high wonders

...
the first time i did winnipeg was 2003

two years before i'd done just toronto

where i met keir cutler and a few others
...

and as toronto ended i had this sense of something big brewing in the west
out on those prairies which filled alot of the map and which i knew next to nothing about
...

and where i had no idea what it was that was so good out there
apart from a sense it was bigger than what i'd just been through

...

which in itself was amazing

me in toronto in 2001

just after i moved to scotland

my first proper hour show

to audiences mad for it

who'd never seen anything like it

and i'd get like 5 curtain calls a night

and a dazed amazement from the audience

...

and half way through my first show
[where i'd foolishly let the technicians sort me a bunch of lighting cues
all of which i missed]
i had this glorious epiphany
this life-changing rush
that i should have been doing this years ago
that the hour show was the only way to go
that today was being ok to good but tomorrow
i would do it so so much better

...

and yes
tomorrow was just plain fabulous
and my first canadian fringe experience was having these long and wildly intense hours belting through the english language faster than anyone had ever seen
where each day i threw a poem out of the show and it never got any shorter
and i had barely any pattery banter between poems
i simply drew back the elastic band to its tightest possible point and then
let fly again
at them
at them
at them

o happy day
its not like i sold out
or made a bunch of cash
i did just OK in terms of numbers
but the experience was mind-blowing for me
and life was never the same again
...

so, at the end of that fest i had this inkling of something even more marvelous brewing in the west
that i wasn't going to

...

and two years later i got there

i did toronto again

which went great and then i very stupidly got on a bus to winnipeg

which is 36 horrible hours living out of A'n'W
with a busload of Hutterites who seemed to have never seen the outside world before and where the only book i had was the Holy Sinner by Thomas Mann [great novel] which definitely got the homespun Hutterites curious

and i finally staggered rickety off the bus into a fringe site where i had no billet and was rather hopelessly confused and stayed in a hostel and then got billeted and all the water tasted of sulphur and the festival started and

whooooo ...
...

i accelerated on the high down slope of the rollercoaster
my audiences were crazy for it
i had a fabulous hour each time
and the numbers went 70
90
sellout 100
sellout
sellout
sellout
etc

with a five star review every day for four days and utterly electrified audiences

who, well, i'm not sure they
understood anything i was
double-dixie-ten-time saying
but they did look
wildly affected by the blast of words
the force of it
the rush of ideas
...

o happy day