These People Are Coming Your Way And They Are Going To Eat You

These People Are Coming Your Way And They Are Going To Eat You
August 20, 2009

Hey Victoria, this is the province just to your east calling.
Imagine the cast of the Wizard Of Oz in retreat from the Russian Front, then imagine it overrun by the Dawn Of The Dead.
Well, that's all coming your way.
So, barricade your basements or get out fast, or buy a better car and fill the tank. And keep all your best sea-planes on permanent stand-by.
Because it's big, it's the Fringe, it's hurtling your way at a right rate of knots and no-one and no thing can possibly stop it.

This gives you only seven days to lock up your sons, to criminalize caffeine, to restock your bars, to black out your restaurants, to invest in some new and better body armour, to stockpile air freshener, and to go to church and pray, yes pray.

Because the performers are currently camped en masse behind a high mountain range only 24 hours from your gates. For the Fringe is already frung and they are swarming like the Mongol Hordes over the temporary and visibly degenerating madhouse that is Edmonton's Old Strathcona district, they are emptying the bars and they are filling the bars, they are convinced they are continually very funny indeed, they are talking only of themselves, they are living off green onion cakes, they have not slept since July, they no longer know who what and if they are, and they are only remotely capable of actually properly functioning as human beings whilst on stage performing their so-called shows.

Yes, these people have been on the road a while, some of them since May or June, and they are starting to fester, they are starting to go rancid and they are starting to rot. They haven't eaten enough, they haven't slept enough, they are no longer capable of any self-reflection. They are fraying at the edges. They are no longer capable of starting a sentence at the beginning or finishing it at the end. They are experiencing alarming declines in standards of personal morals and hygiene. And they are beginning to resemble a New Romantic version of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse miscast in a remount of Rent.

Have you watched these people eat? It's terrible... So black out your restaurant windows and start filling the sandbags... It's going to be very bad indeed.

...

On the upside, they've been doing their shows a while and they are very together. They have chopped what needed to be chopped, cut what needed to be cut, expanded what needed to be expanded, have found the triple long deep laugh where there was once only the occasional chuckle.

They are rehearsed and versed, they are honed and zoned, they are tuned and toned. They're really rather not bad and they are coming your way.

Actors, comedians, goddam poets, singers, clowns... The whole damn peripatetic circus wagon train heading ever west west west all summmer long whilst plotting and planning their assaults on your doorstep.

So it's going to be lots and lots of varnished and unvarnished fun. It's going to be tiptop quality theatre. It's going to be an event.

So, we have to ask, Victoria ARE YOU UP FOR IT? CAN YOU HANDLE IT? It's going to be very good indeed and it is going to be very very ugly.

Bring it on.

...

And do I have a a sense of impending doom? Yes I do.
For my lunchtime fortune cookie read. "Keep your chin up, time heals everything".
... ?
... !
But everything's fine! Everything's good!
... ?
... !
Its the worst and most alarming fortune cookie I've ever read.
Why keep my chin up? What is going to go so wrong time will eventually heal it?
...?
...!
Oooerr...