Gruppo Rubato

What is up with all the people from Missouri?

// July 6th, 2007 // Blog, Kris's Soapbox

For two days in a row, I have had my Fringe flyer mojo slightly quashed (or earnestly misdirected) by people who say they don’t want to take a flyer because they’re leaving town.  For the second day in a row, the people who are leaving town are from Missouri.

What is WRONG with Missouri?  Is there something in the air down there that makes them wake up one morning in late June and think “Hey — Independence Day is coming up next week!  Let’s go to Canada and see a Fringe play in Toronto!”  How do tourists from the States who know nothing about Fringe end up sitting in a seat waiting to see a show they’ve never heard of before?  Americans are cool.  Like Ryan Pentecostal Wisconsin Paulson.  He’s cool, even though he walks around with cheese on his head.

I met a few other interesting people while flyering lines last night.  My favorite, by far, was a woman who I jokingly referred to as Sharon Osbourne because she looked rather like the infamous Brit rocker’s wife.  Little did I know that I had been successfully baited.   She was dressing in the hopes of being mistaken for Sharon Osbourne so she could find a way to talk about her experience as a look-alike, her new one-woman show about being a look-alike (called — wait for it — “Look-Alike”) , or her desire to come and join the cast of The Churchill Protocol as Sharon Osbourne, so she could spice up our military conspiracy play by introducing a monologue about the benefits of bikini waxing at about th half-way point.  Just to help bring in the crowds.  I gave her a flyer and moved on.

We finished our tech rehearsal in about two and a half hours yesterday, which is record time.  We owe a huge amount to our Ottawa director and stage manager (the very pregnant Natalie Joy Quesnel), who gave us a prompt book that should be a case study for how to build a stage manager’s prompt book for touring shows.  She forgot nothing, and thought of things that we didn’t even think we needed until 30 minutes into setting cues, when all of a sudden a list of “lighting cues by state” was immensely helpful.  Bless her lil’ pregnant heart.  The techs at Tarragon Extra were singing her praises, and they haven’t even MET her.  To thank her, I think we should bring her on down to help us out with the show… perhaps we could give her a new monologue about the benefits of bikini waxing (while pregnant, of course).