This Friday is the Rude Mechanicals midsummer gig!
Celebrating midsummer in a cavorting exuberant mayhem. I have a brand new dress, we have new songs. There will be music and masks and dancing and magic, and possibly possession, should the nature spirits wish to talk to us
Flowers and herbs were traditionally believed to hold extra magical powers during midsummer celebrations, wearing a flower crown harnesses magic and helps you have good health throughout the year.
Love can also be greatly encouraged on midsummer eve, try out one of these spells if you are after a fond caress:
1. If you roll around naked in a wheat field, your future lover will appear in your life within a year. Dew was believed to have a healing effect and rolling in it was supposed to make you beautiful and healthy. Dew was even collected in cloths and pressed into bottles for the year to come (I might try that).
2. Collect eight different types of flowers from as many meadows. When going to bed, put the bouquet underneath your pillow. You will see “the one” in your dream.
3. In the wee hours of the night, climb up somewhere high – on a hill, on top of a fell or a big rock. To a place where it is easy to hear surrounding sounds. Your future lover will come from the same direction as the first sound of the morning. If you hear music, it means an approaching wedding. If you hear a child crying, it is a sign of birth.
So, come crowned, rampant, wild and magical on Friday if you can, and if you can’t dance crowned, rampant, wild and magical wherever you may be, for this is summer and it deserves celebration!
“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.”
Friday 21st June 2019
373 The George Tavern, Commercial Road, London. E1 0LA
Starts 7.30, £5 on door.
Jo Fisher Roberts 
A MIDSUMMER’S SPELL FOR MISS ROBERTS
I teach the royal road of light.
Be thou devoutly eremite,
Free of thy fate. Choose tenderly
A place for thine community.
Let there be an holy wood
Of embowered solitude,
By the still, the rainless river,
Underneath the tangled roots
Of majestic trees that quiver
In the quiet airs; where shoots
Of the kindly grass are green,
Moss and fern asleep between,
Lilies in the water lapped,
Sunbeams in the branches trapped,
Windless and eternal, even!
Silenced all the birds of heaven
By the low insistent call
Of the constant waterfall.
There, to such a setting be
Its carven gem of deity,
A central flawless fire, enthralled
Like truth within an emerald!
Thou shalt have a birchen bark
On the river, in the dark;
And at the midnight thou shalt go
To the mid-stream’s smoothest flow,
And strike upon a golden bell
The spirit’s call: then say the spell!
Thank you!