On Being a Stagewhore

Hi welcome to the brand new restaurant site for gourmets, we call it Hop the Pop a name not chosen by a highly paid focus group to evoke images of “energy”, “whimsy”, and “childhood” in you, the consumer with money who will give us a certain amount so we can pay off market survey researchers.

Hop the Pop is working on replacing this boring text with a full Flash page containing links to tons of PDF files, but in the meantime I’ve (I am the owner and head chef) I’ve put together our menu listing so hopefully you will immediately begin salivating and head down and buy some food because there are a zillion other new restaurants in this suddenly popular area that was reclaimed from the Portuguese and Italians and transformed into a foodie zone for the entire city so really if you could drop by I (the owner) and all my staff and family (the owners) would really appreciate it.

A double cheesburger with bacon served between grilled cheese sandwiches with mayonnaise served between two fish filets with heavy cream served between two honey-glazed doughnuts with onion rings served between two deep-fried Buffalo turkey breasts served with tomatoes served between two multigrain ciabatta buns.

We call it “The Programmer’s Breakfast” in honour of all those hard-working people in that high tech hub just an easy fifteen minute drive away, and really if you eat one of these it will give you enough energy to tackle the incredibly hard job of programming for the rest of the day.

Or maybe you’d prefer

Bacon strips on top of melted cheese on top of ground beef on top of sauteed onions and ketchup on top of spaghetti with a side order of roast potatoes and our signature “Grilled ’till Liquid” (TM) roasted sweet peppers.

We call it “The Businessman’s Breakfast” because of course you guys are also there just a short fifteen minutes drive away and did I mention we do take-out? Because we do. This is the breakfast that will get you ready for all those power deals of the day.

On a diet? Why not try the

Romaine lettuce + cheeze + tomatoes + ranch dressing (made in house from an old Portuguese recipe we found while demolishing the inside of this crappy old heritage building) + bacon + bacon + croutons + cheese + heritage tomatoes + our world-famous hand-made cream cheese and beet perogis (four per salad or super max it to get eight and some more bacon).

We call it “The Power Salad” for the health-loving power mover who still needs to keep going just not as badly as the programmer or businessman. Administrative assistants in the four blocks of buildings practically next door that house some of the finest software firms in the world will love this salad.

Don’t like all this fancy food, you say? We have

Burger on top of a burger on top of a burger on top of a burger on top of of of a burger on top of a slice of PROCESSED CHEESE (for patriotism!) on top of a burger on top of a blue plate.

We call it “The Blue Plate Special” for those who just want a simple Atkins-friendly, GI-friendly, Paeolithic-friendly meal but don’t want a lot of fancy cheeses and sauces on their blue plate, like on our other breakfasts. Construction workers, we made this for you in mind, so come on over soon please.

What’s that you say? You are a gourmet? You are in luck

Pizza dough covered with tomato sauce made from San Marzano tomatoes covered with mozzarella cheese made from the milk of virgin cows and blessed by the Pope or the Dalai Lama (please specify when ordering). Toppings are your choice of bechamel sauce, caviar, Perrier, edible gold leaf faux BMW or Mercedes logo (please specify when ordering), edible photograph of a trailer park, sliced Champagne grapes (double topping), black truffles, white truffles, truffle oil, that maggot cheese from Italy (with maggots, double topping), an edible gold leaf crown, bacalau, orphan tears with saffron (triple topping), and sundried tomatoes.

We call it “The Aristocrat”. Perfect for a well-balanced breakfast for the blue-blood venture capitalist who just got a bunch of money from selling off a startup firm, or even for a commercial banker. (I take special pride in this dish as it is my way of saying Grazie! to all those Italian families who helped make this a vibrant enough area to attract hipsters and ultimately us.)

Love the evironment?

Granola on a bed of rocks garnished with nuts and berries in an edible spruce bowl drenched in au pair soy milk and drizzled with black mint honey. “The Treehugger” which is surprisingly popular.

Or for brunch or breakfast

A bowl of pig fat garnished with a crispy slice of seared pork belly. “The Youthenizer”, it can be applied either internally or externally to revitalize yourself and your skin.

Hop the Pop. Currently open only for breakfast as none of the zillion other restaurants in this nabe are, so that’s great for us and you. If enough of you come, then we can start opening for lunch and (from your mouth to God’s ear!) for dinner. These recipes are nothing compared to what I have planned for a full set of meals.

Hop the Pop. The energetic, whimsical, child-like restaurant in the edge of that trendy food district.

WE SERVE COFFEE TOO. Albert’s mom.

Wow, what an amazing show I saw tonight.

Suddenly, Last Summer in the basement of The Magic Oven (a moderately upscale, highly organic pizza/pasta restaurant on the Danforth), produced by red light district.

It’s a challenging time for live theatre. (Has there been any time in the past thirty years when theatre people haven’t been saying that?) But no, it really is a challenging time for live theatre. Reduced funds from governments, reduced support from businesses, people watching Transformers movies and surfing the Web, etc.

How do you make theatre relevant to today’s audience? You can maybe say “Come tweet at our show, we’ve got three rows in the balcony just for you.” Which really only solves the problem of making theatre relevant for people who CAN’T enjoy themselves unless they can tweet or text their friends and family about how much fun they’re having.

Or, you can solve the problem in a brilliant way, by bringing the theatre to the community. You don’t want to travel across town to pay $75 and spend four hours of time to get to and from and watch a show? No problem, go to the basement of The Magic Oven around the corner. Or the Kiwanis Boys and Girls Club of Toronto in Cabbagetown. Or Alternative Grounds on Roncesvalles. Or…

What’s that, you say? You want to see ALL the productions? Well, the theatre companies involved are rotating around venues in each neighbourhood!

SO BRILLIANT!

It takes theatre back to its roots by making it part of the community. Which is where it all started back long ago. In fact, they say it way better than I can as part of their mandate:

BEYOND THE STAGE:
An evening in the theatre, like any form of entertainment, stands to be enriched through knowledge, familiarity, and interaction. The Tennessee Project is founded on the principle that audience outreach is an exciting and integral part of modern theatre that creates a more intimate and thrilling experience for everyone involved. Over the next few months, members of the Tennessee team will be getting to know each community. We will be volunteering at – and engaging with – local businesses, holding FREE events, opening up our rehearsals, hosting ‘bar banter’ nights and VIP launch events, staging readings at local libraries, hosting gallery showings, and bumping in to you on the street!

This solves the more essential problem of “How do you let people know theatre is still important to their lives.”

As to the show I saw tonight, I was only worried near the start when the dramatic music at the opening of the play was drowning out the actors (I was seated right in front of one of the speakers.) But after that, wow. Clever direction, superb acting, so good.

I am definitely going to check out more of their productions. And I need to say this is one of the most exciting production ideas I have seen around theatre in a long time.

The Tennessee Project Toronto.

Back when I was still taking acting classes, one of my teachers (David Switzer) passed along his explanation of why people were willing to tolerate huge salaries for sports players and Hollywood superstars. In effect, people are paying to watch them play, because as adults, they don’t feel entitled to play. (Sears and Switzer give really good courses, by the way. Unsolicited testimonial.)

Also, by extension, people are allowed to play along with them in a “trickle down” method of playing. Sports fans paint their faces and bellies blue and dress in Viking hats and wave plastic scimitars around, Hollywood fans shriek and cry when they see their favourite star live. [Disclaimer: Obviously I know nothing about the exact way sports fans dress up, but the general theory still holds.]

The strongest players, the ones who we wind up loving, are the low ego players. Their generosity makes us remember what generosity is. We can admire and praise the cold technical skills of the lone superstar, but honestly, we are never going to love that performer with the same level of trust as someone who loves the game above all.

I guess I wrote this to remind myself to seek out opportunities where the game is the important thing. And maybe convince you of the same thing.

Last night I had the pleasure and privilege of performing with my classmates from the Kate Ashby Academy at the Lower Ossington Theatre.

Our group was EVERYONESMIRANDAPROV because, well, there is a woman named Miranda in our class, and…

What a charge it was. The audience was fantastic, my classmates were fantastic, the musical genius of the keyboardist was fantastic…so magical!

And the HIMANDHERPROV after was equally magical. (Well…maybe I’m biased a bit towards my class. He he.)

It was the most fun I’ve had doing improv since my days of being El Santo Gordo.

Does this make me want to start acting/improvising again? Honestly, from what I can tell, the average age of an improviser in this town is 20. Not so good for me. Acting is a possibility, but I want to start getting paid for it.

Some interesting decisions to make. Meanwhile, I still have a script in draft 11 that needs finishing.

I started out in theatre as a stage manager for a company founded on strict Renaissance principles. This meant two lighting cues every show (lights up at the start, lights down at the end), and actors speaking at so many words per minute to make a five act play fit into two hours.

When I say strict, I mean according to the theories of the artistic director. They might have been accepted as doctrine in academic circles, or not. I didn’t care. When you’re in the role of stage manager, you learn to ignore such trivia so you can serve the larger task of not having actors kill each other.

However, the odd thing (even for me in my then great naivete about all things theatrical) was that the artistic director hated Shakespeare. Not enough to not program him into his seasons, but get him in private? Johnson, yes, Marlowe, yes, Middleton, yes, Rowley, yes, but Shakespeare?

Untalented hack. Overrated. And so on.

However, being exposed to a rep season of Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, I could tell, even with my limited knowledge, that Shakespeare was the better writer. Not that I didn’t enjoy The Spanish Tragedy, but it was melodramatic, and characters in it were about as deep as they needed to be for a melodrama. The Shakespeare characters, on the other hand, came across as real people.

So yes, for some people, Shakespeare sucks. Not me, though! Happy Birthday Shakespeare! 

The coffee shop has paired up with an ice cream place.

When you walk in, you no longer smell coffee. Instead, sugar molecules move from floating in the air and rappel up your nose hairs so they can punch you in your olfactory nerves.

Walls of sugar everywhere. Donuts to the left, ice cream and “mix-ins” to the right.

Mix-ins. Do you like chocolate chips? Then add some to your ice cream. Gummy worms? Toasted almonds? Pretzels? Coconut? Alsatians fur? Spoo? Grommets? Mix it on in, mix it on in.

A row of young women, wanting to grow much older, wait in line for their turn, giggling and talking with each other in a language I do not care to learn.

I get my black coffee and a sundried tomato pesto mozzarella garlic chili bagel and sit here, feeling superior.

This post was sort of prompted by this event. (It is also a change from the normal theatre activity posted here, so skip it if you’re so inclined.)

webOS is basically dead. So the developer announced no further support and development for his two main apps. Which is fine. But he also removed both of the apps from the app catalog. So if someone’s phone crashed and a full reset was required, then no chance of getting those apps back.

I don’t think I would care as much if the apps were crap. They have a few bugs in them (losing your account authorization with Twitter occasionally, killing the sound when one loads), but nothing that I can’t work around. I really like the apps and their design.

For whatever I paid for them (maybe eight bucks total), I certainly don’t expect lifetime support. But I would like to be able to have access to what I paid for, somehow.

Pulling an app from a public catalog is the easiest way to handle the fact that you are dropping all support for that app. It is also the way guaranteed to please the fewest of your current customers.

So what are the other choices?

Open sourcing the app might cause problems, because the dev is planning to develop for other platforms like Android and iOS/Apple, and he might want to reuse code. Which is fine. No open sourcing.

UPDATE: As @webosinternals pointed out to me, making something open source does not prevent you from using the code in commercial projects.

Hosting the app yourself might be costly. I don’t know. The source file itself is pretty small. If he isn’t getting enough money from downloads, then I can’t see it being a huge issue, but I haven’t crunched any numbers, so who knows?

He seems like a really decent guy, and is giving refunds to people who bought his two apps during the last two weeks. It’s a messy situation, and there are no perfect solutions.

I just wish I could keep access to a repository for these two unsupported, abandoned apps.

This time I was only indirectly chewing my nails and waiting for a reply. My friend and colleague was the one who sent in our combined application. Not that I did much, some light editing and suggestions, and sending over a bio/resume.

He actually got an e-mail. The last two times I applied, I did not get an e-mail. Instead, I wandered over to the SummerWorks site and scrolled down through the list of winners. For two years in a row.

Does the fact that he got an e-mail mean that this was a better application than the ones I sent in? Does it point to a general increase in respect for the way SummerWorks treats all applicants? Was it just random chance?

I don’t know. I have to wait until my collaborator gets back in town to get all the details. But until then, I’m going with the better application theory.

What who is this shadow reaching from this past I never entered

How does it know me so well when I’ve never seen it before now

It whispers things it should not know

Flesh of my flesh

Blood of my blood

Who cries out in the night?

Is it my voice, or the voices of me stretched back to

Who was I before I was born?

Flesh of my flesh

Blood of my blood

The terrible stinky drunk men marry the

The quiet repressed men marry the

The simple honest men marry the

The scattered sisters go marry the

The times between them the children between them

The marriage becomes the sad that creeps between them

The memories that surround them to

Protect the enrich the fantasies

Every day is the last with a few more flubbed lines

Flesh of my flesh

Blood of my blood

Happiness is that thing out there

We’ve never heard