Totem Figures

Caution: Copyright TJ Dawe. This script is protected under the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the Copyright Union. Changes to the script are forbidden without the written consent of the author. Rights to produce, film or record in any medium, in any language, by any group, are retained by the author. The moral right of the author has been asserted. For performance rights, contact the author TJ Dawe, #5–1555 E. 5^th. Ave., Vancouver, BC, V5N 1L6.

Totem Figures, written, directed, and performed by TJ Dawe, premiered April 29, 2008 at the Havana Theatre in Vancouver, BC. It premiered as a Fringe show at the Orlando Fringe on May 15, 2008 and has since played at fringes in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Victoria, Vancouver, and Edmonton.

Inspired by his experiences performing the play and speaking with audience members afterwards, Dawe recently launched a website (http://www.totemfigures.com), which features twenty-five-minute podcasts with prominent Canadian writers and performers including Bill Henderson, Jay Brazeau, and W.P. Kinsella. In these podcasts, the interviewees discuss their "totem figures," which range from Ray Bradbury, Robert Altman, and Edward Albee, to Luigi Pirandello, Elvis, and the Beatles. Website visitors can also view short video clips of these "figures" in performance or interview settings. In the future, Dawe hopes to use some of the material gathered on the website as the inspiration for a book on totem figures.

Bare stage. Apart from a chair. Or a small stool. And a mic on amic stand. Pointed towards the chair.

For preshow: TJ sits on the chair (or small stool) upstage,fingerpicking an acoustic guitar, pointed towrads the mic on thestand.

At the appropriate time the lights dim

He puts the guitar away

A general wash illuminates the stage

He picks up the microphone

And speaks…

Fifth Business is Robertson Davies' best known bookit's a novelit's the first book of his I ever readthe main character is a hagiographer – an expert on saintsand he isn't Catholiche's interested in saints entirely from his own inclinationsand he's really interested in saints, lemme tellyahe travels to Europe to research themhe writes books about themhe's a boarding school history teacher, and a war heroand he talks to his students about historyand heroesand saintsand mythsand folkloreand about how patterns in mythology appear in regularpeople's liveswhether they're aware of them or notwhether they mean them to or noteven if they reject the idea

"Totem Figures" is a term I use to describe the icons ofsomeone's personal mythologythe word "totem" is borrowed from First Nations culturein BC and the Pacific Northwest aboriginals carved andpainted and erected totem poleswhich told the story of a given native bandor familyor individualthrough symbolsmostly animal facesI grew up in Vancouverthere are totem poles in parks and museums therewe studied aboriginal culture in school

I didn't work out any of this beforehand when I came up withthe termthat's just what popped into my head to describe the ideaI'll get to that later in the showbut the unconscious choice of the word "totem" is an indicationof the fact that growing up where I did left an imprintit's part of the story of my lifeit's part of my personal mythology

this is a show about personal mythologyabout the idea that we're all the main character in our ownlife storyspinning out our own epic adventures, our own mythologywith everything we do and every choice we makewe tend to think of epic adventures and mythology as thingsthat happen to other people:larger than life fictional characters from other countries fromthousands of years agobut I contend – and this isn't just my idea – that the reasonmythology speaks to people –and by mythology, I'm talking about any story told by anyoneat any time, as long as it speaks to peopleit could be the Epic of Gilgameshbut it could just as easily be Iron Manor the Golden Compassor the Golden Girlsor a story your aunt told you about the time she almost gotmarried but didn'tas long these stories speak to youand the reason they speak to people is because they are ananalogy for lifefor the things people go throughfor the epic adventure each of us is on between birth and deathso I consider everyone in this room – everyone on the planet– to be an epic adventurerin our own more modest, metaphorical wayeven if we aren't literally fighting dragonsor traveling through spaceor going into the bellies of actual whales and dying and beingrebornon a metaphorical level we do all of these things all the timeespecially when we take a step into the unknown

so if you were to look at your life as an epic adventureas a grand mythif you had your own totem poleif you had your own personal Mt. Rushmoreyour own Sgt. Pepper's album coverthat told the story of who you areand what you've doneand who and what has influenced youwho would be on it?what would be on it?could be anyonecould be anythingdepends entirely on you

could be a family membercould be a political figureor a writeror an athleteor a friendcould be a character in a novelor a superheroor a placeor a nationalitycould be an occupationor an objector an animalor an activityor an organizationor a wordyou name it, you decideTotem Figures

Totem Mythsare stories we keep coming back to for a good chunk of ourlivesagain – could be anythingcould be a religiousstorycould be a fairy talecould be a folk taleor a movieor a novelor a comic stripor a cartoonyou name ityou decideTotem Myths

Totem Figures, Totem Myths

anyone can adjust these definitions as they see fitanyone can rename these terms as they choosebecause everyone's mythology is their own

now, the thing about Totem Figures and Totem Myths isthey aren't just people and places and ideas and stories we likeI mean, they arebut at least potentially, they're also more than thatthey're a portrait of youthey can tell you a lot about yourselfwhat you valuewhat you aspire tothey can give you strengththey can give you that spark of hope right when you need itthe mostand most importantlythey can point you in the direction you should go when you'restanding at a crossroadswhich is where I'm sort of at

Hiwelcome to the showthanks for comingI'm TJ Daweas I mentioned, I'm from Vancouver, BCI'm 33 years oldand for the last ten years I've toured the Canadian Fringetheatre circuit – which, in case you don't know, is a sequenceof ten, eleven, twelve day theatre festivals very deliberatelyarranged in an orderly sequence east to west across Canadastarting in Montreal in June moving west, a new city every twoweeks – Ottawa, Toronto, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Edmonton,Victoria – until you get to Vancouver in Septemberif you want to start a little earlier, there's one in Orlando,Florida in Mayand I do that one tooanyone can apply to these festivals – as many or as few of themas they chooseanyone can be accepted, no experience is necessaryselection is by lottery or first come first serveand there are between fifty and a hundred and fifty applicantsaccepted in a given festival, depends on the festival

I've done 83 fringe festivals so farthe fringe circuit's the hub of my yearI tour pretty much every summeralmost always with a new autobiographical monologueand every tour I've done has built on every previous tourbecause fringe audiences are smartthey talk to each otherthey remember shitand every tour since 2000 I've found myself involved inmultiple shows on the toureither as director, co-writer, dramaturge or collaborator ofsome kind

I've done some theatre work outside the fringebut not muchand most of it has been somehow related to something I havedone or something I will do on the fringe

I'm absolutely aware of how fortunate I am to lead the life I dopeople know me when I walk around a fringeand stop me to say helloor to give me their take on something I said in my showwhich is especially flattering, to think that something I saidstayed with someone outside of the 90 minutes they spentwith me in a darkened room

to answer a question I sometimes get – yes, I actually make aliving doing pretty much nothing but fringe festivalsmind you...I'm of no fixed addressall my stuff's in storageI have no carno assetsno debtsno petsno dependentsI dress like a slobI read used booksI don't drink or smokeand I don't like going out

Another question I'll sometimes get isso what are you gonna do nowI mean, all these little skits you do on the fringe are fine anddandybut you're not gonna tour the fringe the rest of your life, areya?What are you really gonna do

and my general response to that isfuck you!!don't you think I put my heart and soul into these shows asit is?don't you think they take everything I've got?and what's wrong with what I'm doing in the first place?and who the hell are you??mind your own goddamn business!!

I usually phrase it a little differently than thatit's more likewell, y'know, I've got some ideas I've been kicking aroundfor a movieor for a full length playor a novelor, y'know what? I came up with this idea for a radio show awhile agothat I'm really hoping to get around to doing some seriouswork on sometime soon

Luke Skywalker's an orphan

I don't do segues, by the way

and him being an orphan makes him an instant outsider as faras I'm concerned

there are a lot of orphans in popular mythology, if you thinkabout it

there's Little Orphan Annie – obviouslyDorothy from The Wizard of OzSleeping BeautyCinderellaSnow WhiteHarry Potter – and VoldemortFrodo BagginsSpidermanSupermanBatman – and RobinAnne of Green GablesTom SawyerPollyannaTarzanSimba, from The Lion KingAladdinTony and Tia, from Escape to Witch MountainPunky BrewsterWebsterArnold and Willis from Diff'rent StrokesOliver TwistMosesOedipus the King

That's a pretty long listif you think about how many people out there actually areorphanswhat's the deal with that?they're not making these for the orphan market

how many of us have always felt like an orphanhow many of us have fantasizedwe were an orphanhow many of us have always felt like the outsider

now, I never played any kind of Dungeons & Dragons role playinggames growing upI wanted toI just didn't know anyone who had the stuffthere's a lot of stuff if you want to play those gamesthere's boardsand booksand figurinesand dice with four sidesand dice with twelve sidesdice with twenty sideseven dice with six sidesand you need at least three or four peopleand you need timea single game could take weeks, or even months to playthere's a lot of organization if you want to play those games

I did what I couldwhen I was ten or eleven I'd take a piece of notepaperand draw a map on it, of a castle or a mazeand I'd put something in each room:a monster or a trap or a clue or a weaponand I'd come up with a story for the thingwho the hero waswho the villain waswhat the mission wasand I'd guide my friends through it, one at a time, in theschoolyard, at recess

when I was 18 I left home and went to universitylived in rez my first yearand some of the guys in my building were into those exact roleplaying gameslike, the real onesthey started one upand they asked if I wanted to be involvedhell, yes!here was my chanceit was a fifty years into the future game titled Shadowrun

so step one: create your characteryou could be any kind of character you wantedthere was a guidebook specifically devoted to describing allthe various kinds of characters, with pictures and attributesfor each oneit helped if you kept the rest of the group in mindthere were three other guysone was the GM – the game master – you have to have one ofthose – that's the storyteller, the referee, the God of the gameone guy was a decker – which is a futuristic hacker – and youhad to have one of those in this game, 'cuz it's the futureand the third guy was a street samurai – which is your basicbig musclebound all purpose ass kickin' tough guy – a warriorand after careful consideration I made my character a streetshaman – a magicianand part of being a street shaman is you have a totem animaland the book gave you a list of animals you could choose fromwith pictures and attributes for each oneand I settled on raccoonwhose clever hands can draw the bait out of any trapthose were the book's actual wordssounded good to me

we played whenever we couldtwo, three times a weekwe had a good timesoon other people in the building heard about itasked if they could joinwe always said yesthey'd create a characterjoin the gameand before long there were too many of us trying to play atonceand the whole thing collapsedand we never started it up againbut something I noticed even thenwas that every single guy who joined the gamewould make his character a street samuraiand he'd make him as bigand as buffed upand as loaded with machine gunsand futuristic weaponsand bio-enhancements as he possibly could

and it wasn't too much of a stretch to realizethat these characterswere usthis is who we wanted to bewe'd taken our ideal versions of ourselvesand projected them onto a fantasy landscape

and out of everyone thereI was the only one who'd chosen to be a magiciansomeone who puts words togetherin order to bend reality

and my totemwas the thief

Jesus Christ.

Sketch by TJ Dawe

The story of Jesus is a story of death and rebirthJesus surrendered – this story's in the gospels – so frightenedabout what he'd have to go through that he prayed in thegarden of Gethsemane for the cup of suffering to be takenfrom himbasically saying "God, don't make me go through with this"and he was so scared he burst a blood vessel in his foreheadbut he went through with itand on the cross he cried out "My God, my God, why have youforsaken me"those were his last wordshe diedwas buriedand rose again

now, whether that actually happened or notwhether that happened like that or notthat's the story I grew up having told to me week after weekor in some cases – day after dayfor some pretty critical years of my developmentthat's the story the entire Christian religion hinges onthe crucifix suggests that storyand the crucifix is the symbol of all Christianity

knowing what you have to dosurrendering to itin spite of the fearin spite of the brutal, inevitable, agonizing deathdoing it anywaydying to itand being reborn

Robertson Davies was one of those writers I hadn't read muchof, but kind of figured I shouldI'd read Fifth Business when I was 24 and really liked itand I'd read three of his other books over the next five yearsand I really liked themand he's a pretty significant writer – at least in Canadahe's probably got a place on the Mt. Rushmore of CanadianLiteratureor at least on the Sgt. Pepper's album cover of CanadianLiteratureand something inside me whispered that it would be in mybest interest to see what he had to say

so one month I picked up and read his novel The Rebel Angelsand then the next month I got What's Bred in the Boneand then the next month The Lyre of Orpheusand the next month Murther and Walking Spiritsone a month for four months straightdidn't mean to do thatI was traveling at the time, just picking up what I could to readbut once I noticed that pattern, I thoughtthat's interestingone a monthnot too demanding a schedulewhy not keep it up?he's got a finite number of books

so I didkept reading him, one a monthand I read the Salterton Trilogyand The Cunning Man, which he wrote in his eightiesand A Voice from the Attic – this non-fiction book about literatureand readingthree books of columns from his newspaper alter-ego, SamuelMarchbanks from the forties and fifties when he was ran anewspaper in Peterborough, Ontariobook of journalismbook of ghost storiesbook of playsthree books chronicling the first three seasons of the StratfordShakespeare Festival – the Canadian one – which he had ahand in foundingbooks of essayslecturesarticleslettersinterviewsone a monthtook about a year and a half

and with everything I read, the other books were fresh enoughin my memory for me to notice patternshere's the thing: if you go through any artist's body of work,you can't help but notice patternsin any non random system, there are patternsthat's the definition of non-random

and then I read a biography of hima six hundred plus page,ten years in the making,researchedannotatedfootnoted like crazydefinitive biographywith pictures in the middletitled Man of Myth

and then I started rereading himone a month

when my parents were first married they had a record playerand a record collection before they even had a bedthey slept on a mattress on the floor and listened to obscurefolk musicthey named me after an obscure folk musician

Jean Carignan was a Montreal fiddler who championedQuebec fiddle musica lot like Michel Tremblay did as a playwright with Quebecspeechbefore Michel Tremblay, Francophone Quebec playwrightswrote in proper, dignified Parisian French and nothing elseTremblay came along and wrote the way Quebecers actuallyspeak Frenchit was revolutionaryhe's still alive, still writing, still a cultural hero in QuebecCarignan did the same thing with Quebec fiddle musiche played and recorded the music that came out of Quebeche saidthis is our musicthis came out of our livesthis deserves to be played and recorded and celebrated

he drove a taxi by daywhich he ownedand played music at nighthe did his own thinghis own way

some of his fans called him "Ti-Jean" Carignan"Ti" being short for "petit"meaning "little"Little JohnJohnny, basicallyit's a common nickname prefix in Quebec, especially for boysa lot of boys go through a few years of being Ti-Jacques orTi-Paulbut no one's real name, like on their birth certificate, is TiJean, or Ti-anythingthe way no one's real name in English Canada is Billy or Bobbior Jennyexcept mebut it's anglicizedbecause my parents aren't Frenchand don't speak a word of Frenchso it isn't the French "Jean" – J-e-a-nand it isn't even quite the English "John" – J-o-h-nmy name, on my birth certificate and driver's license andpassport is correctly spelledT-i-hyphen-J-o-nendlessly mispronounced in English Canada and in the Statesat the dentist's office they usually call out for "Tie-John"so I just go by TJso my nameis a deliberately misspelled obscure nicknamefrom a culture I didn't grow up inand have no genetic relation towhich even my own parents can't pronounce correctlyit's sort of like a Japanese couplein Japanwho speak no English and have never been to the USnaming their son "Larry"because they're fans of Curb Your Enthusiasmand spelling it L-a-r-r-r-ithe upside to growing up with a weird-ass namewhich I didn't appreciate at the timeis that it's this constant subtle reminder that you're on yourown path

my middle name is David – spelled the normal wayI'm named for a basketball playerDave Cowens was a centre for the Boston Celtics in theseventiesnot the tallest playeror the flashiestbut he lead the team to two NBA championshipshe took two months off from one season cuz he was burnedoutand drove a taxihe'd pick up fares and people would say to him"aren't you that guy from the Celtics??"and he'd say "Naw. I get that all the time. I just look like him."He lived in a modest apartment in downtown Boston,even though he could have afforded something much biggerand much betterhe did his own thinghis own wayand then he did something very unusual for a professionalathlete:he retired early, because the game wasn't fun anymoreNow he's a coach

David's also a figure in the Old Testamentthe shepherd boy who slew the giant with nothing but a slingand a stonethe underdog who went on to become kingalso an artista songwriterand the ancestor of Jesus

my last name – Dawe – D-a-w-ethere's no S at the endpeople often put an S at the end and I've never understoodwhyeven journalists do that sometimesthe name is of entirely uncertain originit's common in Newfoundland, where my dad's fromand The Book of Newfoundland Names postulates that it might bederived from the bird "jackdaw"which is a thieving birdone or more of my ancestors might have been thieves

my sister and I once found our parents' "Name Your Baby"bookand there were two names circled as a possibilities for meone was was Lach – L-a-c-h – Scottish for "lake"I have no Scottish background eitherand the other was Joshuaa form of Jesus

in What's Bred in the Bone by Robertson Daviesanother novelthe main character's a painterand at one point, about halfway through the book, he'sstudying under a masterand he gets an assignment to paint a fresco in the classical styleof certain dimensionson any mythological subject of his choiceand he chooses the Marriage at Canawhich is the story in the gospels where Jesus turns water intowine

and he paints the sceneof certain dimensionsin the classical stylebut he gives the people in the scene faces of people from hisown lifethey're still who they are in the storythey're still Jesus and Mary and the bride and the bridegroomand everyone elsebut with the clothes they're wearingand the expressions on their facesand an object one of them's holdingand who they actually are in the painter's life, which the peoplein the novel don't know about, but I did, because I'd read thenovel and they hadn'tit simultaneously tells the story of the Marriage at Cana andthe story of the painter's life up to that point

he casts his own life story onto a mythological subject

Bilbo Baggins.

Sketch by TJ Dawe

in The Hobbitwhen Bilbo finally confronts the dragonhe's wearing the ring, so he's invisiblethe dragon can't see him but he can smell himhe engages him in dialogueand asks him who he iscuz the dragon speaks perfect English...and Bilbo answers with a series of abstract titlesthat describe everything he's been through in the novel up tothat point

and this is the appropriate way to talk to dragons, it says in thenarrationyou don't want to let him know where you live, for instancebut it's more than thatit's Bilbo's storyit's who he iswhere he comes fromand all of the experiences that have turned him into who is atthat momentit's his own personal mythology

dreams are personal mythsevery night your unconscious mind takes whatever's happeningin your conscious lifescrambles it upand projects it onto a cryptic mythical landscapeand it's up to you to decipher the meanings

okay, how's this for a mythic patternJesus symbolism in my life...

my mom was a nunshe really wasboth of my parents were in the church when they metmy mom was a nun, my dad was not a priest – he was aChristian brotherboth of them left home to join the churchmy mom grew up in Iowamy dad grew up in Newfoundlandmy mom left home at nineteenmy dad at seventeenthey left home to devote their lives to Godthe church paid for their college educationsfor my mom: Des Moinesfor my dad: New Yorkthey became teachersand taught for the next decade, where they were sentfor my mom: Montanafor my dad: Victoria and Vancouverthey met at Seattle Universitygetting their masters' degrees in religious education over thecourse of three summersover the course of those three summers they fell in loveat the end of those three summers they left holy orders – withpermissionthey moved to Toronto, got married and started having kidsI was born and raised in Vancouver, mostly in the suburbswell, I was entirely born in Vancouver, but mostly raised inthe suburbsand we spent a few of my earliest years in Whitehorse

now this might sound like a pretty unusual thing for them tohave doneand it isn't common, but it happensyou can leave with permission and still be a good CatholicI've met other ex-nuns and ex-brothers who've done the samething

but then for me to be born of a nungranted, an ex-nun, but still – a nundoes carry some interesting virgin birth symbolismand my mom's name is, of all things – any guesses?Marythat's right! Howdid you know?and it gets better

and I swear to God I'm not making any of this upnot one detail in this show is made upand I've never made that claim with any of my previous shows

she isn't just Mary, she's Mary Joshort for Josephinethat's her middle namebut as a kid, as a nun, now – she's always gone by Mary Joso she's both Mary and Joseph!What the hell kind of bombastic symbolism is that?If you were reading that in a novel, you'd put that novel downno editor would let a writer get away with konk-the-audience-over-the-head symbolism like that in the first placebut it wasn't done consciouslymy mom didn't realize it till I pointed it out to herand I didn't realize it till someone else pointed it out to methree years ago!

It gets better

my dad's name is Yahwehno – it's Petera very important name in Christianitythe head apostlethe first popeand a fisherman – and my dad's from NewfoundlandPeter, the rockthe cornerstoneon which Jesus builds his church

my dad was a high school principalhe was a teacher firstbut he got his first principalship in his early thirtieswhen he was younger than I am nowa very young age for that kind of joband he was a high school principal till he retired in his sixtiesjust last Juneand that, I think,is some fabulous God symbolism

I mean, on a mythological level your father is God to youalreadyespecially if you grow up in a Christian familyin a Christian societyGod the Fatheryour mother's familiarshe's the one you knowthe one who raises youbut your father's mysteriouspowerfulremotehe judgeshe loves youbut he can kick your assmy dad even had a beard

and for any kid, school is probably the dominant institutionof your lifeyou day revolves around schoolyour weekyour yearthe clothes you wearthe expressions you usethe people you spend the most of your time withand in the hierarchyof a schoolthe principal is God

and I was a student in my dad's schoolfrom grade eight to grade twelveso being the principal's son was a lot like being the son of Godand it was a small schoolfour hundred and fifty students over five gradeseveryone knew everyoneit was like living in a small town in the middle of Vancouverthere was no chance of anyone disappearing into the crowdmuch less the principal's soneveryone knew that about me from the day I got therestudents, teachersno escaping that, no howthe upside to being the principal's sonwhich I didn't appreciate at the timewas that I got to see my dad in his work environmentevery dayI got to see what he didgot to see how other people reacted to himgot to see how he affected the world around himthis world that he'd sort of created and maintained

it was a Catholic schoolwe had school mass once a month in the gyma crucifix on the wall in every classroomlife-sized, with a real person nailed to itnoReligion was a required course every year, for everyone, rightup there with English and Math and Scienceand I'm not talking comparative religion, I'm talking Christiandoctrinethe teachers were Catholicmost of the students were Catholicour families were CatholicI interacted with very few people who weren't Catholicand I was an altar boy till I was seventeena good one – I did the incense – that was the top jobI prayed a decade of the rosary every night for a few yearstherein silence, in private, by choicenot even my immediate family knew I did thisI had a little plastic statue of Mary by my bedsideand a picture of the somber, suffering face of Jesuswith a crown of thorns piercing his exposed heartand eyes that followed you no matter where you went in theroom

a friend of mine's dad once described to me the differencebetween when a dog's been at your garbage and when araccoon has

a dog knocks the can overtears open the bagdigs through the contentsscatters them all over the placesniffing everythingrooting through everythinghaving the time of its lifemaybe finding nothing it can eatand who cares, someone feeds him anyway

when it's a raccoonthere's a precise cutlike it was done with a surgeon's knifeat the exact point in the bag where the food isdisturbing nothing elsethe food is cleanly removedand the raccoon disappears like it was never theresometimes walking through a puddle as it goes, so its scentand tracks evaporate...

every time I do a new one man showthis one's number ten, by the wayI rehearse like crazyI have tothe script is long and complicatedand often involves a series of disconnected monologues withnothing bridging one to the next other than the fact that I'vememorized that this one goes after that onesound familiar?usually takes me two to three monthsand I always reach the point in the process where I lose allsense of perspectivethe stories aren't interesting anymorethe jokes aren't funnythe script turns into this sixteen or seventeen or in this casetwenty-one thousand word parade of pure gibberishand I have to keep rehearsing, every day, all the samedrilling it insmoothing over the bumpsburning it into my hard drive

I once read an article in the paper that actually said that actorsapproaching opening night register stress and adrenaline levelscomparable to car accident victimsthis article didn't say anything about actors who play everypart in the playand write the script!It also didn't mention that car accident victims are generallyinvoluntarythey don't grow up dreaming of being in a car accidentthey don't go to special schools to learn how to be in caraccidentsthey don't audition for car accidentsor apply to lotteries, and if they're drawn in these lotteries,pay hundreds of dollars and travel across the second biggestcountry on earth at their own expense to be in a car accident– in a series of car accidents, in these car accident festivals allacross Canada

by the time I openI can't eat or sleepI'm in a constant state of heightened emotionsI'm dead certain the show's a piece of shitI'm a piece of shiteverything I've ever done is a piece of shitand I will now finally be unmasked for the fraud I've somehowtricked the world into not noticing I am until nowI want to runI start making elaborate fantasy plans to cancel the tourand go off and live in the forest for six monthscurled up in fetal position, next to a tree stumpweeping

but I go through with it anyway

and I come out the other side, reborn

and I feel like I can flyI wake up in the morning feeling like my body is emitting lightI walk the streets, feeling like I've hit a home runI can hear the crack sound of the bat connecting with the ballI can see the ball sailing over that back fence

so I was raised pretty strongly Catholicand I believed with all my heart and soul for a very long timebut the whole venture was ultimately doomed if, for no otherreason, because of the musicwhich, on the one hand, is a gross oversimplification of somecomplex spiritual issues, and on the other hand, captures itperfectlyI mean, have you ever listened to the music in a Catholic mass?and the way people sing it?is that the sound of the way these people feel about God?about being personally known and treasured by the being whocreated the entire universe?

here's the thing, though – church music lives on its own plainit doesn't even occur to us to think of it criticallyto even think of it as music that some person, somewhere,someone with more or less musical talent, sat down and wroteit's immune from criticismjust like Christmas musicjust like the national anthembut what if you didwhat if you looked at it purely as technical songwriting andplayingand as an expression of feelinghow would it stand up?can you imagine someone listening to it for its own sake?can you imagine someone nonreligious coming home from ahard day's workflopping down on the couchcracking open a beerand thinkingMan...I need to blow off some steam...and doing itby throwing on a recordof an amateur three hundred person choirof random peoplesinging Catholic hymnswith no enthusiasm whatsoeveraccompanied by everyone's favorite musical instrument: theorgan!also played by an amateurand just cranking up the volumeand disappearing into the musicahhhhh.....I can't even picture the pope doing that

and if God really is everything everyone says he islike, if he's The Guythen he's quite certainly many notches above the greatesthuman geniuses in every possible fieldincluding music appreciationso how would that music sound to him?!I mean, it sounds bad to me, and I'm just a human!and if he's everywhere, all the time, he can't help but listento itweek after weekday after dayin every church on the planet – there must be millions of themand he can't forget any of itwhat the hell kind of torture is that?!I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy!when I dieand go to hell for saying all thisthat's probably what they'll do to me

orconverselyis God up there, listening to all this church musicJust diggin' it...just boppin' along...cuz I wouldn't even be friends with someone whose taste wasthat badmuch less worship them

Charles Bukowski was born in Germany in 1920German motherAmerican soldier fatherthey moved to LA when he was three, where his dad was from

right after World War One wasn't a particularly good time tobe German in Americakids in his neighbourhood called him "heinie" - "hey Heinie!"

Bukowski poetry.

Sketch by TJ Dawe

and attacked him, threw rocks at him

the family was poor in the first placeand then the depression hit

as a teenager he broke out in boils the size of golf balls all overhis face and bodyhe'd go to the hospital to get them drilledand doctors would bring in other doctors to look at him andthey'd say"Look at this case of acne vulgaris! I've never seen it so bad!"they'd say like this he wasn't there, like he couldn't hear themthen the nurse would come in with the big electric needle anddrill each boil individuallyhe'd sometimes leave with his entire head wrapped inbandages, two little slits for his eyeshe'd ride the streetcar home like thathe missed a whole year of high school, because of the boilsand was severely pockmarked for the rest of his life

and he was ugly in the first placeand silentmorosebeatenand after a certain age, more than willing to fight backhe discovered solitudediscovered writingdiscovered readingdiscovered drinking

after a year and a half of community college he started driftingaround Americaworking shitty jobs and losing themwriting short stories and sending them off to magazines andbeing rejected by themhe starvedhe drankhe lived in cheap rooming houses and sleazy hotelshe shacked up with women who drank and fought and yelledjust as much as he didhe fought in back alleys behind bars and lost most of the timehe was six feet tall but had really small hands, small fists

at twenty-four he rented a shack behind a house in Atlanta fora buck twenty-five a weekand lay in the scrabby bedand there was a wire hanging above him which should haveended with a light bulbbut there wasn't one – just a bare, live wireand he lay there, swinging his handseeing how close he could get his fingers to the live electricity

at thirty-five, back in LA, he lost eight or nine pints of blood inone day through massive alcoholic hemorrhagingand he was a broke drunk – no job, no health insurancehe wound up in the charity ward of the hospitalthe odds against him surviving: fifty to onebut he made itthe doctors told him if he ever drank again, he'd diehe came outwrote poetryand kept on drinking

in his late thirties he got a job as a night clerk at the post officein LAsitting on a stool, sorting letters all night

in the meantime he wrote and wrote and wrotemostly poemsusually autobiographicalhis own stories and opinionsno tricksno rhymesnothing fancynothing abstractjust a raw, honest style like no one else was doing at the time

he started getting published in little magazinesunderground newspaperschapbooks

in the mid-sixties an aspiring publisher heard about himnot an actual publisher – an office furniture dealer whowanted to be a publishercame to his placeintroduced himselfasked if he had any poems still unpublishedBukowski showed him a whole closet fullthis guy started publishing these poems as broadsidesthen as chapbooksthen as full bookshe eventually guaranteed Bukowski a small living allowance– a hundred bucks a month – if he'd quit the post office andwrite full timehe acceptedhe was fiftyhe was terrifiedhe was certain he'd have to run back to the post office any dayand beg for his old job back

Charles Bukowski.

Sketch by TJ Dawe

but his stuff caught onhe started putting out novelsbooks of short storiesand one book of poems after anotherhe carried on long correspondences, writing seven, eight pageletters every day, scribbling little cartoons in the marginshe attracted fanatical fansand he didn't want them aroundhe just wanted to stay indrinkand get the word down the way he wanted it

he put out forty-five books of poetry and prose in his lifetimewhen he died in 1994 he was America's best selling and mostimitated poetand every year since then his publishers have put out at least abook a year of previously uncollected poems and stories andlettersand they're still doing itand they aren't scraping the bottom of the barrel at all

my dad took me to see Star Wars when I was fournow, I've been around four year olds since thenthey're basically amoebas with shoesso it's hard for me to imagine I even knew what a movie was,much less could follow the storybut when those big yellow words "Star Wars" blasted off into asea of stars on that big screenand the trumpets played the Star Wars fanfare in surroundsoundsomething took hold of me that's still thereto this day that moment in that movie brings me right back tothat feeling

I was obsessed with Star Wars growing upI played with the toys, as many as I could getwhich wasn't that manyand we lived across the street from an elementary school (thatI didn't go to) with a full playground and a fieldright next to a community centre with another full playgroundand two swimming poolsthe whole thing swarming with neighbourhood kidsand against my mother's protestsI hardly ever left my roomI'd stay in there, by myself, with the door shut, concocting oneadventure after another

Luke Skywalker.

Sketch by TJ Dawe

my favourite character was Lukemy favourite movie was The Empire Strikes Backwhere Luke really learns to use the Forceand faces challenges – worse than he'd ever have imaginedand finds out the truth about his father

when we'd go somewhere as a familywe'd often run into some former student of my dad'sand they'd come up and say hello, and they'd often rememberhim as the teacher who read their class The Hobbit or The Lordof the Ringsor who'd recommended they read it

turning water into wineif you think about itreally works as an analogy for creating art

Jesus was, in his own way, an artistturning the water of regular languageinto the wine of effective speech

he spoke to crowds and to individualshe had to hold their interestand tell them something they didn't knowthere's an art to that too

and one of the things he said that really stuck with me was

The stone the builders rejectedhas become the cornerstone

Star Wars is about a boy in search of a father

Luke grew up an orphanhe never fit in to his uncle's world of farming

Ben Kenobi comes along, becomes a father to himteaches himguides him into a bigger worldprotects himeven sacrifices his life to save himlater Yoda takes over

Robertson Davies once said any man worth his salt has morethan one father in his lifetime

then he discovers Vader's his fatherDarth VaderDark Fatherpowerfulmysteriousremotehardly even humanmore than able to kick your ass

Peter Dawe—TJ's Dad.

Sketch by TJ Dawe

and his final challenge, given to him by Yodais that he must confront Vaderand he doesand instead of killing himand instead of turning into himhe reaches out to himhe does the bravest thing he can possibly dohe lays everything on the line to win the love of his father

my mom and my sister and I used to go to my dad's basketballgames growing upmy dad coached senior boys basketball in high schooldefensive coachzone defencehe watched American college basketball like a scientisthe told me the NBA's more about the starsNCAA's about the coaching, the strategyhe had favourite coacheshe'd tape games

he turned into someone else when he was coachingpowerfulfrighteningfocusedstorming up and down in front of the benchwith one hell of a yellhe was a raging commander on the battlefield

on a weekend, if there was a tournament going on, we'dsometimes go for the entire day and watch game after gameafter gameand sometimes they'd have these funny half-time thingslike the "Mad Dash 4 Cash"where people bought raffle ticketsand whoever got drawn had sixty seconds, timed on thescoreboardto run around the court and try to pick up sixty one dollarbills that had been scattered all over the placeif you got 'em all, you got to keep 'embut if you got less than sixty, you had to give 'em back, andyou were given a chocolate barand there were other things like that at other games and otherschool eventswe went to a lot of school eventswe were the principal's familyif my sister and I had the day off school and there was no oneto take care of us, we'd just go hang out at the high school allday

I mentioned the Mad Dash 4 Cash at a family gathering acouple years agoand my dad told me it had been his ideahe came up with all the ideas for things like that in the school'slifebitshooksconcepts for pep ralliesfor the awards banquetfor the winter carnivalhe wouldn't take credit for thembut he'd come up with themdo a lot of the work getting them rollingand then stand back as they happened and watchglad that they'd brought everyone together and given everyonea good time

George Carlin was born and raised in New York Cityhe was a funny kidclass clownhe'd do impressions of people in his neighbourhood for hisfriendshe was raised Catholiceducated by nuns

at seventeen he joined the air forceat nineteen, became a deejayhe had a boss in one of his radio jobs who told him he shouldreally start writing down some of his ideasthey're good ideasso he did

he started doing stand-uphe was clean shavenhad short hairwore a suitdid clean materialplayed Vegasand middle class night clubs

at thirty he grew long hair and a beardstarted doing material about smoking potabout the seven words you can never say on televisionhe explored his ideas, no matter how bizarre they werehe once saidif a centipede wants to kick another centipede in the shinsdoes it kick with one leg at a timeor does it lean on fifty and kick with fifty?he came up with a sentence that incorporates all seven deadlysins:It enrages me that I, a clearly superior person, should earnless money than my neighbour, whose wife I'd love to fuck,if I weren't so busy sleeping till noon and eating pork chopsall day

he put out comedy albums, and won Grammies for themhe was arrested for obscenityand acquitted

he started getting the occasional film and TV roleand discovered it wasn't really his thinghe wasn't that great at itcompared to stand-upand you don't get much creative controlcompared to stand-upbut you can get a lot more money and fame for a lot less work

he stuck to stand-updid comedy concertsHBO broadcast them as specialshe released them as albumshe made that the mainstay of his careerhe put out an astounding amount of material – way more thananyone else of his generationhe just died in June of 2008and right to the end, in his early seventies he was still doingover a hundred concerts a yearputting out a new album of all new material every two orthree yearsand right to the end, his stuff was better than ever

like most high schools, ours was sports orientedand the big sport, for guys, was basketballI started playing on the basketball team in grade five, gettingready for high schoolI suckedI was gangly, awkward and unathleticI sat on the benchkept joining the teamkept suckingkept sitting on the benchI was warming the bench in grade ten when it was announcedthere'd be a school play for the first time in all my years ofhigh schoolI wanted to be involvedbut you had to auditionthat scared meso I just happened to mix up the date of the audition andmissed itbut I talked to the directors after the play had been castthey said I couldn't have a part, but I could understudyso I understudied all three male roles, learned all their linesand I sat backstage in rehearsals with the prompt script in mylap, cueing actors if they forgot a lineI joined the crew, I ran the followspot for the performances

I really looked up to the guys in the showthey were so funny,so creative,so open to lifethey talked to me like I was an equalI was only fifteenthey were seventeenone of them was nineteenwow…

TJ Dawe–high school play.

Sketch by TJ Dawe

the school play and the basketball season covered the samepart of the school yearthe next year I wouldn't be able to do bothsenior boys basketball was a much bigger commitmentand I'd have a good shot at getting a real role in the next year'splayI'd have to choose

The Hobbit is about a company of thirteen dwarveson a mission to recapture a mountain full of treasure thedwarves had mined and carved and put the best of themselvesinto creatingwhich was attacked by a dragonwho killed everyone inside and took up residence in thetreasury, in the middle of the mountaina few of the dwarves were outside at the timethey scatteredregroupedand came up with this mission to recapture the mountain anddeal with the dragon, somehowGandalf, the wise old wizard, chooses quiet little Bilbo Bagginsthe hobbit, to go with them as their burglar

I first read this when I was sixteenand not on my dad's recommendationmy sister's best friend's boyfriendhe was twenty-threeTwenty-three!!!he talked to me like I was an equalhe even smoked a joint in my presence once – first one I'dever seenhe passed it aroundI didn't take a hit off itbut I did read the book he recommended

an essential thing about hobbits they left out of the recent TheLord of the Rings movies is that when they want toany hobbit can step as silently as a catit's part of why they walk around in bare feetbut they aren't criminally inclined at allthey're quiet, peaceful, unprepossessing folkthey average three feet talland their greatest joy in life is to eat

well, like most hobbits, Bilbo's completely inexperienced asa burglarand he has no desire to go on any adventures

and the dwarves aren't impressed with him eitherhe's smaller than themhe's meekhe's pudgyhe's never been in the outside worldhow's he gonna take on a dragon?or anything else, for that matter?one of them remarks that he looks more like a grocer than aburglar

Gandalf defends himsayinghe's the oneI've chosen himand there's more to Mr Baggins than any of you realize

every month or two in school we'd have an assemblyall 450 of us would pile into the gymsit in the chairs and on the bleachersand my dad'd be there at the focal point of the gymmic in handtalkingwalkingmaking eye contact with everyone thereno podiumno cue cardshe'd talk for an hourhe'd tell a story that was somehow related to somethinghappening in the school at that timehe'd tell about former students doing legendary thingslike being the first woman to serve on a torpedo boat in WorldWar IIoperating the hornthe "a-roo-gah" hornwhich he had with himand that we were now going to use to cheer on the senior girlsvolleyball team in the lower mainland finals on Friday!he made this shit upmy mom's youngest brother had stored some of his stuff inour basementmy sister and I had found that horn the week beforehe had everyone going thoughhe'd say outrageous things with a completely straight facehe'd weave this elaborate mythology about the schoolhe'd go on tangentsexplore ideashe'd tie in religious themeshe'd hold the attention of a gym full of teenagersand he'd always come back to the original point

and if something bad was happening around the schoollike a string of thefts, or vandalismhe'd vent and rageand scare the shit out of us

I first read Watership Down when I was eighteenI was just tip-toeing out of the world of Mad Magazine andStephen King novels and discovering everything else there wasto readand one of the characters in The Stand, by Stephen King – myfavourite book at the time – talked about reading WatershipDown,how much it hooked him, even though it was about rabbits –the dumbest, scardest animals you could imagineI figured I'd give it a chancegot a copy from the librarycouldn't fuckin' put it downreading that book thrilled me just as much as it did to watchStar Warsit still does

Watership Down is about a group of rabbits who live in a warrenand one of them has a flash, a vision of the warren beingdestroyedhe doesn't understand it, but he can't deny ithe tries to warn his friendshe tries to warn his chief rabbitbut he gets rejectedand almost no one else believes him eitherhe's a scared little rabbitwhat does he know?and why would we leave our big, safe, comfortable warren?

a few do believe himand they leavethey're outsiders anywaythey set out and try to find a new place to livenot really knowing where they're going or what they're doingand they wind up facing challenges like they'd never haveimagined

I went with the school playand I got the lead role!it was a musical parody of Star Trekit was a real, published play – you can Google it, titled PardonMe, Is This Planet Taken?and I played Captain Jamie T. Church of the starship Empirenot the greatest scriptand I think the directors recognized this, because they actuallylet me add my own jokes throughout the whole play, like I wasGroucho Marx or something!and on closing night I came up with a crazy ad lib cuz the castwas cracking up and ruining the big crisis scene before theintermissionI got us to stop the play, rewind and do that part of the sceneagainand we screwed it up againso I got us to stop, rewind and do it a third timethe audience went bananas

George Carlin had a bit about how people say someone wentbananas"he went bananas!"or they say apeshit – "that guy went apeshit!"bananas are apeshit, think about it...

anyway, I got all kinds of compliments for it afterwards, fromthe directorsfrom the castfrom the audience

I felt like I'd live foreverI wanted more of that feeling

I'd done a careers test the year beforean "interest inventory"not Meyers-Briggsnot the Enneagramnot how you perceive the worldnot what you're good atbut what you're most interested inand my highest scoring category: adventure

so when I graduated the next year I went to university to studytheatreI wanted to be an actorwanted to be part of that world

I had big dreamsI thought I was on a fast track right to the top

so I left hometo conquer the worldstarting in this next city:Victoria

adventures are dauntingit's fuckin' scary to go beyond the world you knowBilbo didn't want to goLuke only left his home planet cuz he had tosame with the rabbits in Watership DownJesus sweated blood

staying where you are is at least familiareven if it's completely miserableat least you know what's what

so in university I was suddenly no onefor the first time in my life I wasn't the principal's sonbut I wasn't remarkable for any other reason, eitherit was no special accomplishment to have been the star of yourold high school drama classeveryone else there had been that too!each of us had big ambitioneach of us told ourselves "well, I'll make iteven if the rest of you motherfuckers quit!even if I have to starve and live in a garretwhich of course I won'tcuz I'm gonna be on the cover of magazines, and winningOscars before I'm twenty-five!"

the odds against you making it as any kind of artist areoverwhelmingly against you, no matter how you wanna definethe term "making it"they tell you this repeatedly in theatre schoolquite emphaticallythey bring in guest speakers to tell you this

and the further you get into the bigger world, the more this isimpressed upon you on its ownand I was in a bigger world than I'd ever been in beforenew citynew environmentnew social structurenew everythingand I was scaredtoo scared to meet peopletoo scared to audition for playsfor scenesfor anything

I wound up being one of many unremarkable acting studentsin my departmentone of a hundred aspiring actorsinfrequently castmiddle to low end of the packgood enough to make it into each succeeding year's actingclass and keep paying tuitionbut probably destined to graduateand go out into the real worldand never really get anywhereand quietly drift into some other professionand be forgotten

well, before longBilbo's been captured by trollshe's been attacked by goblinshe's stayed with elveshe finds the ring at the bottom of a mountain that causes somuch trouble a little while later in The Lord of the Rings, but tohim it's just a magic ring that makes him invisible – a real assetto an amateur burglarhe's stayed with eagles in their own nest – and he's scared ofheightshe fights giant spiders in a dark forest by himselfand he's afraid of giant spiders in a dark forest when he's byhimselfhe matches wits with a dragonand a goes through a whole lot of other shit, too

and along the way – without them even realizing they're doingit – the dwarves start respecting himin fact, they start depending on him to come up with a planwhenever they're in a spot

he's the stone the builders rejected, become the cornerstone

and at one point he's got to come up with another planand he does, even though it'll be dangerous and require a fairbit of luckbut he thinks to himself that he's grown to depend on his lucka lot more than he did in the old daysand by the old days he was only referring to the previous springbut that seemed like ages ago to him then

I went home for Christmas break when I was nineteenand one Christmas record ended and I went over and put onthe next one without even checking which oneand it was a single guitar, fingerpicking familiar Christmassongs

I'd started playing guitar two years beforeI was okayand I liked fingerpicking

here's the thing:if you practice any art formor any sportor any skill at alleven if you aren't any goodit gives you a whole new appreciation for the people who aregood

and this guy was goodsimplenot flashy at allbut he was playing these corny old Christmas carols andmaking them mean somethingI looked at the album coverThe New Possibilityby John Faheythis had been one of our Christmas records my whole lifeI'd heard it hundreds of timesand I'd never really listened to it once

I dug through my dad's record collection and found threeother albums by himtaped 'emand one of them was called Yes! Jesus Loves Meit was all church musicincluding some of the exact songs I knew from mass!

But the way Fahey played them, they were suddenly imbuedwith genuine joyor they were dark and frighteningor they were boththere was a quote on the back of the album cover, from Fahey"Christ is Not CUTE" - cute was all in capitals

I went on to get more of his albums whenever and whereverI couldI'd buy themborrow them from the university music libraryI'd read the liner notes while they playedI'd lay in bed listening to them, just staring at the ceilinglistening to the album like I was watching a movieimagining what each piece meantwhat kind of story it toldthey were all instrumentals

Fahey was not a Christian musicianhe drew from all kinds of musical sourcesfolk songsblues songsbluegrassold jug bandsDixielandclassical musicmodern compositionBrazilian musica Hindu chanthe lived for a year in a Hindu monastery in India in the 70s

but his greatest hit, if you can call it that, was a hymn:In Christ There Is No East or Westand the way he played it – he went through it twice, slowlyand reverentiallyand then he sped it up and syncopated ithe made it his own

and scattered throughout his other albums wereSt. Patrick's HymnJesus Is a Dying Bed MakerFight On Christians, Fight OnLord Have MercyThe Episcopal HymnandI Am the Resurrection

Star Wars is about growing up

it's about a whiny kid who's never done anythingfrom a barren world where nothing happensgoing out into the great unknownand suddenly coming face to face withlovedangersacrificethe discovery of who he really isand his true potentialwith the fate of the entire universe quite literally at stake

he steps up to the plateand hits a home run, first trynot bad, kidhe steps up againand gets the shit beat outof himbarely escapes with his lifebut he gets back uphe learns to hold his ownhe grows up

one thing I did get cast in universitywas a fringe show

Daniel MacIvor.

Sketch by TJ Dawe

a touring fringe showa cross Canada summer long fringe tour!

the word "tour" sounded unbelievably romantic to me at thetimeI'd never been on oneI was nineteenI'd barely traveled

it was a three person play by Daniel MacIvor – my favouriteplaywrighta recent discovery, toonew, exciting, experimental, accessible theatreand usually with just one person on stage

discovering Spalding Gray had been like that – that hadhappened the year beforejust a guy sitting at a desk on stagetelling a story from his own lifeplaying all the partsdoing the sound effectsspeaking at high speedstelling the truthand being absolutely captivatinga whole play with just one person?I didn't know you could do that...

we rehearsed part time for a month and a halfI lived in a house with a bunch of other theatre students,including two people in the showwe were two blocks from the beachI was in the basement – not in a bedroom in the basement, mybed was next to the furnace in the basementwhen we weren't rehearsing I'd work on my linesread bookswatch videoslisten to musicand write in my journalabout how awesome everything wasand how awesome it was all gonna be

Spalding Gray.

Sketch by TJ Dawe

any adventure always sounds like a lot more fun before youset off on itan adventure's only really an adventure when you a reach apoint where you seriously wonder if you're gonna come outalive

and your first fringe tour never goes as well as you hope it willyou picture sell out crowdsand standing ovationsand rave reviewsand being pick of the fringeand your reputation preceding you across the circuityou calculate how few sell-outs it'll take to pay off your tourdebtit'll be easy...you don't imagine medium or small housesyou don't figure that between a quarter and a third of youraudience will have gotten in without payingyou certainly don't anticipate spending more time and energypromoting your show than performing it

promoting a fringe show's a real grind, manhanding out fliers to line-upsdoesn't sound that badjust give someone a piece of paperhow hard could that be?it's fuckin' hardto stand in front of a line-up of strangersinterrupt themlook 'em in the eyeand tell them that who you are and what you're doingis worth their time and moneyperson after personline after lineday after daycity after cityacross the whole goddamn countryand if only one person at the end of a long line-up doesn't takeyour flier, even after everyone else has not only taken the flier,but asked for details, promised they'll come, invited you homefor dinner and set you up on a date with their daughterif that last person doesn't take your flier, no matter howpolitely they turn it down, it's like they've stabbed you in thekidneys with a rusty shiv

when we were on tour, I'd get line-ups of popular showsassigned to me by my directorand I'd show up, stack of fliers in handand see everyone standing thereand I'd freezeI couldn't do itand I knew how important it waswe were brokewe were in debtwe were starving!but I couldn'tI'd gone tharn, as they say in Watership Down

Bilbo's the one hobbit in a company of dwarvesexiled dwarveshe's the least experiencedhe's the only one who didn't want to be therehe's an outsider who doesn't even fit in with the other outsiders

Luke leaves the rebels to go off to learn to use the Forcehe becomes mysticalhe has to confront his challenges by himselfhe's an outsider among the Rebels

Jesus and the apostles: outsiderswandererscriticizing their society,their own religious authoritiesand within that group Jesus was the chosen one,the mysterious onefacing his challenges alone

it took me most of the way across the country to work up thecourage to flierand to figure out a technique

our show had an abstract concept and an abstract titleyou couldn't describe it in ten words or lessso I'd go on and on and on describing itI'd make my sales pitch a fast-talking patterI'd make eye contactI'd crack jokesI'd make each sales pitch different, so if someone I'd alreadyfliered overheard me talking to the next person, they'd hearme saying different things and maybe keep on listeningeach sales pitch was just as much of a performance as anythingI did onstageI'd quote from our good reviewsand hold up photocopies of them that were cropped andenlarged to make it look like they were on the front page ofthat day's paperI'd shuffle themone after the other out of a folder I carriedaround with meI had people from further along in the line break off theirconversation and turn and listen and laugh and applaud andhold out their hand for a flier when I was doneat one point my director tried to flier a guy in a line inEdmonton, and the guy saw the thing and said"Oh – I already got one of theseit was from this tall skinny guy who talked about two guysdoing a competition, and this girl in a blue bathing suit sittingon top of a lifeguard chair..."he did a full-on schtick impersonating me fliering him for like,a minute and a half

but handing out fliers is only one aspect of a fringe toura fringe tour's a massive experiencea fringe festival's a massive experienceI mean, even if you leave out choosing your script, out of allthe scripts out thereor devising itbrainstorming itwriting itrewriting itrewriting itdoing a first reading of itfielding peoples' commentsrewriting itrehearsing itmemorizing itrewriting itopening itrewriting it againeven if you leave all of that outthere's so much going on in those two weeksespecially if you're also coming in from out of town

you get in to a given city on a Monday or a Tuesdayyou check in at the fringe site officeyou get your welcome packyou flip through the program to see who else is in townyou settle in with whoever you're staying with – usuallysomeone you've never met beforeyou go to your venue, which might be nice and might be ashitholeyou have your tech rehearsalwhich might be good, might be a disasteryou put the local info on your posterslug 'em around and start trying to put 'em upeven though somehow all the good spots are taken alreadyyou go to the opening ceremonyyou march in the fringe paradeyou go to the fringe previewyou do three minutes of your show out of context and havea bunch of people in the audience who were thinking aboutseeing it cross it off their listyou do up your sandwich boardyou put up your sandwich boardyou hand out fliers to the people standing around looking atthe sandwich boardsyou open your show on a Thursdayyou keep handing out fliers, right after you've come off stageyou sweat it out, waiting for reviewshope for good oneshope for that fifth staror fouror even just three and a half...hope for sell-out crowdshope to chip away at that millstone of a tour debtand wind up having to swallow a whole bunch of new expensesyou never saw comingand overcome the reviews that weren't as good as you'd hopedthey were gonna betry not to let what some critic said about you haunt you forthe rest of your lifebut it willyou'll never forget ityou'll tattoo it onto your soulyou'll hear it as you walk aroundyou'll hear it as you lie in bedyou'll hear it backstageyou'll hear it on stagefuck itsuck it upget out theregive those people the showall nine of themkeep flieringkeep performingsee other peoples' showsspend what little money you have on beerread the paper every daysee how everybody else is doingtry not to let your jealousy get the best of you when they allgot better reviews than youfuck itsuck it upkeep flieringkeep performinghang outtalk shop with the other performersgossipeat from the vending cartsdrink in the beer tentwalk back and forth from venue to venue till you know thestreets of that neighbourhood better than the locals dobetter than you know your own neighbourhood back homeredo your sandwich board after it rains and the ink from yourreviews drips all down the woodgo to the fringe bar at nightdrinklaughflirtflatterstumble homeconk out on your billet's couchwake up early, not really knowing where you areor who you areget upget out therekeep flieringkeep performingday after day after day after dayand right at the point of utter exhaustiongo to the closing night fringe party!!cheer for the people who win the fringe awardstry not to let your jealousy get the best of you cuz you didn'tget onefuck itsuck it updrink your face offdance your face offsmoke upmake outpass outwake up underslept and hung overpukepackdrive to the next citycheck in at the fringe site officeflip through the programsee who else is in townetcetera etcetera etcetera

butapart from what each festival has in common – they're allradically different from each other!each one has its own feelits own cast of charactersits own ups and downsits own beginning, middle and endeach festival nominally lasts less than two weeksbut quite literally feels like it lasts an entire calendar yearso if you think about something that happened two cities agoit's like thinking about something that happened two years agoand multiply that by the number of festivals you're doing onyour tour

and the first time you touryou don't know any of thisyou're discovering it all as you go

Canada's a nation of outsiderswe grow up in the shadow of the most powerful and influentialculture in the history of human civilization up to this pointgetting a lot of our mythology from American movies and TVshowswhich are mostly written, directed and produced by...Americans!with most of the actors being... American!most of the characters in the stories being... American!which often describe cultural institutions we don't havebeing advertised products we often can't buybeing wowed by contests we're not eligible for

maybe that's why we produce so many comediansand musiciansand artists, period

John Fahey playing guitar.

Sketch by TJ Dawe

John Fahey was born in 1939 in Takoma Park, Maryland – it'sa suburb of Washington, DC

he was self taught as a musician and composeras a teenager he and a friend would go to poor blackneighbourhoods and knock on people's doors and ask if theyhad any old records they wanted to sell

when he was twenty he recorded his first album of guitarmusic and put it out on his own label:Takoma Recordshe made a hundred copiesput his name on one side of the albumand on the other put the best blues name I've ever heard: BlindJoe Death

in the sixties he got a masters in music from UCLAand wrote his thesis on Charley Patton – a legendary oldMississippi bluesman from the thirtiesand a number of times in the sixties drove to the Southon more record buying tripsand trying to find old forgotten bluesmen in person, followingclues from the lyrics of their old 78stwice he succeededhe'd hang out with themdrink with themlearn guitar from themhe even helped revive their music careers

he kept putting out records for the rest of his lifemostly just him playing guitarno other instrumentsno bandcertainly no singinghe was entirely untouched by the musical trends of the sixtiesand the seventiesand the eightiesand the ninetieshe put out over thirty albumsusually with his own liner notes, which were always funny andintelligent and weirdhe also had a degree in philosophy

he never had a hit songnever had a hit albumnever got richnever tried to

in the last decade of his life, after his third divorce, he lived ina fleabag motel in Salem, Oregonhis royalties had dried up, and he didn't carehe had no time for anyone who wanted him play the same oldmusic the same old wayhe hated people treating him like a guruhe made his living going through the old records in thriftstores and finding ones he could sell to collectorshe recorded wild dissonant electric musiche did abstract paintings and kept them in his roomhe wrote articles and stories and kept them in a boxhe had diabetesEpstein-Barralcoholismhe ate at the same cafe every day and always ordered the samething:three scrambled eggs and five or six strips of crispy fried baconand he'd butter and salt the eggsand he'd butter and salt the baconhe had a massive heart attackhad sextuple bypass surgeryand died twodays laterage sixty-one

our three person Daniel MacIvor show wound up doingalternately well and poorly, city to citywe got good reviews and we got slamswe played to full houses and empty oneswe paid off our tour debt with the proceeds from every showup to and including our fourth last show of the entire tour,splitting the proceeds thereaftermaking four hundred dollars each, for four months workwhich averages out to about four cents an hour

but I performed in cities across the countryfor audiences of nothing but strangersand only an audience of strangers can tell you the truthI got my eyes opened to the cities of the fringe circuitand to this culture of wild adventuring artists doing their ownthing, their own wayand I'd been a part of thatand I turned twenty

and the show was always a thrill to doeven when there was hardly anyone thereeven when we'd just gotten kicked in the nuts by some criticeven after we'd gotten sick of each other from being broke andliving in close quarters for so longwhat happened on stage was always magic

our final city was Victoriawe got back to that old house we'd been living in when wewere rehearsing just a few months before, in the Springbut that seemed like ages ago to me thenI came in the front door, and stood there, looking at the livingroomI couldn't believe I was backI felt like Odysseus, returned at lastand Tim, this theatre student who'd been there all summer –Tim was there, and he looked at me and saidyou're differentyour energy's differentand I looked at Timand saidyeah

all of my totem myths are the hero's journey

Star WarsWatership DownThe Hobbitthe story of Jesusthey're about leaving the smaller worldgoing out into the great unknownfacing challengesdrawing on resources you didn't even know you hadyour old self dyingas you're reborn as someone better

the hero's journey is an analogy for growing up

all of my plays are about growing upabout leaving your environmentabout the difference between how you thought something wasgonna be and how it actually ends up beingand having to deal with that differenceabout moving from a smaller world into a bigger one

lucid dreams are when you figure out that you're dreamingand you wake up within the dreamyou don't literally wake upyou're still in the dreambut now that you know you're dreamingyou know nothing can hurt youand you can do anything

anyone can learn to do thisthere are techniques you can learnthere are books you can buy

I flung myself out on a different adventure the summer beforethat, when I was eighteendid a working holiday in England, a country I'd never been toand on the flight there I listened to the in-flight audioentertainmentand there was a comedy channeland one of the people on it was George Carlinwho I'd vaguely heard of

he was doing a routine about little bits of everyday lifelike ice cream headachesor when you're walking down a set of stairs and you're notreally paying attention and you think there's one more stairto go when there actually isn't and – WHAM – you slam yourfoot down on the flooror when you look at your watch and then immediately forgetwhat time it isso you look again, and you forget againso you look a third time, and then someone says what time isit?and you say "I don't know!"all of these things everybody doesbut no one talks aboutno one even thinks aboutmuch less thinks to turn into artjust the clay of everyday lifethis guy was talking about 'emand making 'em hysterically funnyI didn't know you could do that...

I got back to Vancouver a couple months later and startedbuying his old recordslater I got his stuff on tapeCDbookaudiobookDVD

when I'd have to read a new Shakespeare play for a theatreclass I'd go to the university music library and listen to theRoyal Shakespeare Company do it on vinyl, and I'd followalong with the textin between acts, I'd put on comedy albums as intermissions –often George Carlinand as sacrilegious as it is for a theatre person to admit, Ipreferred the Carlin to the Shakespearewhose work is closer to what I'm doing now?

I ended up getting all of his albumsand I started remembering them line for lineintonation for intonationinadvertentlyjust cuz I liked them

in grade six one day we had a priest come and talk to our classhe asked if any of us were thinking of studying to becomepriestsfive or six of us raised our handsI was one of 'em

James Joyce said artists are priests of the imaginationpriests are outsidersartists are outsidersSalman Rushdie said only someone standing outside the framecan see the whole picture

live performances are like religious ceremoniesthe Christian mass was directly and admittedly modeled onGreek tragedieswhich were both plays and religious ceremoniestheatres are like churches, and vice versasome churches get turned into theatresand when a play or a religious rite works, there's a catharsisthat's the whole pointand when it doesn't, there isn't

you know, sometimes I'll eat a pot cookie and take a long walkand go fishing in my imaginationand come up with ideas for moviesfor plays that would be too elaborate to do on the fringenovelsessaysTV showsideas that thrill me so much I can't wait to get home andscribble down pages of notes on 'emthere's at least a dozen files on my computer I've been meaningto get around to doing some serious work on for some time

don't get me wrong, the fringe is greatbut there's other stuff I'd like to do too

it's easy to put those ideas off, thoughI'm usually preparing for a fringe tourdoing a fringe touror recovering from a fringe tour

and there's no deadlinefor any of those other thingscertainly no paychequeand quite honestly, no real probability any of 'em 'll ever seethe light of dayI mean, how many zillions of peopleare out there writingscreenplays?how many novels never get published?how many full length plays never get past the workshoppingstage?can you imagine putting one or two or five or ten years of yourlife – and a piece of your soul – into some creative endeavourthat winds up sitting on a shelf, gathering dust, never havinghad a chance?

There can be negative totems

from Bukowski's early childhood to his early teens his fatherbeat him at least twice a weekif he couldn't find a minor infraction to punish him for, he'dmake one uphe preached the gospel of work and thriftand despised his brother who drank and didn't have a job

John Fahey's father raped himmany times, growing upgrinning and taunting him as he did itthreatening to kill him if he ever told anyoneeven holding a gun to his head oncein some of his writings, later in his life, Fahey claimed he'dnever known a single moment of happiness in his entire life

George Carlin never knew his father at allhe was a pretty severe alcoholicso when George was two his mother took him in one arm, hisbrother in the othersneaked out the window onto the fire escapeand never looked back

Bukowski vowed to be everything his father hatedhe drifted and drank and got jobs he didn't care about, andlost themhe slept in sleazy hotels and on park benchesbut he kept his job at the post office for over ten yearsand he wrote like a driven manevery dayand every nighteven after an eleven hour graveyard shift sorting lettersthrough five decades of hard, steady, daily drinkingand he was more productive and more successful as a writerthan most people ever are at anythingincluding his fatherand he looked like his fatherand he acknowledged that his father created himhe said when you get the shit beaten out of you several timesa week for yearsyou tend to say what you mean

I can't claim anything even remotely like that about my dadThe worst thing I can say about him is that he's really quietafter my sister graduated high school, he and I would drive toschool in the morning, and not say a single word for the entireforty minute tripand quite often the radio wasn't workinghe never regaled me with stories of his hard childhoodor of all the people he'd worked with, or taughtnot that I'd have listened, I was sixteen

I don't know his life story at allor his inner lifenow I open up my inner life and tell my life stories on stage fora living, to anyone who'll listen

so I got back from that first fringe tourrun through the ringertransformedtriumphantelectricstanding ten feet tallready to take on the worldstarting with my third year as a university theatre studentand I dropped right back into anonymity...the fringe tour had happened outside the self-contained worldof my theatre departmentnobody knew about itor if they did, they didn't careI was still just one of a hundred aspiring actorsstill didn't get cast muchbut now my fires were burning harder than ever

I'd kept up my journal on tourI kept writing in it

I spent the next summer living with my parents in the 'burbsdriving a trucksaving upliving cheapspending most of each day stuck in a traffic jammy thoughts all swirling around me

every day on the way to work I'd drive by this typewriter storeone day I stopped in and looked aroundand bought onefifty bucksBukowski wrote on a typewriter

I'd get home from a day's driving and bang out my thoughtsit felt goodand I had nothing else to doand maybe it'll lead somewhere, somedaymaybe notbut either way – it feels good

Watership Down is that classic kind of adventure storywhere there's an intrepid and assorted band on an impossiblemission they can't afford to failand each of them can do different thingsthere's the mysticand the tough guyand the idea manand the storytellerand the leaderand the clowneveryone's got their specialtyeveryone's necessary

just like in Star Warsjust like The Lord of the Ringsjust like The Seven Samuraiand The Guns of Navaroneand The Wild Bunchand The Great Escapejust like Mission: Impossibleand The A-Teamand The Fantastic Fourand The X-Menand GI Joeand The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

and with any ensemble situation like thatyou, the perceiver, are naturally gonna gravitate towards onecharacter at least a little bit more than the othersyou can't help but have favouritesit might not be the same as the popular favouriteor it might bebut there's probably gonna be one character who speaks toyou more than the others

in Star Wars, for me, it was Lukethe main character – but an unpopular one, among Star Warsfans

in X-MenI was into comics for a few yearsmy favourite comic was the X-Menand my favourite X-Man was Wolverinethe lonerthe mysterious onethe outsiderand the X-Men were outsiders already

in GI Joe my favourite guy was Snake Eyesthe silent onethe mysterious onethe outsider

Fiver from Watership Down.

Sketch by TJ Dawe

in Watership Down, my rabbit was Fiverthe mysticthe visionarythe outsider amongst outsiderssensing a pattern here?

and Fiver isn't the main character of Watership Downbut that didn't even occur to methere was something about him that spoke to me

we reveal ourselves with every preferencewe can't help itI got a good friend of mine to read Watership Downhis favourite rabbit was Bigwig, the tough guymy friendis a tough guy

marijuana came into my life in the latter half of my last yearof high schooland I fuckin' loved it

I was a shy, quiet teenagergangly and awkward and unathleticthe principal's sonhardly said anything around the dinner tablespent most of my time on my ownin my room, with the door shut and lockedbrewing in my own thoughtsmarijuana helped them leap out of me

in university I was a shy, quiet theatre studentoverwhelmed by the constant theatricality of all the othertheatre students who never seemed to ever fuckin' turn it offtheatre students are an especially flamboyant bunchway more so than professional actorstheatre students haven't made it yetthey've got something to proveto themselves

and in any group of people, I'm rarely the one doing thetalking anywayI'm the quiet one, sitting in the shadows, watchinglisteningmaybe asking questions,prompting other people to talk about things I'm interested inremembering their answers for laterlooking for patterns I can use in a showI'm the thief...

but marijuana generally quiets peoplemakes them paranoid, awkward, self-consciousfor some reason it has the exact opposite effect on meand a pattern developedI'd smoke up with someone at a partyand we'd be having what would start as a normal conversationand as the marijuana hit our bloodstreams it'd kick my braininto a higher gearso as I'd be chasing some point conversationallymy mind'd stay one step ahead of meso I'd keep talkingand as the other person got more stonedthey'd get more paranoid and self-consciousso they'd say lessso I'd say moreand then after a certain point I'd realize that the other personhasn't contributed to the conversation in like, twenty minutesbut they were still listening, they were still interestedand there were other people, and they were watching andlistening and interested tooand I'm standing upand gesturing wildlyand talking really fastand I've been doing this for some timeand I could take all this inand still come back to the original point

and then I'd thinkmanif I could get some of this on paperI might have something

Jesus was a fringe performerhe traveled up and down his countrytelling his ideas to groups of peopleoften in the form of storiesand his crowds were probably about the size of a fringeaudience

he was born and raised in a country occupied and dominatedby the most powerful and influential culture in the history ofhuman civilization up to that point

now, in case any of you are worried that I've let my minorfame on the fringe go to my headalong with thissupposed "Jesus symbolism" I've twisted outof my life storyand have come to think I actually am Jesusreincarnated or otherwiselet me be the first to reassure youyou're rightI doI amI am the messiahI am the resurrectionI am the son of God

and I'm thirty-three!

Robertson Davies felt you had to be at least the same age as awriter to really appreciate a bookso he'd reread a novel by Charles Dickens when he was theexact same age Dickens had been when he wrote itand he said he'd get something entirely different out of it thanwhen he'd first read it when he was seventeenand he said Dickens was such a genius, he'd reread the samenovel when he was decades older than Dickens had been whenhe diedand get something different again

I was describing this to a friend oncecuz it sounded like such an interesting thing to dothe only part that didn't work for me was Dickensnever been into Dickensbut the concept isn't specific to Dickens at allyou could do that with anyone

so I said to my friend, if you were ever to do something likethatwho would you choosewhose work would be significant enough in your lifewho would be your... totem figures

who would be on the Sgt. Pepper's album cover of your lifewho would be on your own personal Mt. Rushmore

and this idea stayed with meand I kept thinking about it

and later I thoughtif you had your own Mt Rushmoreand looked at the faces, all specific to youwhat do they have in commonand what does that say about you

on that first fringe tour a company did a play they'd adaptedfrom the writings of Charles Bukowskia writer I'd vaguely heard ofI sat watching it in a made-up venue in downtown Saskatoonall this raw, simple language just pouring over mejust a guy talking about his lifewith brutal honestymaking the clay of everyday life... artI didn't know you could do that...

I got back to Victoria dead broke from that first tour and triedto find some Bukowski to readthe university library didn't have anyit had all been stolen!used bookstores never had himnew bookstores often didn't stock himbut I got to know which ones didI couldn't afford to buy the booksso I'd go in and stand by the shelf, just read a poem or twoand take what I needed

and there was this one poem that just killed me, titled Historyof a Tough Motherfuckerso with a title like that, I thought was gonna be about Bukowskihimselfor about a boxeror a barroom brawlerit was about a cata cross eyedbent spinechunk missing out of one eartailless alley catthat Bukowski befriendshe starts feeding himthe cat comes over regularlyone day a friend comes by to visit and accidentally runs thecat overBukowski rushes him to the vetthe vet X-rays himsays he'll never walk againbut his back was broken once before, you can see it healed,somehowand he used to have a tail, it must've gotten cut offand look – someone shot him, you can see the pellets are stillin himhe writes him a prescriptionBukowski takes the cat homelays him on the bathroom floorcat can't walk, can't moveBukowski sits on the bathroom floor with him all summera long, hot summergiving him the pillsdipping his finger in the waterbowl, bringing it to the cat'smouth to lick offover and over againone day the cat tries to walkhe gets halfway up, wobbles like a drunk, and falls down, flaton his facehe looks upmakes perfect eye contact with Bukowski from that positionand Bukowski sayscome onyou can do itthe cat tries againand....makes itBukowski saysyou know the restnow he's walking againfightingcool as everand journalists come by to interview himask him about his literary influencesand he holds up his crosseyed bent spine tailless alley catand saysthis!I'm influenced by this!by what happens!and the journalists look at each otherthey don't understandbut the cat knowsBukowski knowsthey both know it's all bullshit

George Carlin.

Sketch by TJ Dawe

poets are outsidershow many people are genuinely into poetry?George Carlin said more people write poetry than read itand Bukowski never cared for the company of other poets

comedians are outsidersa comedian stands separate from the audiencea comedian stands outside of society and notices things no oneelse doesand says what's the deal with that?and George Carlin was never part of any comedy scene

there's almost no audience for instrumental guitar musicand John Fahey felt no kinship with the folk music community

teachers are outsidersever have the experience when you were in school of seeingone of your teachers in the supermarket, or at the mall?ughh...what are you doing here?and principals are outsiders amongst teachers

on that first fringe tourright when my fears and anxieties were getting the worst ofmeI reread The Hobbitand Watership Downand they gave me what I needed

totem myths are good for thatthat's kind of what they're forto give you that spark of hope right when you need it the most

Bukowski wrote about all his years of working horrible jobshow he thought to himself oncedon't give them everythingkeep something for yourselfeven just the tiniest bita spark can set a whole forest on fire

people rarely read a book a second time, thougheven a favouritemuch less a third or a fourth timeI've already read itI know what happenswhy would I read it again?

simultaneously, people will readily admit to having badmemoriesthe most frequent compliment any actor gets is the one thatmeans the absolute least to them:How Do You Remember All Those Lines?

and people will readily admit to not remembering what theyreadeven with their favourite bookmaybe they'll remember the storyvaguelyor the main charactersort ofor whatever it was that made them think "this is my favouritebook"

but read the whole thing again?years later, after I've forgotten so many of the details?after I've grown and changed and I'd look at the thing with awhole new perspective?

(shakes head vigourously)I've already read itI know what happens

we reveal ourselves with every preferencewe can't help but gravitate toward certain thingseverybody's got favouritesno one's into everything equally

your favourite character on Lostor on Buffyor on Sex and the City

your favourite story in the Gospelsor in the Old Testamentyour favourite prophetyour favourite saintyour favourite Zen parableyour favourite episode of The Brady Bunch

have you ever dressed up as someone or something for morethan one Halloweenor wanted to

your favourite actoryour favourite athleteyour favourite wrestler

the pictures you have on your wallsthe albums you never get tired ofthe songs you can play on guitaror would if you couldthe movies you can lip sync

have you ever been into someone or something before anyoneelseor after everyone else lost interestor that everyone else never got into at all

why thatwhy themwhat are the patternswhat do they say about youso I'd clack away at the keys on that old typewriterwhen I filled up a sheet, I'd take it outdrunk with itin love with itand put it face down on an ever growing pile next to thetypewriterput in a new sheetand keep on writingfilling sheet after sheet after sheetspewing shit outjust cuz it felt good

and then I graduatedwith a BFAand couldn't get a job at a gas stationmuch less any acting or writing workprobably didn't help that I was too chickenshit to get out thereand auditionVictoria was hard place to get a day job back then

I moved into a moldy basement suiteI lived on welfare

I kept readingI kept writing

George Carlin did one man showshe played theatres and concert halls

George Carlin stand-up.

Sketch by TJ Dawe

not comedy clubshe wasn't part of a bill of six or seven comediansit was just him, writing and performing his own stuff – he wasthe show

John Fahey did one man showsjust him on stagepicking awaytaking the audience on a ridehis albums are one man shows like that tooit's one voice, going all over the placechanging the mood and the temporeincorporating themesexploring themestaking themes apart

Bukowski did poetry readings in the seventiesand not part of a night of spoken wordjust him on stage in a theatre, concert hall or night clubwith a deska mica sheaf of poemsand a fridge full of beer on stageas soon as he didn't need the money anymore he stoppeddoing 'em

his books are like one man showsthe poems are autobiographicalthey're often arranged chronologically, with what part of hislife they deal with, so there's an arc in the bookand the poems are spare, they're easy to readI can read a book of his poems in an hour or two or three, likewatching a movie

my dad did one man showsin a gym, mic in handwriting his own materialdirecting himselfprobably never thinking of it in those terms at all

so fighting huge clouds of fear and self-doubt I wrote a oneperson showand put it on in my old theatre departmentand then I wrote another oneand put it on at the Victoria Fringe

I learned from each script as I wentfeeling my wayI'd never taken a writing classI didn't know what I was doingI didn't follow w any theoriesI had no mentorI just tried to write the kind of thing I'd find interesting if Iwere sitting in the audience, watching

I laid the lines of each monologue out on the page likeBukowski poemstrying to capture the rhythm in the layoutI still do

Peter Dawe–assembly.

Sketch by TJ Dawe

and then I wrote another showand booked myself a full fringe tourMontreal to VancouverI was twenty-threeseemed the thing to doI'd done a fringe tour once beforeI knew the circuitand where else would I get something on its feet?who'd give a chance to an unknown like me?

I had big dreamsI had great expectations, in spite of everything

Carlin was a language manhe'd dissect clichés and euphemisms and redundancies andoxymoronshe'd talk about the significance of languagewhat the words and expressions we choose reveal about us asa cultureand as individualswe think, largely, in languagelanguage reveals thoughthe'd sometimes do these long intricate routinesvirtuosic pieces of writing and memory and deliverythat make you laugh and think and change the way you look atthe world and hold your breath and say how does he do that?How does he remember all those lines?

he'd call himself an entertainer, never an artistbut he'd deliberately show his liberal, freethinking audiencetheir prejudices and sacred cowsand then take 'em across that line

I used to develop a given piece of material imagining it was aCarlin bithow would George say this?what would he do with this idea?I still do

so how do I find out who my totems' totems are

John Faheylook at whose songs he playedread his liner notesread his bookshe's got two booksthey're obscure, but they're out there

in Bukowski's poems and novels and stories he talks extensivelyabout his favourite writersand how he discovered themand which of their stuff he liked best

George Carlin, in his stand-up, would tell you all about hispetsabout drivingabout the contents of his fridgebut he'd never tell you about his journey as a comedianor his cocaine addiction in the seventiesor his long, happy marriageeven in his bookshe's got three booksyou've got to hunt down interviews and articles for thatbut he did write an extensive timeline of his life on his website: georgecarlin.com

my dad doesn't talk about his lifebut he'll readily tell you stories about his totem figuresnot that he calls them thatthey're mostly musiciansStan RogersJohn Hartfordand he originated an award in my old high school called thePrincipal's Inspiration Awardwhich came from him watching this guy from our school runthe steeplechase in the lower mainland finals track meetthe steeplechase is five times around the trackwith hurdles so big you don't jump over them – you jumponto them and vault yourself offand one of 'em has a water pit so big even Olympic runnerscan't clear itso the gun goes offthe runners runand this guy from our school jumps over the first hurdle –tripsfalls on his facegets up, keeps runningnext hurdle – trips, falls on his facegets up, keeps runningnext hurdle – trips – into the water pityou know the restmy dad sitting in the stands,watching this guyso inspired he originated an award to commemorate theoccasionand to be able to tell the story at the awards banquet that year

as a graduation present when I got my BFAmy parents bought me an acoustic guitar of my choicethat one(points to the one from preshow)

later I mail ordered a John Fahey instruction booklater I found some more transcriptions of his songs on the net,mostly by fans, on his website: johnfahey.com

I can now play twenty John Fahey songsit's the only thing I play when I pick up a guitarit's been like that for years noweach of them took me a very long time to learnand you don't pick up too many chicks at a party by playingJesus is a Dying Bed MakerI don't go to parties where people play guitars anymoreanywayI play cuz it feels goodit's meditativeit's fulfillingI get to know each song a hundred times better than I didbefore I could play itand then when I hear Fahey play the original – wow...and I'm participating in the world of John Fahey!it's like shaking hands with Jesus

so that second fringe tour – the first with my own material –was a real battlethe car I was touring in starting making a funny noise aroundBanffbut I had to make my tech rehearsal in MontrealI pressed onby the time I brought it to a mechanic it turned out it neededa new axleand a new radiatorthe bill came to sixteen hundred bucks

if I'd had it fixed in Banff, it would have been twenty-five bucksI had a stage manager with me doing some of the workwho I'd promised to pay a measly fifty bucks a showin some cities she made more than I did

no one remembered me from the previous tourthat had been four years beforehadn't been my showI had no automatic audienceI didn't get any advance presssometimes didn't get reviewed at all

my show had an abstract title and an abstract conceptI couldn't describe it in ten words or lessso I had to do another long song and dance for every flier Ihanded outand I handed out a lot of fliersI played to tiny crowds most of the time anyway

I had a set: a big pile of empty cardboard boxes which I had toscrounge from recycling bins in every cityI'd stand on a chair and do a flip in the air and smash into them,three times a show, and rebuild the crash pad as I monologuedI'd have to replace some of them within the run, if they losttheir resiliencesometimes I'd overestimate their resilienceand when I'd jump on them the boxes would flatten and –smack – I'd land on the floor on my tailboneand have to keep going with the show, as if everything wasfine...

I'd do my photocopying and postage before I'd have breakfastand sometimes have nothing left for breakfast

I was too shy and too busy to socializetoo broke to celebrateand there was too much to do, anywaybut then things started to get a little betterthey started to turn aroundI got some good reviewspeople started comingI made enough to pay my parents back for the loan to get thecar fixedand right at that momentI got mono mononucleosismimicking tonsillitisthe worst of both worldsa disease mimicking another disease?!what the fuck is that?I've never heard of thatbut it was happening to me...I couldn't lift my arm off the bedcouldn't swallow my own saliva, much less eatcould take any medicineand there is no medicine for mono – no treatment at allall I could do was listen to people say"oh – you have mono? I had that once, I was in bed for sixmonths"I emptied my bank account and bought a one way plane ticketback to Vancouvercrashed on my parents' couchkicked it in two weeks, and picked up the tour again

cuz there were always moments on stage when I could justfeel it workingeven if there were only six people thereit was happeningthe show was coming acrossmy own ideasmy own wordsmy own wayand those six people were getting itI knew it,and they knew itit was a godly feelingI felt sixty feet tallit was more than worth everything I'd done to get thereand everything I'd have to do to get back

Bukowski described the final time his father beat himhe'd paste him across his bare ass in the bathroom with his bigleather razor stropand one time, all of a sudden, it just stopped workinghe was still doing itit was still connectingit still hurtbut it just didn't mean anything anymoreand he knew itand his father knew itand the sink knew itand the tapand the tuband the toilet knew itand his father stood there, breathing heavilyconfusedBukowski hadn't done anythinghadn't resisted at allit didn't make sense

and Bukowski saidyou can do that some more if you want toand his father saidDon't you ever talk to me like that again!!

he hung up the razor stropleft the roomand never touched him again

so the fringe tour became the hub of my yearthe dominant institution of my lifeI applied to every festival and did every fringe I could, everysummerevery tour built on top of every previous tourso every year I had to top myselfand every year I had a deadline

when the tour was done I'd scurry off to some day jobsave uplive cheapfill out fringe applicationsmail off a cheque with each one – five or six or seven hundredbucksand I'd come home, broke and tired and discouraged after aneight hour day doing something I hatedand have to write

I didn't write every daythere were days and weeks and months when I didn't write athing, and hated myself for itthere still are

my totems are all artists or characters in works of artthat's no coincidenceI'm an artistthis whole map would probably look a lot different if this wasthe personal mythology of a doctoror a lawyeror just someone who didn't respond to art that much

my totems are all maledescribing the concept to friends I've found people's totemsare frequently their own gendernot always, but oftenwomen more often have men among their totems than theother way aroundwomen go through the school system, and you can't do thatwithout reading a lot of books by menmost political figures are menthe Bible was written by menmost movies and TV shows are written, produced and directedby men,with men in the lead roleseven a lot of chick flicks are made by menwomen have always told their stories on a one to one basis, butthey've only started telling their stories on a bigger scale in thelast century or soguys have to overcome a fair bit of social conditioning to readbooks by womenI've only started reading books by women in the last six orseven yearsnot long enough for the ten year yardstick

I came up with this whole Totem Figures idea when I was thirtyand at thirty I found myself with a ten year yardstickI only really started making my own decisions when I reachedabout twentyand as an adult something comes into your lifeand it can't be explained away just by the fact that it's popularit's yoursit speaks to youit feeds youit gives you what you needand you can't imagine ever being without it

and then it fades away

you notice this, looking back over ten yearsI'm sure I'll notice it even more looking back over thirty yearsor sixty years

but some things don't fadesome things keep going on strongand threaten to stay with you for the rest of your life

which oneswhat are the patterns

I did my show Labrador at the Adelaide Fringe in 2000Adelaide, Australiaonly ever having done it a handful of times, eight monthsbefore

Labrador is a monologue about touring to Newfoundland andLabrador with a children's theatre companyand having that moment where you catch a glimpse of yourselfin the mirrorand for the first time in your life can't deny how much youlook like one of your parentsin my case, my dadso to deal with this realization I go off to a bar in Labrador Cityto get hammeredand I meet a distant relative I'd never heard ofwho tells me a family secret about who I am and where I comefromand then I admit the whole thing's made upnothing happened in Labradorand my dad's side of the family is still a complete mystery tomemaybe that's why I made all that shit up in the first place

I didn't say that last part in the showthat's just me thinking about it, years later

but in Adelaide, I was still pretty new at this gameand just terrifieda long ways from homeoverwhelmed by the enormity of what I was trying to dowho the hell did I think I was?

I paced back and forth, backstagetrying to gather up the courage to go out there when the lightswent downhonestly not knowing if I'd find it

and I thought about John FaheyI prayed to himcalled him St. John FaheyI wasn't really prayingI didn't ask him for anythingand he was still alive, thenI just thought about his originalityhis honestyhis creativityand his courage

the word fringe means the edgethe outside

John Fahey–old.

Sketch by TJ Dawe

fringe theatre is the outside of the theatre worldfringe companies don't get fundingdon't get taken seriously by the mainstreamor even get noticed by the mainstreamfringe shows rarely get remountedor produced againor publishedmost fringe artists don't get much theatre work outside thefringevery few lastand very few are remembered by anyone but the handful ofpeople who saw their showsand most people's memories ain't that great

on a fringe tour you're in someone else's housein someone else's cityin a best case scenario you'll be a star in that city for twoweeks, to a few thousand peopleand then you're goneif you come back any other time of year, you're anonymousall over again

you bond quickly and intensely with people you won't seeagain till next year, or ever againthe roster of performers changes constantlythe staff changesthe volunteers changethe audiences change

the fringe circuit's been going really well for meI don't poster anymoreI don't flierI don't go back to a day job when the tour's done

but every new show's a death and rebirthevery time I have to go into the belly of the whaleand every time it's worse than every previous year

and every tour brings new challenges and problems I neversee comingevery time I reach a point where I seriously wonder if I'mgonna come out aliveand every time I seem to juuuuust make it

and if there's anywhere I'd feel at home, wouldn't it be on thefringe circuit?if there's any group of people you'd think would be "mypeople" – wouldn't it be the people on the fringe?but the more I tourthe less I find myself hanging out

I'm still working on learning to lucid dreamI'm an insomniac and a potheadit's about as bad of a double-whammy as you could have forlearning that particular skillbut still, I've done it maybe a dozen times

in my first lucid dream I woke up in the dream world andrealized I wasn't going to literally wake upand I thoughthey hey!let's see what I can dothere was a tree stumpI scooped up a handful of dirt near the base of itcupped it in my handsand willed it to changeI was testing my dream superpowersI concentratedcome oncome on....after about a minute I opened my hands

it was still dirt

so I tried againand this time I felt it movingmorphingafter another minute I opened my handsand I was holding the biggest, reddest most beautifulstrawberry I'd ever seenit was the size of an appleI took a biteit was unbelievably delicious

a few years ago some of the other fringe performers and Istarted organizing late night cabarets in various cities acrossthe circuitget a bunch of people togetherdoing shit that isn't in their showand doesn't promote their showput it on at midnightshake it up, take a chance, have a good time

for the one in Saskatoon I came up with a hook:as many companies as wanted to join would write their showtitle and their password for a free ticket on a piece of a paperfold it in halfdrop it in a hatand then we'd all draw from the hat anonymouslyand you had however many days from the draw until thecabaret to see the show you'd pickedand come up with a three minute rendition of itit was called Spoof Nightthat first year, half the companies in the whole festivalparticipated

I administrated the drawcame up with a running orderwent around to line-ups, promoting the event, handing outfliers for itI checked in with the performers, asking how their bit wascoming, making sure they were still doing itI saw as many of the shows being spoofed beforehand as I couldI did a bit, and someone did mea few companies spoofed me in their bit, actually

and on the night of the cabaret I had a late show myselfso I got there after it had already startedand I slipped in to the back of the venueand saw people satirizing what was happening around thefestival, onstage and offsaw the people being spoofed take it in exactly the right spiritsaw some people do spoof bits that were better then their ownactual shows

and I felt this warm glow welling up inside me about howwell the thing was going and how much it was bringing peopletogetherand then I thoughthow's that for following in the old man's footstepsit's the Mad Dash 4 Cash...

there are a whole lot of outsiders out thereevery sports movie's about an underdog or a team of underdogs

The Bad News BearsHoosiersRocky

almost every movie period

Forrest Gump8 MilePretty Woman

every fairy taleevery novelevery story

The Catcher in the RyeAmerican BeautyUgly Betty

okay, maybe not every novel and movie and storybut a lotand some major ones

Robin HoodThe MatrixNineteen Eighty-four

in the Old Testament the Hebrews are enslaved in Egyptenslaved in Babylonwandering in the desert for forty yearsconstantly in conflict in their own landalways on the move

The Karate KidThe Breakfast ClubAmelie

in the old spaghetti westerns Clint Eastwood's character's somuch of an outsider he doesn't even have a name

My Fair LadyI, ClaudiusCharlie Brown

these are some insanely sweeping generalizations, I readilyadmitbut we're all ultimately individualsand does anyone feel like The Man?Cyrano de BergeracTaxi DriverBoratdoes anyone ever sayI'm part of the dominating forceI fit right inI'm completely secure with my position, all the time

The Fight ClubOne Flew Over the Cuckoo's NestThe Devil Wears Prada

maybe the artists who created these stories felt like outsidersthemselvesbut how would their stuff get big if people didn't relate to it?

Lawrence of ArabiaThe Handmaid's TaleThe Sound of Music

maybe all of these interpretations have a lot more to do withthe person coming up with them than anything else

The Grapes of WrathThe Wind-up Bird ChronicleRudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

since leaving home at 18, I've moved on an average of onceevery four monthsnot including long stints of touring and traveling

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance KidThe Hitchhiker's Guide to the GalaxyMr Bean

we reveal ourselves with every preference

A Clockwork OrangeThe PartyEdward Scissorhands

with what we keep and what we let fade away

The Shawshank RedemptionLost in TranslationBeauty and the Beast

and there've been plenty of times when I've been the one at aparty doing all the talkingas I said, that's how I got doing one man shows in the firstplaceand there are times when I fit right in and don't mind at all

Peter Dawe and TJ Dawe.

Sketch by TJ Dawe

a few years ago I was living a matter of blocks my old highschoolmy dad had moved on to another school by thenthe new principal had been a teacher when I was studentone of the younger, cooler, teachers – he was a good guyI stopped in one day and said hellowe got talkingand he asked if I'd do one of my shows for the studentssurehe didn't call it a little skit, so I agreedhe wanted Labradorokayso a week later, there I wasin that same old gym where my dad had done all thoseassembliessame audience configurationsame bleacherssame school uniformssame basketball hoops and scoreboard on the walland I was about to talk for an hour, to tell them all a storyabout my relationship with my dadpossibly using the exact same microphone he used to use

and they surprised methey brought my dad in to introduce the showand he described my career to the studentsread from one of my reviewsheld up one of my awardsand told them all how proud he was of me

there just isn't enough time to talk about every person andstory and influencethis has been a portion of the Mt. Rushmore of my lifethe Sgt. Pepper's version of the show would probably take aweek, nonstopand I could do it, too!

Catch 22 – that's my favourite book, by the wayfirst read that around my nineteenth birthdaythat's where I got this whole scrambled-up-order-that-comes-together-at-the- end thingand where I first learned the power of reincorporationthey're pretty much the same thingI learned these things by osmosismost of what I've learned in my life has been by osmosisby doingputting it into words long after the fact

anyone else could have these exact same people and stories astotems and draw entirely different meanings from themor draw the same meaningseveryone's mythology is their own

and all of those people asking me what I'm really gonna dohave got a pointwhich is I guess what makes the question so annoyingso what am I gonna do nowwill I tour the fringe for the rest of my daysas challenging and fulfilling as it isor will I work on some of those other ideas and step out intoa bigger worldcan I do both?do I have the energy?do I have the guts?

blackout

(blackout)