We Are TJ Dawe

This is not Peter Strand Rumpel eating poutine. We are TJ Dawe...

Let me explain. So a few days ago we run into TJ on the road - literally, cause it's in the middle of a street festival, so everyone's in the road. He says, "Hey what are you guys doing Monday night?" and we say, "Whaaaat did you have in mind?"

Turns out he has a corporate gig in the Virgin Islands on Monday night, but he ALSO has a fringe show: his latest one man show, Maxim & Cosmo, which is a very funny very erudite and personal look at the differences between men and women. Fair enough. So the deal is, he has to somehow cover his show HERE while he is performing THERE (in the Virgin Islands).

So he's gathered about 16 fringe artists (including us) together who will read his show out loud on Monday night (last night).

We got our pages a day or so later - each of us had 2 sections of about 3 pages each, and we'd seen the show (and loved it) and those who hadn't seen TJ before were heartened that all we had to do was sit on a stool and speak really really fast. It's a pretty dense show to pack into 90 minutes. At any rate, on Monday we practiced our lines by reading them over once and then spending the afternoon in Old Montreal. We later went to a Tim Horton's to late-minute-panic, and saw a man leaving Tim's with a manilla envelope just like the ones we were carrying. "Stop!" we shouted. We waved frantically. The man stopped, saw our envelopes, and came running in. Turns out he's in the show too. Paul is doing a one man show called On Second Thought and is also nervous about this whole "I am TJ Dawe" venture. We compare notes, we all relax and have a good laugh.

The evening itself was a blast. We knew a few of the people, and then met the rest there. It was a fun and exciting fly by the seat of your pants evening. Keir Cutler (Teaching Shakespeare) was our maestro and gave each person a signal when it was their turn to shadow the current reader and leap in at the appropriate moment. I have to admit that having hardly planned it at all, it worked out pretty darn good. It would have been worth doing even if it HADN'T been an emergency. That's the spirit of the fringe, after all. Just Make It Work. And sometimes, sometimes it's really really cool.

Thanks to TJ and all the great folks we got to play with.