Is Anyone Still Reading This...

Hey everyone. Wow, like 3 weeks since I last posted. Not a whole lot to say. Do you ever have one of those days when you feel like none of your plans in life are ever going to come true? Like, for no reason at all you get this flash of... insight, I guess, and you just know that everything you're working for just isn't going to pan out in the end.

If you ever get that, write me and tell me about it. I'm genuinely curious if I'm the only one.

Polar Bears Join the WWF!

Greetings loyal readers. I come before you with a worthy cause. The Earth. I enjoy it. I'd like to see it kick around for a while longer. At least until I die (my kids are on their own). Now I personally am not opposed to a little global warming. I do live in Canada after all. A couple extra degrees here and there might actually bring our winters down to a "chilly", as opposed to "soul-crushing", temperature.

But of course, I'm sure that my gradual climate change plan would have some kind of downside I can't see right now. Probably in Mexico. While our temperature might rise enough to permit wearing only one comfortable jacket in the winter, I imagine people in Latin America would just begin spontaneously combusting. So I guess it behooves us to keep the climate more or less where it is.

Which brings me to my pitch. This April the 29th, I will be participating in the World Wildlife Foundation's annual CN Tower Climb. It's pretty much exactly what it sounds like, and I'll be trying to raise pledges for the WWF to use in their (apparently non-violent) battle agaist global climate change.

Oh, the things I get roped into when I'm surfing the web at work.

So this is where you come in. I want you to be those suckers-I mean, pledges. You can make them on my own personally-customized website here. They say $20 suggested donation, but feel free to donate whatever you like. If not for me, then do it for Roger.


above: Roger, the activist polar bear.

Words Fail Me

I know I e-mailed pretty much everyone I know, but just... just take a look at this.

Nerd Post

Hey everyone, here's a great article on Ain't It Cool News all about this year's comic book awards. If you don't get it right away, you're not gonna get any of it. Nice shout outs in there to Spider-Man/ Human Torch, Franklin Richards: Son of a Genius, Seven Soldiers of Victory, Brian K. Vaughan, and Halifax's own Scott Pilgrim. Well, technically, Toronto's own, but Bryan Lee O’Malley lives and works in the 902 now. So I guess I get to lay claim to him in both cities.

Heh, "Dammit, Schleppy wishes Schleppy could quit you".

Everything Must Go!

So it's been brought to my attention, namely by Lisa Garby, that I haven't updated this blog in... a couple of weeks. There's a reason for that. Namely laziness. Or sloth, if you will. But frankly, I've had a lousy couple of weeks. Things have ranged from jejune to outright craptastical. Having said that, I'm sure that none of you care. Well, that's not true. You're either reading this blog because you're a) my mom, b) a friend of mine, or c) someone who has never met me, and therefore reads this with a kind of awed respect. So it does stand to reason that you would care about what kind of a month I'm having.

In the interest of full disclosure, here is a brief summary: Not getting enough hours at work, hard going looking for a new job, everyone is too busy to hang out, bird flu looms, I wrote a follow up e-mail for an audition and managed to mess up the title of the authour/ director's show, looks like I won't be doing "Lord of the Things" for a while (rotating cast), I'm pretty broke, I ate some expired rice on Thursday, I wrote another e-mail to one of my Bad Dog directors where I mistook him for someone completely different, and I think my new brand of deoderant is giving me a rash.

Oh yeah, and I owe hundreds of dollars in income tax. Almost forgot that one.

Well, there it is. I promise though, that is the last you will hear of my woes. Onto the good news. Theatresports has officially opened! All five teams have finally been announced and named, and here they are for you to peruse:

Everything Must Go! - Ian MacIntyre, James Jeffers, Jim Talyor
RUSH (the Improv Troupe) - Adam Cawley, Brad Sayeau, Tom MacKay
DANG! – Rochelle Wilson, Stefanie Drummond, James Gangl
King Sized Snickers – Merk Wieclawski, Paloma Nunez, Angela Sweeting
The Snit – Becky Bays, Jason Gemmill, Erin Conway

We had our first preview show last night, and boy howdy what a show it was. The first match-up in the rotation was our team, Everything Must Go!, vs RUSH. I'll give you the highlights: the first half of the show was an exhibition round with all 6 players working together...

(Actually, here's something interesting. I was going to write all about the scenes in the show last night, and then I realized that improv scenes are never funny in retrospect. Especially when you're telling people about them. Improv really is the ultimate disposable art form - with a play at least it can be remounted. But with improv it only exists for an instant, and you move on).

So I'll sum it all up by saying we won.

I will say though that this was the most satisfying, fun, and energetic improv I've done in months. Hopefully this show sets the tone for the next few months worth of shows to come. Speaking of, I'm doing another show at the Bad Dog, news of that to come...

Happy Lisa?