SOMETIMES events in life happen at exactly the most convenient time. Like this: just one day post my comedy course booking and one day pre my *drink with* a potential someone, along comes the opportunity to speak to Australian stand-up comedian Deborah Frances-White, whose successful West End show How To Get Almost Anyone To Want To Sleep With You has been described as “life-changing”.
I’m ecstatic. And yes, very selfishly looking forward to grilling her on: A. how to carve out a successful comedy career. B. how to use my humour (or other assets) to impress aforementioned *drinking partner*.
Sentences that I’m prepared for, in relation to the second goal, include “bubbly personality”, “vodka” and “more vodka”.
But her number one tip shocks me. The answer it seems, to at least the latter if not the former, has been on my rack (clothes rack, that is) all these years and I have been completely oblivious.
“Wear a hat,” the Aussie comic, screenwriter, corporate speaker and executive coach advises simply.
“If you’re wearing a nice hat – that’s a nice little flirt and that opens up a conversation.
“Men will just come up to you and assume you’re outgoing.
“No girl wearing a hat at a party will be a shrinking violet.”
I once purposely wore a headband with a yellow bird on it to the pub, I tell her. A lot of guys did end up looking at me – but perhaps only because they thought it had accidentally flown in and I couldn’t get rid of it.
Win tickets to see Deborah Frances-White in London
However Frances-White, who’s about to wind up How To Get Almost Anyone To Want To Sleep With You at the Leicester Square Theatre before taking the show on a UK tour, has extensively tested out her theory.
“I remember going to a party thinking ‘oh I’m not in the party mood, I’ll wear a hat and that way I’ll feel a bit more upbeat’,” she recalls.
“I wore a cowboy hat. People were taking it off and trying it on. I was the life of the party, and I’d felt very much like not going.”
But wait. There’s more.
“And I spoke to a few guys,” Frances-White continues.
“If I’d gone to that party not wearing a hat I’d have just sat down. But you can’t do that if you’re wearing a hat.”
The hat trick, she explains, lies in the idea of the headwear taking on its own personality.
“You don’t have to be outgoing. The hat’s outgoing for you, the hat does the job,” says Frances-White.
I’m already stunned. However when she reveals her advice for men, “holding your head still when you speak” (think James Bond), I’m starting to see why this woman has been repeatedly described a genius. So obvious yet so not obvious.
Frances-White, originally from the Gold Coast but now living in Camden with her husband, wasn’t always this confident in her own skin.
It took a poster of herself, or rather 100 of them, which attracted lots of male attention at the Edinburgh Festival a few years ago to make herself realise how sexy she was.
This was her “epiphany”.
“I think previous boys had fancied me and I’d killed it.
“They’d tell me I was sexy and I’d go ‘I’m not, I’m not’,” she admits.
Today the comic, who’s performed at the Melbourne Comedy Festival and The Adelaide Fringe, receives emails from fans revealing the impact How To Get Almost Anyone To Want To Sleep With You has had on their lives.
“I got a message from a guy on Facebook saying, ‘I haven’t had a girlfriend for five years (before the show). But now I’ve got a real-life girlfriend’.”
Next year she’s launching her exciting live Leicester Square ‘chat show’, Deb Frances-White’s Ultimate Party.
But as for her task at the present moment, it’s giving yours truly that much-needed advice.
On the comedy front, Frances-White assures me I’m funny (but then she says “everybody” is “funny, desperately funny”).
“When you’re with your mates on a Friday night with a bottle of wine and pizza… you’re really funny, you make your friends laugh,” she says.
“It’s the technique of taking it from you being funny around the table to you being funny with a microphone.”
When it comes to my rapidly approaching *drink*, I should be natural (in a bowler hat, of course) and a bit, only a bit, aloof, she instructs me.
“The mindset is “I probably won’t, but I certainly might (like you),” she says.
“Try to make them feel slightly inaccessible… that they’d be lucky to get you, that they probably won’t get you, but if they do get you that’s how special they are.
“So (it’s) ‘I probably won’t, I certainly might, and that certainly might can have a cheeky twist to it’.”
With that advice I’m off to look at my hat rack.
Deb Frances-White performs How To Get Almost Anyone To Want To Sleep With You for the last time in London on 12 Dec and 20 Feb.
For info and tickets, see DeborahFrances-White.com