Comedy Festival 2018: Cindy Salmon offers self-help with a dark side in Empowerful ★★★
CINDY Salmon delivers a motivational self-help seminar with a dark side.
Comedy Festival
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SELF-help seminars and their semantics are ripe comedy fodder. Nobody can really be that upbeat and perfect, can they?
Cindy Salmon is a confident, American-accented motivational speaker but behind the fringed blonde bob and big eyeglasses, lies a deeply troubled woman with a strange relationship to fish.
Sporting a pink corporate blazer and steel-tipped boots (to kick it to the patriarchy), she dances around like Ellen, high fives her audiences and gets right in their faces to ask hard-hitting questions. Gushing with catch phrases, she calls men “hatstands” and frequently quotes her therapist.
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Predictably, this “salmon-ar” is not as it seems and it doesn’t take long for Cindy to crack into a blubbering mess and spill her guts out about childhood trauma (mostly related to fish).
It’s probably no surprise that fish - dead, sexy and otherwise - are a constant trope and a field day for puns in Cindy’s special world.
The colourful ACMI Games Room looks like an early learning centre fitted out with funkier, more expensive lighting. With three rows of amphitheatre-style benches, it works well for a participatory seminar. But it’s not good enough for Salmon — she was hoping for a sponsorship deal with Rod Laver Arena.
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Essentially this is a character piece and Salmon is a solid, although not particularly ground-breaking character. But that’s not to discount Cindy’s “salmon-ar” as an enjoyable hour of wacky tips for learning new skills, navigating job interviews and facing fears. Plus, if you’re lucky, you’ll get a special souvenir badge.
Cindy Salmon, Empowerful
ACMI, Games Room, Federation Square, until April 22.
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