No more drama

Let us have no more drama.

A cry out to the world, a prayer on my yoga mat, an appeal to whatever god may be listening out there, a challenge to the people I bump up against in my day.

Let us not believe that what happens in a hot, dusty city far away does not affect us. Let us not continue to float, blissed out and complacent, convinced that bad things only happen in other places, that those chickens aren't comin' home to roost, that what happens in the MidEast is only going to become an issue once the price of gas soars to three bucks a gallon and we can't afford to fill up our goddamned SUV's.

Let us not be fooled and frightened by the media (CNN, I'm looking at you here, with all of your endless looped footage of Hezbollah training camps) into thinking that somehow the peoples of Iran and Syria and Lebanon are the enemy. I'm guessing most of them want what you and I want, probably even less: I'm willing to bet they're not concerned (as I am at present) with getting new Lululemon crop pants or checking out the deep shoe discounts at Shoon, but maybe with, oh I don't know, some of the more fundamental human questions. Like safety, peace, being alive to watch their children grow up, not being bombed back into the stone-age by a distant and almighty and highly unpredictable foreign power.

And the thing that makes me the most angry, the thought that torments me - greater than my fears about global warming (see the movie Inconvinient Truth, and see it now, please people), greater than my worries about moving overseas in September and selling off all of our stuff - the constant gnawing despair that I hold at bay with friends, dinners out, books, movies, smoking a bowl, drinking, dancing, and sometimes just plain fucking putting it ignore for the sake of my sanity, is this:

That I can do nothing about it.

I feel fat today, too. But I'm not going to be a drama queen about it.

Flying solo

Apparently Mrs. Clooney, my partner in crime, has locked herself out of our joint blog-child.
I am suffering seperation anxiety and weeping into my pancakes.

Until she remembers her password, good people, it falls to me to regale you all with anecdotes, amuse you with my bon-mots, and generally make an ass of myself.

Not a problem - on with the show!

As we're shortly decamping for the UK here at Casa del Burnso (mostly for the yoghurts, but somewhat to purse post-grad acting course), I've been editing my wardrobe, and have made a most shocking discovery.

I have 20 pairs of shoes.

I had to sit. I was gob-smacked. Although the person I live with regularily accuses me of having too many shoes, I would have sworn on a stack of bibles that I had no more than ten pairs. Well, I would have been a big fat liar. And I've always prided myself on be less acquisitive, less consumerist, less of a shoe-mad whore than other women. Well the blinders are off now folks. And the view ain't pretty. I see visions of this escalating until one day, I become my mother, whose shoes are currently rallying amongst themselves to be recognized as their own independant city-state.

I just took 3 pairs to Goodwill.

But the problem is, I still don't have any shoes to wear. I buy shoes like I buy clothes - as if tomorrow I have to attend the Academy Awards. The result? Tons of vintage frocks, floor length ballgowns, and sparkly, high-heeled, CFM shoes. (CFM, by the way, are the kind of shoes which my mother-in-law, white wine in hand, refers to with a wink as "come fuck me's".)

Nothing practical. Nothing wearable.

Proving yet again that I much prefer the fantasy world to the real one.

Getting 'Head

Last night, I achieved a life-long goal and saw Radiohead live.

I have been a huge, HUGE fan ever since I was fifteen, when I used to lie on the sofa in semi-darkness, staring at the celing in adolescent melancholia, with "Karma Police" or "Street Spirit" looping endlessly in the background, and my dad banging on the floor with a broom handle yelling, "TURN DOWN THAT MOANING!" Lead singer Thom Yorke had the voice of an angel and his music was the soundtrack to the film of my life - albeit a moody, obtuse, European-sort of film, featuring youth with shaggy hair-cuts, plenty of rainy locals, and lots of coffee and existential chat. I vowed to see them live or die trying.

Achieving tickets, as any of you fellow Radiohead'ers know, is no easy thing. One, the band hates touring. So they do it infrequently. When they do tour, it's usually in some tiny European venue like an ancient Roman colesseum in the south of France. This recent tour, for example, has exactly two (count 'em! two!) whole dates in Toronto...and they're playing the Hummingbird. The Hummingbird. Which seats about 27 people. So getting tickets has been, let us say, somewhat of a mission.

But we got them. Or rather, Mr. Burns got them, with the help of e-bay, persistance, Puralator, and a recently acquired (and now seriously dented) credit card. He says I now owe him big time the next time U2 come to town.

But what a show. Oh, what. A. Show. I've never been to a concert where the entire audience was swaying gently back and forth in harmony to show their devotion. Thom Yorke and the boys sounded incredible. Best of all was Thom's frenetic, adorable, spastic little dance kicks. That boy has ENERGY - wonder if it's his reported vegan/raw food diet. There may not be much to that one skinny body, but boy can it move. There was no phoning it in here - that boy was givin' 'er. And he has a surprisingly deep speaking voice..although a crazy-thick accent. He didn't say much, and what he did say was pretty much mumbled and not understood. Mr. Burns wondered if Thom had recently been punched in the mouth, but I tend to think it's just how he is.

And they did three encores. Bless them.

On the way home, Burnsie and I amused ourselves by thinking up alternate concert formats for Radiohead, which included:

1) Thom Yorke changing into a different sparkly outfit between each number
2) the opening act being Corn or Limp Bizkit
3) the band coming out on stage in a clown car
4) Thom Yorke sailing out over the crowd à la Joseph and the Amzing technocoloured dream-coat
5) Thom Yorke singing "Karma Police" whilst kittenishly showing off his legs from atop a giant swing

I remain, Radiohead, your devoted disciple.

I'm feeling very un-(bacterially) cultured...

What the hell is up with yogurt in this country?
I was recently in England, where I was exposed to all manner of mouth-watering and fantastic flavours of yogurt: fig and greek honey, plum, apple pie (delicious, people, delicious!), damson, and rhubarb. Even in low fat flavours!
Yogurt, in short, to get genuinely excited about and pledge life-long devotion to.
And now, have just returned from Loblaws, where the most exciting flavour on offer appeared to be banana. In disgust, I've just eaten a tepid and unsatisfying cherry Silouette.
What's behind this national short-coming? Are we to blaim the North American obssession with dieting (which the "would you like some toast with your pancakes?" British definitely do NOT share) and, hence, elimiting taste?
Do we feel we have no national fruits worthy of specialty yogurt status? What about maple yogurt? What about gooseberry? What about tortiere yogurt? (Ok, maybe not tortiere yogurt.)
Or is there some place where one can get such exotic flavours, and it's only me who is in the dark?
People of Canada, enlighten me.

In the Beginning

Imagine yourself as a first year York University student.
You've travelled five thousand miles across this great country of ours in order to attend this august institution...only to discover that it's
a) not right downtown in the heart of it all, as you'd been led to believe, but instead marooned in the middle of a power-line waste-land
b) a towering, sprawling tribute to the joys of concrete
c) you'll be spending your year living in a prison cell block isolation cell the size of a broom closet with astro-turf carpeting

So you can well imagine your mindset as you approach the Ross Buidling for your first class of your new year (at 8:30 am on goddamned Monday morning.)

The class - Theatre for Non-Majors, which you have mistakenly signed up for in the belief that it is geared towards people who love theatre, who thrill to their very core for theatre, who will gather to worship theatre and discuss it with enthusiasm and excitement and reverence.
Instead - it's the driest, most unimaginative, cut and paste history of theatre as an art form, taught by a wobbling jello like-woman named Lorna or Helmut or similar. Blobby-teacher is obviously unhappy with her life, and has decided that all she encounters will suffer because of it. This means you.

As she begins to drone on in what you will soon realize, with sinking heart, is her accustomed mode, you also realize that the orange plastic molded chair you have taken is the least ergonomically-designed seat in the history of seats. Which means you will spend all future Monday mornings bored, sleepy, and uncomfortable. Interminable visions of mediocrity and frustration yawn out before you. You begin to sweat. Panic dries your mouth instantly. Your brain screams, are you kidding me?? I came all this way for this??? How in God's name will I be able to endure this for an entire scholastic year???

....and then, someone slinks into the orange bucket chair next to you. And starts unwrapping a bagel, uncaring that the crinkle of paper disturbs Blobby's mono-drone. And you sense immediately, with those eerie tingling spidey-senses, that you have just found yourself an ally...

And thus beginneth the unholy alliance of the creators of "Stuart is Dead"! Yee-haw! Welcome to the jungle, you lucky party people!