That, my friends and neighbours, is what you get when you go off gallivanting for a week and forget to empty your kitchen Green Bin. Generations have lived and died, between my departure and my return; whole tribes are happily ensconced, in all their various territories and villages -- Surlafridge, Trashbinville, Cupboard Heights and Sink Valley. They are clever, and only a few have fallen to my cunning trap, consisting of an old yogourt dish filled with cider vinegar, and covered with plastic wrap pierced with a pencil.
I left on Saturday, and met up with the Creative Genius in his temporary digs in Toronto. I'm either about to be rewarded by the fulfilment of one of my fondest fantasies, or punished by the mutilation of same; I'll find out through personal experience next week. I don't see how the vision of the CG strutting around a stage nattily clad in my grandfather's bespoke morning coat alternating with my vintage silk dressing gown 1 could possibly be altogether painful, theatrically speaking, but there are of course so many other levels of possible agony in the wild world of Sherlockian pastiche (see just for starters, Christopher Lee; also, Laurie R. King; also, Guy Ritchie).
He's grown, at the director's request, a set of rust-coloured sideburns for the role, and when not inside a stiff shirt and starched Mornington collar, looks rather amusingly hipsterish. I brought him an early birthday cake (strawberry cake with cream cheese icing and strawberries on top) and we ate that and ran lines and wandered round the Danforth.
Late on Sunday afternoon, I continued on to Ottawa. There, I first watched a lot of television with my brother, culminating during the wolf hour in, I think, something starring Michael Douglas, and slept for the tattered remains of the night rather sordidly on the couch.
The rest of the week involved Fringing, and an overnight jaunt to Merrickville, and the parents' return from Germany. My Fringe experience encompassed four good-to-fantastic shows, balanced by one that was at least seven different kinds of awful 2, which is pretty good odds, I think.
My friend M. and I had a lovely and productive time in Merrickville. Our trip was intended as a Serious Writing Retreat for Maupin, but of course, we had to wander about. Merrickville is one of those quaint Ontario towns full of beautifully-maintained Victorian homes with cottage gardens, and probably the highest concentration of artists I've ever personally experienced. Seriously, there's an entire street that's almost completely lined with in-home studios. We shopped (mostly without buying anything), ate very good local, organic food, and then got down to an intense creative session, which ended up producing about a dozen quality pages.
Our departure the next day was marred by the mysterious disappearance of my keys, which had last been seen when I removed them from my pocket the night before. We searched the room. We emptied and searched our bags. M. went off to check around the path by the canal where we'd walked after supper the previous evening, and I searched the bags again. I tipped my purse (which is not very large, and which I had previously emptied) upside-down, and they fell out. Most peculiar! Ghosts! Pisgies!
I left on Sunday, so as to be on time for my singing lesson on Monday. (Alas, AC left a message on my cellphone Sunday afternoon -- he was very sorry, he was at the Montreal Jazz Festival, no singing. And no singing next week either, as he is once again away. A shame, as I'm very keen to get started on some new repertoire, hopefully a something or three from Cecilia Bartoli's selection of 18th century Italian songs, to which I listened incessantly (and howled along to) during all this driving.)
I met the CG in Toronto again, and he took me out to a couple of the final events of the Toronto Festival of Clowns. That finished very late, and I stayed over (imposing on yet another temporary host to the CG's nomadic lifestyle). On Monday, we went to see Wall-E, which is everything everyone said it was, including brilliant, moving, fantastically animated, and offensive to fat people.
Low points included a parking ticket (about which I should call the Toronto parking enforcement office, since I had in fact found a helpful policeman the night I got it, and he wrote me an exemption), and a rather crushing revelation about understood agreements that weren't, resulting in something of a current emotional malaise. And the fruitflies, of course. On the other hand, my copy of the 2008 Rhysling Anthology was nestled in my mailbox when I returned.
Now it's back to daily yoga, raw food, and three days of work (one of which is of course already past), and then another week of theatrical overload.
1 My wardrobe chest and I provided a certain amount of enthusiastic costuming, accompanied by cranky commentary and an introduction to collar studs, both of which appeared to amuse their victim. About that dressing gown... it's a man's dressing gown, rather tailored and longer than most, in dark red textured silk with ribbed silk lapels and cuffs. I bought it back in my early twenties, for around sixty dollars (which was a lot for vintage then, and a lot for me at the time) and wore it daily for several years.
When I saw it, hanging there in my wardrobe trunk, I was utterly surprised. "Where'd this come from?" I'd completely forgotten about the thing. It's perfect Sherlock Holmes material, right down to the various little holes and stains from my wear and tear, and the CG looks devastating in it.
2 Which, I see now on visiting the Fringe site again, won an award. I... uh, okay. There's no accounting for taste, I suppose— possibly mine, although word in the Beer Tent was very mixed when I was there.
Recent Comments