I remember feeling wistful after Folkfest this year too, that writing up the end of the weekend was like saying that now it was over and I needed to get to work.

Anyway, on the last day of Folkfest my plan to rendezvous with a perfomer to get another copy of last year’s CD turned into seeing four shows and being there right til the end. This meant that I’ve seen 31 performances.

The weather was good, shortsleeves weather but not too hot. I went to the main festival site to pick up my tickets, then back to Wunderbar to see Joel’s show again. But I was actually super early so I sat outside the A&W in the shade, talking to a family member on the phone and eating mini doughnuts. Then I got inside and had another great conversation with Craig the bartender (owner?) about ales. He says I need to check out Keg and Cork. I also talked to the merch guy (whom I’d met at some other shows) about intellectual property etc.

Divide – I actually liked Joel’s show even better the second time through, understanding the pacing and looking for how it flowed together.

Improv-a-palooza – this was another improv show at the Varscona Hotel. Jim Libby whom I’d seen in another show, Wes Borg from the Three Dead Trolls, and some other local improv guys built up an improbable ridiculous story involving Freud, a mother kidnapped in Mexico, a long-lost brother, a father who was an unsuccessful salesman, and some spontaneous musical numbers, by playing a board game to get premises for their story.

However, because of the unpredictable nature of improv combined with trying to finish the game, I got out of there 6 minutes late, giving me only 9 minutes to get by bike from the Varscona to Phabric (which is on 80 Avenue at about 101 St (down from the A&W.) I rode on Whyte Avenue and ran a turning light and boy when I read about the cyclist fatality this afternoon it hit even closer to home than usual. Anyway, I made it in time.

Apocalypse: a Period Piece – a charming original two-man show, both funny and poignant, with Chris Craddock and another guy being little boys in the cold-war era but also being various characters that the little boys pretended to be: their dad, Elvis, JFK, etc. It is held over and I recommend it and might be convinced to see it again.

Then I had a bit of time to spare before my last show. I paid one last visit to the beer tent, watched the festival grounds empty out some, watched artists give one last handbill-pitch, and ate a taco in a bag (taco makings added to a bag of Doritos).

A Wake – the venue of this show was the Southside Memorial Chapel, the funeral home just across the street from the gazebo park. The show itself was okay to well done, musings on death, grief, death ritual, and life, in dance and music and poetic fragments and a few dialogues. But the use of the space and the participation of the funeral home’s owners were just fabulous. I have written to the owners to thank them. I have not lived in Edmonton long enough to attend any funerals or visitations yet, but if it were up to me someday I would definitely do business with these people. After the scripted performance, they invited the audience to see an installation in one of the visitation rooms, and/or to come have refreshments in their reception room and talk to the performers and the owners, and having that kind of grounding and aftercare was probably valuable for a lot of the audience.

It was still daylight. My bike was still there. The vendors were taking down their booths. I rode my bike home and spent the rest of the evening chatting on line about the experience.

Yesterday a couple of friends from Calgary were in town, so we made a plan to meet for lunch and then figure out what to see at the Fringe. We had early lunch at Maki Maki (I convinced them that for the authentic try-anything Edmonton experience they needed an erotic roll). Then we got out the program and the Fest Finder app and the ticket-buying website, and I suddenly realised (and said) that trying to find one play to show people how cool Edmonton Fringe was, was harder than trying to pick a movie together on a date with someone you didn’t know very well yet. Fortunately, they didn’t have to rush right back to the family they were visiting, so we did the Fringe my way. That is, we wandered Whyte Avenue, comparison-tasted cupcakes from fuss and from the Fringe vendor (I still think fuss is the best, although the Fringe vendor had some creative icing flavours such as brightly coloured bubble gum), watched a juggler, organized our routes to use the nice indoor bathrooms in the Arts Barn at every opportunity, ate frozen chocolate bananas, and went to five plays.

After that, I wanted to stay around to go to the midnight cabaret show, and we had a couple of hours in between, so we had supper and nice decaf coffee at Famoso. So we said goodbye just before midnight and I got in line for the cabaret show where I was supposed to meet one of the performers to pick up a CD he was burning for me, but unfortunately the show was very very sold out. The first time I’d tried to buy a ticket at the door and it didn’t work! Ah well. While I was hanging around outside seeing whether tweeting the piano player would pull any strings (it didn’t), I also had a nice conversation with the artist of Charlie: a hockey story and told him my family’s version of some of the stories.

So I collected my bike where I had stashed it in the morning, and went home. I am not sure if I’ll go to any performances today, or whether I’ll get on with recovery and life.

Also, at one of the plays we met up with my actor friend (by design) and saved seats for him and his friends and he and I caught up a bit more on what we’d each seen since we last saw each other. So that was fun too.

The five plays:

The Lesson – the Ionesco play. Classic Theatre of the Absurd works well at the Fringe.

Scratch: The Revengeance – this two-person, many-character original comedy by local artists was hilarious. I’ve never seen any sketch-type comedy where things didn’t drag at all between jokes; it just zipped right along being funny on funny, and incidentally occasionally obscene.

Cockwhisperer – a one-woman show, mostly telling various stories related to her sexual history. It was interesting that she grew up in Hamilton and was about my age. And some of it was funny or moving. But the whole thing was a bit disappointing to me because it could have been a lot more sex-positive, especially given the title and writeup.

Fatboy – this was funny in a very weird way. All the characters were in whiteface makeup and were sort of exaggerated archetypes. We were trying to figure out what genre it reminded us of, and I thought it was like the pantomime, what with the judge and the yelling couple and so on. One of my companions said, only with a lot more bad language and violence. We then looked up the description and it said that it was reminiscent of a Punch and Judy show and of Ubu Roi, “an 1896 precursor of theatre of the absurd”. Random, and I mostly liked it.

Rocket Sugar Factory Improv – We went to an improv show because I hadn’t been to one yet this year. This one mostly went on a theme of “today in history”, they’d get people to call out a year, then they’d look up what events happened on that day’s date that year and act it out. The events included Galileo Galilei demonstrating his telescope, the first version of Linux, and Pulcheria becoming empress of the Byzantine Empire.

The festival ends today. I don’t know if I’ll go … but I still want to meet up with Joel to get that cd, so hmm.