Hooray for you, Mari Sasano.

My friend Elena performed this Daniel MacIvor one-woman play, cleverly designed by Clinton. Two “headlights”, a chair and a couple boxes make up the set: very simple, very effective.

The play itself is the usual MacIvor fare, a monologue that describes an event, with flashbacks and editorializing that reveal some kind of hidden truth. Her character, Bob (Roberta) is a runaway (teenage? It’s not totally clear) who is running from unspecified traumas that make themselves tragically clear as the show goes on. We see Bob as she runs, in scenes of her life before the running commenced, as a little girl, and in unguarded moments, addressing the audience directly about her inner desires. Bob is abrasive, possibly working class and uneducated. Lots of tough talk, lots of self-delusion and repression. Elena did a good job of juggling all these duties, a tricky feat considering how sweet and refined she is in real life– not a bit of the street-talking tough in this lady. So, kind of disturbing to see her as Bob! It would be like me playing someone, oh, I don’t know, socially adept and nice. You’d be all, “Wha happened?”

I think the script brings up a lot of questions. Like, it was not very clear how old Bob is, or how we can reconcile all these naive princess fantasies with her obviously very jaded personality. But it’s MacIvor, and I’ve loved everything I’ve seen of his, including this one.

I have to take the Fringe in careful doses.

For years, I reviewed plays for SEE. That meant being assigned to a venue (lucky if there are soft seats, luckier if there’s a concession) ALL DAY for the first two days of the festival in order to get all of the shows reviewed for the Fringe special edition on Monday.

I would see 12-15 shows in two days, and these are 12-15 hour days. Sometimes I would be sent to other venues to fill in for other writers with more sensible lives. I would look over my notes every night and write 100 word reviews for each play the next morning. At $25 a pop, the money wasn’t bad (overlooking what the hourly rate would be), but by the end of the weekend, I’d be angry– physically angry!– if I had to see a bad play.

There were certainly very, very bad plays. One was a Christian youth group who did an anti-suicide play that appeared to argue for the opposite. Or any play about women’s body issues–one ended with the performers in nude body stockings! Geez, if you accept your bodies so much, show flesh. Painfully un-funny sketch comedy. Period dramas with bad accents. The very last play I ever reviewed started at 11:30 p.m.: an hour and a half of Broadway show tunes. I almost lost it.

Anyhow, that’s why I only saw my first play last night. It’s a first play that premiered at Loud N Queer, revamped by Trevor Anderson and performed by Annie Dugan, John Ullyatt, and Ryan Parker, several of whom are friends.

You’ve probably heard, but this is the gay Jesus puppet show. You probably can’t help but come up with something to look at with that concept, and though there are some rough moments, the entirety of the project was highly entertaining. I made Trevor watch Passion of the Christ and Lost in La Mancha for inspiration, and it looks like he’s made good with it. There are a lot of really funny jokes (and at one point, John flubbed a line, making an off-the-cuff funniest joke ever!) and there was an excellent use of the puppets. Most of the transitions between scenes was simply loud screaming as the lights went down, an excellent choice. Very Trevor Anderson.

There’s only one show left, tonight at 5:30. They’ve been close to selling out each night! I’m sitting in the Journal tent this afternoon from 3-6, then another friend’s play, See Bob Run. Looking forward to that one, too!

The article I wrote for the pullout last Friday got reprinted in Calgary and in Vancouver. Thanks, Ben Lee, for the extra dough!

We went out to see him last night. The Sidetrack was sold out, we managed to get a table in the back somehow. The opening act was a band called The Suits XL. “Acoustic rock!” exclaimed one at our table in mock-excitement. Later, one of their entourage (possibly a band member, I couldn’t see them from where I was sitting) actually tried to hit on me, but not before trying to sell me a CD first. Maybe I’ll make “I will be dreaming of you tonight” my new catchphrase. Just to be fair, Paul had a weird moment with a girl who he knew had a boyfriend but was acting suspiciously single. Eventually she moved on to some other dude who obviously didn’t mind her attention. Gross.

Anyhow, Ben Lee is awfully chatty, and it’s clear why he has such a loyal fan following. Dressed in a white suit jacket (possibly matching pants? again, couldn’t see), he self-deprecated, told anecdotes about when he was 14, sang all his hits. I like Ben Lee. He’s a sweet guy, very nice in the interview, and funny. He has a tendency to be a little too literal in his songwriting, but he’s still young enough to figure that out. Besides, he seems to be on a mission, and I’m not going to argue with his goals of making people happy and inspiring greatness.

It looks like it’s working for him: he has a hilarious rockstar bus,which was running the entire time and taking up the best parking spots!

It’s as good as they say it is: Toni Collette and Greg Kinnear as the parents of a little girl who qualifies to compete in the titular competition. Morose Nietschezean big brother, failed suicide uncle (Steve Carrell!) and inappropriate grandpa in tow, the family takes off to California, where we are supposed to see the family’s various dysfunctions but instead we are shown love, cooperation, and unity instead. And the best thing is, you don’t feel totally gross about it after.

I’m sure everyone sees their own family in this. I was thinking about mine today. It turns out, in hindsight, my childhood was excellent. My family, too, seems a little odd to outsiders. We’re generally misanthropists (except Mom and June), and stiff and undemonstrative with each other. 50% of us have tattoos, only dad is working at a career he was trained for, and for Albertans, we’re all kinda politically radical. And even my mom has the reputation for being somewhat of a nonconformist among her peers.We’re basically an entire family of morose teenagers. But I feel like my parents did a great job, overall: we’ve all become principled, wildly independent do-gooders, in our own way.

Plus we’re loyal to each other, and I never feel like I’m not included, even in this bunch. By this point, we can pretty much talk about anything without self-censoring, though we might have to simplify the language somewhat.

It reminds me of these Edmonton Japanese Community picnics Mom and Dad used to make us go to when we were kids. As awkward as we are with each other, when it came down to the family games (potato sack races, water balloon toss, etc.) there was no beating the Sasanos. Given an us-against-the-world situation, we are unstoppable.

It’s everything it should be, and totally worth the late night screening!

The thing with snakes is that they are really straightforward: either they are scared of you, or they want to try and eat you. Their motives aren’t complicated, but they will bite and may even hurt you. But as scary as snakes are, they aren’t really all that important. I’m not afraid of snakes (unlike my poor boyfriend, who will now have a sleepless night), but I still found the movie exciting to watch and highly entertaining.

The snakes themselves are mostly of the CGI variety, kind of fakey. You got some cobras (regular and spitting), rattlers, stripey coral snakes (I did notice that on occasion they tried to substitute harmless king snakes– nice try, guys), various and sundry other poisonous specimens and one constrictor. But like I said, the snakes are irrelevant. They only needed some kind of danger, and snakes are as good as any.

So instead of focussing on the evils of snakes (there aren’t any– only people and the supernatural can be evil), the movie centres around the characters, action, and boo! moments. That is the only way this movie could have succeeded, and boy, does it work.

Sam Jackson shouts, shoots people, and shows his tough-but-tender character. We got Juliana Marguiles, pretty and no bullshit, getting stuff done. Stereotypes turn into three-dimensional human beings, and soon enough we’re all in there with them, trying to survive. It’s not snakes they have to fight, but their own bad instincts. What better message is that?

And it’s very, very funny. Sight gags with snakes, snappy one-liners, silly panicked passenger moments. But what the movie really does is set up the ultimate joke of humanity. After all, what’s more hilarious than human beings, who have conquered land, sea, air and space, have their asses kicked by Nature herself? No, we should not be afraid of snakes, and we wouldn’t be if we understood them. And, by extension, we make life a lot harder for each other and ourselves by worrying about status and having knee-jerk self-preservation moments when we should all be looking out for each other.

And speaking of populism, this is lowest-common-denominator at its very best. The crowd cheered when Jackson said his “motherfucking snakes” line, and that’s the power of this movie: it really gets what people want to see in a fun action flick and just delivers. And delivers, and delivers!

Go see it! Hisssssss!

So I went to it, for a fundraising thing that Paul’s company sponsored.

I always found the “ultra” kind of goofily aggrandizing, and I hate it when bars call themselves “lounges”. And all the shiny dollar signs a little too obvious in the kind of patrons it wants to attract. If I have to dress to impress to go out to a bar, for crying out loud– well, it seems like a lot of work.

But it’s nice inside, comfy seating for our rich, fat asses. And while the bling-y accents are kind of clueless (it’s like a teenager’s version of what being a yuppie might be like: hey guys, we have jobs! We can party! Wooo!), downstairs they manage to kind of get it– the Bank is located in the old, unapologetically modernist Imperial Bank building, and so among the leopard print (argh!) there are archival photos of when it was a bank, a restaurant, and a ’50s nightclub.

So I won’t mind going again, even though I might prefer a venue that mentions money less frequently.