Victoria's Return

September 9 2004

  Festive Folk,

  The fanfare of the Edinburgh festival evapourated the moment the last show struck its set.  Walking the Royal Mile the next day it was amazing to see the streets all but deserted, save a few straggling tourists taking advantage of all of the discounted unsold scotch and woolen garments.  My flight for Vancouver left on Wednesday the 1st, which gave me just one night to collect myself and catch up on sleep before catching the ferry over to Victoria for my first show there on the 2nd.  I never thought I would experience extreme culture shock coming home after just a month, but there is no better term for exchanging the frenzy of Edinburgh in August for the sleepy streets and general lethargy of Victoria in September.

  My venue in Victoria was another shocker, an enormous Elementary school gymnasium with two hundred creaky wooden chairs gathered around a four-foot raised stage.  This space could easily have fit six hundred people, and the ceilings were so high that my puny voice echoed around the cavernous room - none of the intimacy and feng shui of C Central.  My first show last Thursday drew about twenty-two people, and I was so jet-lagged that I went straight to bed afterwards.  I soon found that the ripples of my success in Scotland had not quite made their way around the world, and I continued to sell twenty or so tickets at each show for the next few days.  Also, I didn't get a single mention or review in the press, which I thought was odd considering "The Rap Canterbury Tales" was developed partially at UVic.  I wasn't complaining, however, since the quiet Victoria Fringe allowed me some much-needed rest.  I slept in, read a book, went thrift store shopping, and basically just recharged, even going to see a bunch of other Fringe shows.  For those of you in Vancouver, I recommend Jono Katz' hilarious one-man show, "Cactus", one of those performances that leave your cheek muscles sore from laughing too much.

  As uneventful as it sounds, Victoria did provide a few firsts of note.  One of my shows, occurring at 11:00 pm on a Sunday, had an audience of five.  When I walked out on stage to see those five faces in the front row, with the one hundred ninety-five empty seats all around them, my first thought was "this is going to be painful".  However, they turned out to be the most energetic and responsive five people I have had yet, putting audiences of over fifty to shame with their cheers and laughter.  One of them had even made the trip all the way over from Vancouver to see me, and my entire audience and I went out for a beer after the show.  I also had my largest audience yet in Victoria; my last show drew eighty people, pretty much covering my entry fee and expenses in one night.

  Then, after six shows in five days, I got up Tuesday morning, caught the first ferry over to Vancouver, and went straight to the airport to fly to San Francisco, my new Fringe haunt.  One of the other shows in C Central back in Edinburgh, "Bang", was put on by a cast from the Bay Area, and I am now crashing on the couch of one of the actors.  The San Francisco Fringe is located in an area that has been described as "the backside of downtown", which makes it affordable to rent theatre space, and provides performers with easy access to low-cost drugs and sex.  Directly across from the Fringe Club Café is an all-male strip club, and the streets are alive with hustlers and various other colourful street folk, America at its best. 

  My venue here is brilliant, however, seating sixty-seven and laid out almost exactly like C Central in Edinburgh.  Yesterday was my first show, and I had twenty people in, which I thought was fantastic considering I had just arrived and hadn't promoted myself at all.  My one attempt to go out flyering found me breaking down the concept of "The Rap Canterbury Tales" for a group of homeboys hustling hiphop tapes near Union Square, and I ended up spending most of my so-called promotional time in a freestyle cipher with Hell-Razor X and a few other local rhyme-sayers.  As odd as it is to be in a Fringe Festival in the ghetto, I must say I am excited to be here; just from scanning the local concert listings I find there are shows featuring three of my rap heroes, Michael Franti, Gift of Gab and Chali 2na, all this coming weekend.     

  I also have another intriguing challenge coming up mid-way through the festival that I thought I'd share, something completely different.  Way back in May, when I was in Brighton, I got an email from something called the "Canadian Millenium Scholarship Foundation" which is basically a 2.5 billion dollar Federal Government slush fund for supporting post-secondary education.  They have special scholarships called the Excellence Awards, which are given to the hand-picked best and brightest young minds in Canada based on a rigorous committee selection process.  They receive almost ten thousand applications and give out just a few hundred of these awards nationwide; the "Excellence Laureate" get their undergraduate education paid for and get flown to Ottawa once a year to participate in the Millenium Scholarship Conference - you with me so far?  The Millenium Scholarship Conference, entitled "Think Again 2004" has a theme this year of "Revolution/Evolution" and features presentations and workshops from Canada's most innovative thinkers, mostly academics and educators, for the further enlightenment of the three hundred or so "Excellence Laureates".  Anyway, they asked me if I would like to give a series of workshops on my Chaucer/Rap project and talk about the evolution of oral traditions and the current rhyme revolution coming out of Hiphop culture.

  What's most ironic about this invitation is that I could never have gotten the Excellence Award myself, since the selection process requires top marks, community leadership, extensive volunteering, and all kinds of other things that I shirked as an undergrad.  However, I was of course honoured to be asked to share my ideas with Canada's best and brightest; the only problem was that the conference runs from the 16th-18th of September, conflicting with the San Francisco Fringe Festival.  So, when I got this invitation back in Brighton I checked my San Francisco schedule and found that I had only a two-day window with no performances, so I wrote back to say I would have to decline.  That is, unless they could fly me from San Francisco to Ottawa on the afternoon of the 16th, schedule all of my workshops and performances for the 17th, and fly me back to San Francisco on the evening of the 18th in time for my show at the Fringe that night.  Amazingly, they wrote me back a few days later to say that this would be no problem, so next week I will be off to Ottawa to exchange views with the leaders of tomorrow, or so I'm told.

  This is definitely going to be one of the greatest opportunities of my tour, simply for the chance to meet and greet all of these brainiacs from across the country and offer them a piece of my mind.  Also, I am proud to say that this is the first time anyone has ever "flown me" anywhere, a gesture that carries a greater significance for me than simply the cost of the airfare (which I am sure I would have been happy to pay myself if it came down to it).  It puts a value on me and on my time that I am not used to, since everything I have done so far on this tour has been self-produced and organized.  Then, when I return on the 18th, I will have two more days of shows and then one day off to explore San Fran, and then my tour will conclude and I will return to Vancouver to sort out the next step.  In less than two weeks I will be back to normal, a jet-setter no more, but for now I'd better focus on the task at hand.  I'm off to Berkeley to put up some posters in the English Department and see if I can hunt down the profs covering Chaucer this fall.  All the best to all of you, and stay tuned for the results of the conference and the San Francisco Fringe.

 

baba