Cometh the hour, cometh the random person

The member of the audience leaping to the action to save the show is familiar from real life as well as 42nd Street. Singers do, after all, get coughs. The occasional actor will break a leg. If you're lucky, it happens in time for the management to get Thomas Allen fresh off the plane. If you're really lucky you're the student in the audience who happens to know the role, as happened to Patrick McCarthy years earlier when Thomas Allen was taken ill.* Of course, understudies exist, and most of the time the 'emergency' performer is well-rehearsed. It happens in sport, too, though again usually the person stepping up is someone who was going to do it anyway at some point.

And sometimes they are Lars Høgnes, a 36 year old waxing technician who works for the Norwegian World Cup team and found himself taking the third leg in the relay for the second team after one of the skiers got food poisoning. Høgnes is actually a good club skier with a couple of team relay medals from national championships as a young man, but he never reached the top level. In true Scandinavian style he was sent off with the comment from the team spokesperson that "He's probably not very good". They did come last (minus Kazakhstan, who were lapped), but at least they were there.

Meanwhile, today's example of something I don't need in my life, a woollen sports bra.

*I learned today that Thomas Allen's middle name is Boaz. That's north-eastern mining communities for you.