Fringe Journal 2004, Part II

Saturday's shows were pretty good, I guess. First show we had on the Journal Stage, which is my favourite stage, due to the layout and sheer size of the seating room.

You know, it's like a real stage, as opposed to the whole "In the Round" style they've got going at the TransAlta Stage. Most of our shows have been here so far.

Nothing huge to say about Saturday's shows, since I was still pretty tired and nothing horrible happened.

Two solid shows, I guess.

Apparently "Tribute" is turning into one of the crowd's favourite songs. We start by introducing it by way of saying that Dev and I like taking road trips all the time, but we never have a car to do it.

Once we get into the song itself, in the first bar, people recognize the guitar riff and start cheering. Not the entire audience (since it's mostly geared to the young teens/adults when Tenacious D does it), but a vocal minority.

Dan from The Dan Show came up to us after a day set and asked "Where's Tribute? I hear you do a great version."

So we told him to come down to the evening show. He came and bought a T-shirt afterwards. It's cool when we get along well with other Fringe acts.

I started salvo one against Hoja yesterday. It was kind of weak, since when I attacked them last time, the other guys freaked. I'm sorry if I said the truth that time.

But this one was attacking them because they were from Saskatchewan. Canton said, "Jago, YOU'RE from Saskatchewan!"

"Yeah, but I'm from Moose Jaw. Mu-uh!"

Oh, another thing that happened was I almost turned the audience against us again (ALMOST! I held back!) by saying after a song, "No that's cool. We can go across the street and count our-[Brain: For the love of God! Whatever you do, don't say "count our money."]- t-shirts."

At which point Dev breathes a sigh of relief, since he also was thinking I'd be so dastardly as to imply "Kow's a bunch of greedy misers who count the money you give them after the show."

I mean, it's true, but I don't want to give that impression to people who are watching us.

Canton and I, last night, went to see Breaking Face by Morgan Smith and Ryan Hughes.

It was a good play, although it wasn't as well done as Cheerleader! was done two years back. Similar script, but better the first time around.

It dealt with a group of friends who lived on Whyte during the period between 2001's Canada Day riots and 2003's Albert's fire.

Not as much character development as I would have liked, just mostly dealing with situations. Also, the stage it was set on was really wrong for it, as we were looking down on the set, instead of having the set right in front of us, like Morgan's previous plays have been. It was like we were distanced from the play by, well, the distance to the stage.

Still, otherwise, a good play.

Before seeing it, I ran into Sarah and Senor Burns. This was the conversation we had:

Sarah: We saw Beth's play today. Real Time.

Me: Oh, yeah. I'm going to go see it later on in the week. I hear it's pretty good.

Sarah: It's great. You should go see it.

Me: Yeah. I will be seeing it. Later on in the week.

Sarah: It's great. You should go see it.

Me: Okay. Tell you what. If I see Matt Alden around, I will make sure to force him to reenact the play right then and there. Because it's not on until Tuesday, right?

Senor Burns starts laughing at that point.

Of course, I see Matt later on, and demand that he do the play for me right then and there. He was a little confused, until I explained the story to him.

* * *

Today, I tried to sleep in, but I had accidentally taken the store keys home with me after Friday's shift. So I had to bring them back for Darryl to open the store.

At 10 a.m.

On a Sunday.

Which means I had to wake up at 8:45 a.m. on Sunday morning so I could catch the 9:15 bus to get to the Mall.

But, I was one minute late. And had to wait a half hour for the next bus to WEM.

I got there at 10:30, had some breakfast in the casino, bussed back, getting home at about 12:15 p.m. And promptly went back to sleep.

The show we had this afternoon was one of our tightest yet. Morgan said it was one of the best Kow performances she's seen, so apparently, we had the crowd for the most part.

In fact, we broke a Kow record for most money made in one show. $460 bucks. At the small stage. Granted, it was a Sunday afternoon, but we were firing on almost all cylinders.

I had no clue what to say during the Spider-Man song. I know, I usually just ramble on about something anyways, but today I actually rambled on about how I had nothing to say and made it longer than a speech where I DO have a plan.

Also, Stan forgot a verse in Mighty Mouse, and just sang about how he forgot how the song went. Man, the crowd had a fun time along with us, though. Which is all that mattered.

It was the kickass tech in the booth, Jamie, today. So we sounded good, and we could, for the most part, hear ourselves.

At the end of our set, when we were letting the audience decided which song they wanted to hear (Faith or Sweet Dreams), the audience started shouting, "Do both of them!"

I said, "I dunno, That's kind of up to our sound guy, Jamie. What do you say, Jamie? Can we sing both songs?"

Jamie held up one finger.

"One song? Okay, then."

The audience boos.

Me: "Hey, don't look at me. It's Jamie who has the final say on this. Blame him."

At which point the audience turned on poor Jamie, while I was almost busting a gut laughing.

Kow as a whole decided to go out to dinner afterwards, to keep us as a tight unit instead of splintering off into different factions like we did last year. ("No, I'll see you guys later. I'm resenting you so much I've got to get away from you for a while." became the subtext of last year midway through the Fringe. We needed our space at that point.)

So we went out to the New Asian Village. It was the first time I went to an Indian restaurant, and it was buffet time. If the other guys wanted to go, I was willing to try something new for unity's sake.

New Asian Village has the biggest selection of beer I have ever seen! They've got three coolers full of different brands of beer. I started off with a Granville Island Maple Ale, and finished up the meal with a Maudite, a Quebequois beer that tastes of mint. Oh, the boys were in heaven tonight.

The food was good. I wasn't blown away with it, in terms of it didn't give me a conversion experience, but it was definitely a good meal. I'm a pretty picky eater, and I found plenty of food I could handle.

But, yeah. The Fringe has certainly been worth it thus far. Especially since it's only three days in...