As it turns out, I was allowed to compare a play to chicken nugget in my review.

 

For those playing along at home, you’ll know what I’m on about. For those raising a quizzical brow right now, click here for clarity.

 

I handed the page to my editor and told her she wasn’t allowed to fire me. But, to my surprise, she didn’t shred the page, set it alight and then burn some sage for good measure. She didn’t just let it go through, she said it was aright reading.

 

She let me keep the line about Clueless, and let me say “this play was about as pretentious as a chicken nugget, and just as delicious”.

 

However, there was quite a bit of meat cut from the printed piece and I would like to rectify the situation. This is an unfortunate reality in newspapers; you can only bang on for as long as the ad stack allows.

 

Sometimes even the greatest yarns have to have to be slashed open, the guts ripped out and then stitched back together – like bypassing the whole small intestine and hooking the stomach right up to the bowels. Sometimes, things are cut right down to their skeletal frames, and sometimes they need to stick to an all carb diet to fatten up.

 

But, like in life, I find myself never needing to add more bread to the equation. I have a tendency to overwrite and so I end up having to cut back on the treats. There’s so much I would have loved to have seen in actual print, however, like a bulging thigh being violently shoved into a jegging leg, it just wouldn’t fit the space.

 

I’d already desperately squeezed into every millimetre of space I could, sneakily cramming things in like a stash of hidden chocolate bars in a child’s room. I kerned words down, I took out spaces, I grouped sentences into paragraphs instead of keeping to the standard rule of hitting enter after each full stop. I was ruthless in my bid to fit more in, as if I was standing at the fridge in the first five minutes home after finishing work, shovelling as much of anything edible into my mouth as possible. Unfortunately in both cases, when you try to fit too much in, digestion – of words and of dangerous combinations of leftovers – isn’t easy. So some things had to be cut.

 

But, sweet reader, we live in the world of the Internet. It’s a magical place where we assume everyone is hanging on to our every word. We can gaily tap away at our keyboards until our finger callouses become infected and leak pus everywhere, which gets into the buttons and eventually destroys our computer. There are no word limits in the blogosphere and since my imaginary audience is obsessed with me and would read my shopping list if they got their beady little eyes on it, I freely breeze past my goal weight of 600 words.

 

So here’s my self-indulgent binge on the things that were trashed, because they’re no shame in eating hot chips from a garbage bin if they haven’t been there that long (I’m speaking literally AND metaphorically, from my own experiences, of course). Here are a few things that just didn’t make the final cut:

 

* Calling one of the actors “mystery meat”.

* The phrase “fangin’ for a nugg”.

* a suggestion the lead actor had a beard full of secrets.

* Critique of the high-five techniques.

* Questioning whether the playing of a Limp Bizkit song beforehand was intentional, what it meant and whether Halle Berry admits to featuring in the film clip for one of their absolute masterpieces. I then could have compared the demise of Limp Bizkit to Lincoln Park and Nickleback and penned a really poignant essay about which group left the biggest mark on our hearts and made the strongest contribution to music (spoiler: it’s none of them).

* A snarky remark about daydreaming about stabbing the person sitting next to me through the eardrum with a ballpoint pen for taking up my arm space.

* A definitive list of all the ways audience participation could backfire on a performer (if the person they picked to stand up gave the performers Ebola or vomited with stage fright or still had their umbilical cord attached and it fell out of their shirt etc).

* My soon-to-be patented six-pack of nuggets rating system. I gave the show five nuggs and one with a bite taken out of it but no one will ever know that.