Scattered Flurries

And what would a Torontonian’s blog on September be without a lot of Film Festival talk?  Particularly if that Torontonian has generous parents who are Film Festival donors and buy whacks of tickets!

Anyway, these are the movies I saw:

• The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
• Colony
• Good Hair
• Capitalism: A Love Story
• An Afternoon with Chris Rock (not a movie, an actual talk)
• Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
• Samson & Delilah
• Cracks
• Leaves of Grass
• Mr. Nobody

All good flicks, though I thought Capitalism wasn’t Michael Moore’s best, and Samson & Delilah was too bleak for my tastes.  (Both these movies I ended up seeing because friends of my parents canceled, though, so they were even more free!)  I really hope Cracks makes it to theatres; I quite enjoyed it but have not heard a word about it since.  Keep your eyes and ears open, folks!  Oh, and I feel I should issue this warning about Good Hair: it will make you stare at black women’s hair.  I haven’t gotten in trouble yet, and it’s more or less worn off, but for awhile, I was risking some serious tongue-lashing.

September also saw the beginning of rehearsals of Billy Stutter for its Bad Dog Short Play Festival run.  I’ll get more into the play later, but just know that it’s the one I wrote on the boat and the one that will be touring a few Fringes this summer.  The director: Bruce Hunter.  The cast: Logan Brown, Ashley Comeau, Dave Pearce, and Brad Sayeau. The stage manager for the Bad Dog run: Kara Evelyn.  The stage manager for our Fringes: Jennine Profeta.  Learn those names, there will be a test later.  (Well, not really, but they’ll be good to know.)  People who know this group will vouch for the fact that it’s an impressive group, and also an eclectic one.  We make it work.

Oh, and I performed in something called The Hell Show.  Any hopes I had for a life in politics are pretty well dashed.  Or the electorate will grow smart enough to understand satire.  At any rate, I mention it here so I can’t wuss out and deny it later.

And now, pictures of famous people (I tried not to be obnoxious about it, but sometimes, when you’re standing five feet from famous people, the camera just can’t help itself):

Well, with the weather so nice, I should probably polish off the months of August and September, lest I manage to fall another season behind!  (As it is, I’ll still be a fall and winter behind, and I want to be caught up by the time of the Fringe tour!  Luckily, preparations for the tour will probably deprive me of an interesting life between now and then, so that at least bodes well…)

So in addition to New York, August saw a return to the cottage for the Hershfield family.  Mostly good loafing, though I did rediscover tennis and somehow got better at it in my years of not playing it (though perhaps I’m just in better shape?)  And it got us the most adorable picture of Claire ever, and I swear it wasn’t staged:

I have always been a fan of that bottle toy, and now I know why!

And the other fun event of August was the Rogers Cup, which the lovely Marsha Mason was nice enough to take me to.  Marsha watching tennis looks like this:

And tennis watching Marsha looks like this:

Highlights beyond Marsha time include Maria Sharapova in 3-D (by which I mean “there and playing”), an older man in the stands wearing a fisherman’s hat and bicycle gloves casually clipping his nails (I’ll have to review my notes, but the important thing is I actually made a point of taking out a piece of paper and describing this man), and a couple of Grade A douches picking a fight with the entire section.  As I remember it, they were talking during play about ‘some bitch’ who confiscated the beers they were trying to sneak in, some elderly lady in a sunhat shushed them, and the one guy snapped, called her an ‘old bitch’ and made an argument along the lines of “Don’t shush me!  I play tennis, I know the etiquette!”  And then, as people stepped in to defend the old lady, they started lashing out at everyone.  Quite the spectacle.  I don’t remember it verbatim, but I do remember Marsha being quite certain of and amazed by his use of the word ‘etiquette.’  Perhaps more interesting to live through than read about (especially since these guys seemed to take us for allies, what with our comedians’ inclination to register horror and disgust as amusement and all), but let’s not lose track of what’s important: there are Canadian tennis hooligans.

Wow.

And that, as memory serves, was August.