Shyzerblog

It’s Christmas Eve! The decorations are up, the lights are lit, and I’m… at work. But only for a few more hours. My only regret is that I never got to finish putting Hugh Laurie’s face on a cookie – it was going to be my gingerbread House. Here’s what I did manage to deck my halls with.

I’m writing a musical. Right now, there are four things you should know about this:

1. It’s called Long Dark Night and it’s a film noir comedy. Private eyes, femmes fatale, gangsters, fedoras, that sort of thing. I know, right? How could it not be hilariously fun?

2. It will run for six performances as part of the SummerWorks festival August 4-14th.

3. Tonight, June 15th, we’ll be presenting a handful of songs from the show at Granny Boots. The evening is free and details are here.

4. We’re still casting! If you think you or someone you know could be our gritty private detective or sassy nightclub proprietress, check out the casting call.

Here’s one I’ve been sitting on for a while. My only regret with this one is that I couldn’t work in an “Engage!” joke.

And speaking of Patrick Stewart in a musical oeuvre:

A couple of weekends ago I went to Geneseo, NY with a circus company. I had written a linking narrative for their show, and was to perform in it as the German photographer with a “smart-assed post-modern” sense of humour, as one commenter put it, who delivered said narrative. This is a rundown of that weekend.

Friday

7pm – Board the bus.

Those of us who were leaving from Toronto load up the bus and head to the airport to pick up the rest of the acts, most of which were coming from Montreal. The bus, which had 12 beds and two little living areas, including a kitchenette, is pretty swank and is where we’ll spend the first night. The little corridor of bunks reminds me of that scene from Some Like It Hot. You know the one.

8:30pm – Leave the airport. Our bus now carries me, two jugglers (who separately perform on unicycle and acro bicycle) three acrobatic breakdancers, one silks/cyr wheel artist, two handbalancers (one of whom will also perform cube), one straps artist, three mobile arists (one of whom will also do a bungee act), and our driver.

9:15pm – Stop in Niagara for dinner. To everyone’s disappointment, the KFC here does not have the Double Down on its menu.

11pmish – Arrive at US customs. A border guard takes all of our passports and directs us to a small building, where we wait forever. Eventually someone asks if something is wrong or if we’ve been overlooked, and we’re assured that everything is fine. Fifteen minutes later a supervisor comes out to tell us that our passports were accidentally sent to the wrong building. Finally, a single agent begins to process us one at a time, while a half-dozen other agents are occupied, either completing mind-bogglingly important administrative duties imperative to keeping spies and n’er-do-wells out of America, or playing Farmville. It’s hard to tell. But either way, they’re too busy to chip in and process us all at once. Everyone is fingerprinted and photographed, which I find unnerving.

Saturday

1:30amish – Leave customs. We spent over two hours being processed, meaning that of our less than 36 hour stay in the States more than 7% of it was spent waiting for someone to staple a piece of paper into our passports. Just sayin’.

3am – Arrive at the hotel, where the bus parks for the night. Though the bus bed is comfortable, and much bigger than it looks, I’m never one to fall asleep at a reasonable hour. I spend most of the night lying in my bunk going over my lines, mumbling to myself in the over the top German accent I’ve been working on all week.

10am - I wake to find that I’m one of the last to do so and quickly check into my room.

10:15am – Bus leaves for the show venue.

10:25am – Realize that the jugglers are not on the bus. (Someone will go back for them later)

11am – Setup and rehearsal of acts.

The venue is a large gym, and when we arrive lights and curtains have already been hung, while chairs continue to be set up by student volunteers. I’m not sure when all this happened, whether early this morning or last night, but between lights, sound, rigging and curtains there’s a hell of a lot of equipment in here, and no one’s even unpacked their apparatus yet.

There’s not much for me to do at this point. The acts are going through and setting their points (the ‘point’ from which aerial equipment is hung from the ceiling) and lights. Each act has different requirements; some need to be lit just so (so as to not be blinded by a spotlight at the wrong moment), others need time to adjust to the flooring, which may ultimately determine which tricks they are able to do. This all takes time.

At any given moment there are a number of improbable goings-on scattered chaotically throughout the room, and I’m reminded of the White Queen: “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Late afternoon – I sit down with the stage manager and we go over transitions in the script along with lights and sound. The script is mostly structured so that I’m responsible for bridging each act with a short monologue, but there are a few acts who need to interact with me on their entrances. We explain these transitions to each act. As time goes by it’s starting to look less and less likely that we’re going to have time for a cue to cue.

7pm – Performers begin to get into makeup and costume in our meeting room-turned-lunch room-turned-dressing room.

7:50pm – Cast meeting. The stage manager runs through the show verbally, confirming each act’s transition. This is as close as we get to any kind of full rehearsal, which I find nerve-wracking but also exciting. On the one hand, if someone is late or doesn’t know where to go, I’m the one on stage who has to cover. But I also know that my job is really just to be funny  and engaging and ensure that I don’t totally drop the show’s energy in between acts (I’m looking at you, Banana Shpeel).

This is also interesting to me in that it’s the opposite of the working convention used in straight theatre. A play is generally a very centralized thing, starting with a writer and director who hand their vision down to the actors and technicians, who are more or less puppets of the former. But circus can be entirely decentralized, with different pieces brought together with a certain degree of interchangeability. In this show, each act was developed autonomously – including my narrative. (Though I’m familiar with the disciplines, I only actually saw one of the acts prior to the day of the show). This is a big adjustment for me, but it can work, and one could argue that this sort of compartmentalized system yields a higher level of expertise and awe per minute than the theatre model. I’m curious as to what some cross pollination could accomplish.

7:55pm – Everyone has their own warm up. Shortly before curtain, the stage is filled with people doing handstands and splits and other minor acrobatic feats, making my own vocal warm up seem even more lame than usual.

8pm – Showtime! I’m not sure how many people there are, but the place is fairly full – I’d say six or seven hundred, at least. In addition to the chairs you can see in the photos above, there are also bleachers covering the back quarter of the room. There are a few hitches – a late cue here, a bungled entrance there – but they’re mostly unnoticed or forgiven (it’s easy to forget about a late sound cue if that late sound cue is immediately followed by someone doing something really totally completely amazing that you never ever would have even thought remotely humanly conceivable).

During intermission one of the ushers asks where I’m from and is surprised when I answer “Canada” in my normal voice. So either I’ve done a decent job with my German accent or she doesn’t get out much (I choose to believe the former).

My getup (which I failed to remember to take a picture of) includes cameras and camera bags slung over my shoulders. I keep my real camera in one of them and snag pictures of the acts from the wings when I’m not on stage. These are the few that turned out.

Cube

Straps

Cyr Wheel (a personal favourite!)

Hand balancing

9:30pm – Final bow. Standing ovation.

9:45pm – Change and take off makeup. Those whose apparatus needs to be dissasembled do so; the cube and cyr wheel are taken apart by their owners and carefully packed, as are the unicycle and bicycle. The crew breaks down the set and the theatre becomes a gym again. The rest of us eat dinner.

10:45pm – Back at the hotel I take a long awaited shower. When I come out the fire alarm is going off, but no one pays it much attention and it turns out to be a false alarm anyway. I hang out with the break dancers and one of the jugglers for a while. After finishing what little we have on hand we go out in search of a bar, but by the time we find one it’s closed.

Sunday

3am – Bed. I’m not good at sleeping in hotels and have a restless night.

9am – Wake up. Pack. Complimentary continental breakfast.

Those are “egg patties”. They’re better than they look. I take seconds.

10am – Board the bus and head home. I sleep the whole way, waking only as we pass through Canadian customs, which takes all of fifteen minutes. We make another stop at the airport, and by late afternoon I’m home, where I go back to sleep for a very long time.

It takes two days before I can stop thinking with a German accent.

I’ve had a hazy couple of days of really awful sleep patterns; days and nights have been running together in an annoying way that makes me actually (pleasantly) surprised to realize that it’s only Thursday morning.

I wonder why my procrastination so often takes on the form of working really hard to postpone starting something that almost always turns out to be really enjoyable once I actually get into it.

I have two days to pick up a German accent.

I hereby pledge to update daily, if for no other reason than because my daily life has gotten mind-numbingly boring, and hopefully the prospect of public scrutiny will encourage me to either step up my game or start inventing some far more interesting lies about what I do with myself.

Wherein Nuit Blanche becomes the backdrop for classic Golden Girls moments.

12:00am
Happy Birthday to __________!: It’s an all night birthday party! A table in the middle of the street with people sitting around it stirs epic questions of the pseudoconscious. Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? Is this an exhibit or a food vendor? Blanche Devereaux sits distraught with coffee and cheesecake after discovering Rose is better than her at dirty dancing, a dance form that almost perfectly mimics the act of making love. Sophia quips, “Maybe it’s the standing up that’s throwing you”.

12:15am
Bonfire: A bonfire in Dundas Square reminds us of three quintessentially Canadian experiences: standing behind the safety fence built so large around a bonfire that you can’t even feel its heat, looking at something completely disappointing in Dundas Square, and putting up with something lame being justified as “quintessentially Canadian”. Blanche Devereaux feels lonely, calls Mel Bushman.

12:35am
Firs+ Aid: A stark white tent, shining and sterile in the night, stands as a proud monument to life and death, the fragility of the human body and the triumph of the human spirit. Blanche Devereaux tries to buy condoms only to feel the nasty sting of age discrimination.

12:50am
Auto Lamp: An ordinary van becomes an extraordinary lamp, at the same time asking us to watch and to look away. Blanche Devereaux tries to pawn off her broken down car on Rose, before realizing that friendship is more important than turning a profit.

1:10am
The Task: Working through the night, a man moves 15 tons of concrete blocks from one pile to another and back again, evoking deep images from the collective unconcsious; images of paint drying, of grass growing, of tears of boredom. Blanche Devereaux becomes jealous when Dorothy threatens her popularity at the Rusty Anchor and goes to drastic measures to secure her social place.

1:35am
Nuit Market Starring the Toronto Weston Flea Market: A flea market erupts in an otherwise unsuspecting alleyway. Used records. Pashmina scarves. Pins, 3/$5. Money flows. We are all connected. But how? Blanche Devereaux runs madly through the stalls searching for the leather jacket with her winning lottery ticket in it, which stupid Rose accidentally gave to charity. Stupid, stupid Rose.

1. London Fringe Festival

The London Fringe Festival was a ton of fun, in spite of missing the train to London on opening day (oops), VIA rail strikes jamming up further travel plans, and London transit buses that stopped running at 6pm (6???? Seriously?). Also:

Highlights include an afternoon spent lounging in one of Sarah’s coworker’s pool, great audiences at the Fringe club, staying in a guest room with all Simpson’s decor:

and this thing:

This was a set of chimes in a park near our theatre. One day, while Sarah and I were hanging out in the park before a show. it began to play. The tune seemed familiar, and we both stopped to listen, finally realizing that it was, in fact, playing “It’s a Small World (After All)”. Full chorus and verse. If anyone from London can explain this to me, I’d love to hear the rationale.

2. G20

Well that sucked.

Highlights include not getting the crap beaten out of me by the police for no reason, conversations with people offering delightfully intelligent arguments like “well they should have known” and “the police are just doing their job”, writing hilariously snarky emails to Bill Blair and finally receiving an inadequate form response from an office assistant a month later.

3. Hamilton Fringe Festival

Hamilton was another great festival, although commuting to and from home for every show was a bit trying – mostly because there was no way to predict what kind of awful traffic we’d get snarled in on the way there.

I think Hamilton’s audiences have been the most enthusiastic so far. It was in Hamilton  that the show got its first full standing ovation, and that I had my first request for an autograph (awkward!). Also, it’s the closest the show has been to home since its first incarnation, so it was nice that so many friends could finally come out and see it.

Oddly, I didn’t take any pictures in Hamilton.

4. Friends for Life Bike Rally

Highlights include: Everything. Pretty much the whole damn trip, all six days of riding, and two days in Montreal. Maybe minus the pain in my knees.

5. Minnesota Fringe Festival.

The day after returning from the Bike Rally I flew to Chicago, where I spent the day before taking an overnight bus to Minneapolis. Holy crap, Chicago is a beautiful city.

Highlights of Minneapolis include:

1. Ridiculously friendly people. I was lugging a TV (a prop for the show) down the street the day after I got here, and it was a million degrees out. (That’s a million degrees Fahrenheit, I’m not sure what that is in Celsius, but it’s pretty hot.) A complete stranger passing on the street offered me a ride to the theatre, and then promised to come see the show when I told her about it. And she actually did!

2. There are bunnies EVERYWHERE. Seriously. They have bunnies the way Toronto has squirrels. Every night when I ride home I see little families of bunnies scurrying across people’s lawns. (I am more than a little worried about running one over.) Bunnies!

3. Tons of awesome old neon signs and retro diners/bars/restaurants (most of which I suspect are not trying to be retro in any way).

The festival here is really huge, a lot like Toronto’s Fringe, which I’m finding a little overwhelming and it’s hard not to feel invisible in the middle of it all. Also, in case I didn’t mention it, IT IS A MILLION DEGREES FAHRENHEIT.

You don’t have to know me well – in fact, you barely have to know me at all – to know that I am not a reactionary person. I generally contemplate more than complain, and am not one to get bent out of shape over minor scandals or trendy causes. So I hope you will appreciate the extent of consideration and concern I have put into the following, and understand that when I say this is probably the most important thing I have ever asked of you, I really, really mean it.

Awful, terrible, scary things happened in Toronto this weekend. Yet even scarier than the violence and mayhem in the streets are some of the arguments I hear from otherwise reasonable people in defense of the atrocious abuse of charter rights perpetrated by G20 security forces and supported by all levels of government.

Discussions with those presenting these arguments have shown me that many are simply unaware of what happened this weekend. Perhaps you decided to get out of town for the duration of the summit (a prudent move, no argument) and since returning all you’ve heard of what happened is a few snippets from the TV or the radio about violence and riots. My intention was to put together a primer on the events of this weekend, referencing various news sources, but instead all I’m going to say is this: if you read nothing else about what happened at the G20 this weekend, if you do no more research beyond this sentence, then please first read this account of the inexplicable arrest and detainment of a pretty average citizen. It’s a long read, for sure, but it provides a detailed, captivating account of what happened to one Torontonian that is undeniable, compelling, and at times even funny. If you’re still skeptical, a little bit of research will corroborate many of the writer’s claims of police disorganization, contempt, abuse, homophobia, and lies.

To those of you who live far from the downtown core of Toronto and had the luxury of staying away: imagine if a crime occurred in your neighbourhood and the police responded by quickly surrounding the area and everyone in it (including you), arresting them, and then releasing people hours later after deciding that they weren’t the perpetrators of the crime. You’d be pissed, and rightfully so – the police have no right to arrest hundreds of people just because a few of them may be guilty. Now consider that this is not an analogy for what happened this weekend – this IS what happened.

Why would the police do such a thing, you ask? What would they have to gain? The Star has a pretty good idea in this article on the Miami Model.

Meanwhile, actual perpetrators of violence got of scott free. Police did not try to apprehend ‘black bloc’ tacticians, allowing windows to be smashed and cars to be burned for hours. When I headed down to Spadina and Queen on Saturday I watched a police car – already surrounded by hundreds of police – burn for a good 45 minutes (and it had been burning since long before I arrived) before the police bothered to move in and extinguish it. And when a few bad apples tried to disrupt an otherwise innocuous gathering, the crowd reacted. At one point a man pointed out a guy who had thrown something into the crowd. “This guy!,” he said, “in the white shirt!”, and at least fifty civilians (no exaggeration – it was hilarious. All that was missing was Yakety Sax.) chased the perpetrator down an alley. Not a single police officer (though there were many to spare) supported the pursuit, and the man got away.

If you haven’t already seen this video of a civilian totally pwning a would-be looter, treat yourself – it’s very satisfying. But it raises the question: why were civilians left to enforce order, and not the $1 billion worth of security forces? Naomi Klein has a pretty good idea in this video.

Instead, police used a tactic known as “kettling” to detain hundreds of innocent people for hours – even though both police and the mayor’s office admit that only a handful of people were responsible for the violence (which, incidentally, had taken place a day before). Police even apprehended journalists. If you haven’t already read Steve Paikin’s chilling account of the beating and arrest of a journalist on Saturday night, please do. And please, please – if you can’t understand how atrocious it is for the police to arrest journalists who are merely trying to document public events, ask a grown up to explain it to you. I don’t have the patience to draw you a picture.

Since the G20 has ended, Police Chief Bill Blair has admitted to deliberatlely misleading the people of Toronto regarding the secret laws that were passed for the summit. He has also admitted to stocking a press conference that was supposed to showcase confiscated protestor weapons with items that in fact had nothing to do with the G20 at all, and weren’t even weapons. On Tuesday evening a group of people (including myself) showed up to protest Bill Blair’s appearance at at Pride Toronto event. When asked if he knew why the group outside was so upset, Blair replied “I don’t know, and I’m not sure I care“. This is the man who now thinks the only review of police conduct at the G20 summit should be an internal one, despite his flagrant failure to uphold the Toronto Police Services values of honesty and openness.

I’m not one to throw around ‘isms, but the events of this weekend and the subsequent attitude of Bill Blair smack of authoritarianism. I firmly believe that this is a watershed moment in Canadian history: either we stand up and demand accountability and redress for the events of this weekend, or we do nothing – sending the message to the government and the police that whatever they say, goes, regardless of whatever rights we think we have.

So please – PLEASE – do something. Write to the mayor (mayor_miller@toronto.ca), your city councillor, your MP, your MPP, and the Prime Minister’s office (you can also quickly send a pre-written email to the PM’s office from Amnesty International’s website) demanding an inquiry into G20 security measures, and the removal of Bill Blair from his position as Chief of Police. And then write to them again. One little email is meaningless, but thousands of them can’t be ignored.

Please join me this evening at the Rally for a Public Inquiry Concerning the Actions at the G20. And while you’re at it, join the Facebook group (it’ll keep you informed) and sign the petition.

If you’re not quite convinced yet, here are a few more links you should check out:

Torontoist’s Fourteen Essential G20 Videos

http://backofthebook.ca/2010/06/27/widespread-police-misbehaviour-illegal-activity-at-g20/3402/

http://spacingtoronto.ca/2010/06/28/g20-a-few-questions-to-ask-organizers-of-g20/

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/article/829515–call-inquiry-on-g20-mayhem

http://toronto.mediacoop.ca/video/compilation-videos-about-police-violence/3897

http://www.amnesty.ca/resource_centre/news/view.php?load=arcview&article=5453&c=Resource+Centre+News