproductive biologist, I understand how such techniques work, but there was some lack of clarity when explaining some of the science to a general audience. I think some work here is needed to improve the explanation of sperm donation and how it works, although making this funny is a different ball game!
She then went down the rabbit hole to find her half siblings: those conceived using sperm from the same donor. She ended up finding over 15 new half siblings (and there may be more out there…). Lauren and her newfound family members then attempted to find their sperm donor. There was no paper trail linked to the clinic, but after some Facebook searches, they found him.
When they made contact with him, it turned out that he donated sperm during his time as a medical student in the USA. Lauren told these stories in a remarkable way. She managed to keep things funny, despite the subject matter. There were some really funny anecdotes including one of the siblings keeping everyone's information in spreadsheets and the name of their group chat: Spare kidneys!
Despite the funny moments, I found this to be really shocking and it gave me some insight into how the US donor system previously worked and the lack of regulation that allowed medical students to donate sperm samples from small sums of cash and the lack of paper trails meaning donor conceived children are unable to find their donor parent. Along these lines, some of the humour was a little too dark for the audience, especially at one o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon. She kept joking that she had undertaken much therapy but the audience was not on board with some of the darker elements of her show. This led to some slightly awkward moments when she was encouraging us to laugh.
As the show finished there was a satisfying conclusion to the misfit story. When Lauren met her sperm donor, it turned out that he was a hippy oddball. I really liked the conclusion that she found an understanding and acceptance of her misfit status once she found her donor conceived family. Overall, Misfit Meltdown was standard Edinburgh Fringe Festival fare, and a good work-in-progress show with some funny moments. I would be interested to see the show again once it is in its fully fledged form.
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