100 years ago today

The Empire Theatre burned down, taking with it The Great Lafayette and many of his performers and animals.

What better way to commemorate it than a photograph of eminent psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman filming a teenage boy playing the keyboard dressed as a teddy bear?

This was part of the Lafayette Seance performed at Edinburgh Secret Society. I am allowed to speak about it since it was put out as a webcast (which I am yet to see-been busy). It involved getting 500 people to exit and enter a theatre within about 5 minutes which was a pretty neat trick in itself!

Unfortunately, as this was never intended to be a "serious" seance we did not get an appearance from the man himself. However, I did get to be on my own in the theatre for a bit (with the seance crew behind the safety curtain and the sound and light guy at the back which is as about on my own as I could get) which was quite spooky.

There is a reason a teenager was made to dress as a teddy bear and perform on stage by the way. And it was not just to give us all a laugh (which it did). Lafayette had a mechanical wind up teddy bear which was in fact a young girl. She sadly died in the fire also alomg with her brother. 300 000 people turned out to their funeral.