Tonight, I’m producing an improv show which brings together my love of improvisation as well as my passion for World War One history. For those of you who did not know me before moving to France, I was once (or twice, or four times) a Tour Guide at the Vimy National Canadian War Memorial, in France.
The whole experience had an extremely profound impact on my life and today, on the 98th Anniversary of the Four Canadian Divisions storming the ridge, all together in formation for the first time in our history, I and several of my hilarious colleagues, will be presenting:
All funds raised will be going to the Vimy Foundation and Wounded Warriors Canada.
Confession time: I had a great Easter/birthday long weekend.
It was the perfect reset I needed to help me put things into perspective and refocus my goals, but also celebrate and reflect upon another year on Earth. And despite a slip and fall accident resulting in an incredibly bruised and sore coccyx, I’m doing that thing right now where I might be producing my very own Dopamine and Serotonin. Happiness, folks.
My birthday fell on Good Friday this year, which is great for sleeping in, and not so great for feeling the contemplation and sorrow that are typically aligned with this particular holiday. That being said, I have a commitment to Improv Game Show, a weekly comedy show I co-produce with Cassie Moes every Friday evening, and we typically go strong, even on holidays. This particular rendition was very well attended; the cast was excellent and Gillian English (my very darling friend and the show’s host this week) went so far as to invite my friggin’ improv hero, Rob Baker, to come play the set with us on account of it being my birthday. The following shot I think demonstrates how I felt about the news:
🙂
The evening continued with drinks and chats at SoCap, which is quickly becoming my home-away-from-home and then across the street for food and more drinks with members of the cast, other improvisers and friends. I’m so thankful to be a part of this awesome community. What a super swell birthday! 😀
Speaking of which, the following day, my monthly improv baby; Guess Who’s Coming to Improv? took place at Comedy Bar, and was filled with wonderful audience members and hopeful participants. I got to play a few good scenes, and to watch some that ended up like this:
So, pretty good time overall.
I was so lucky/happy/ #blessed to have had Jan Caruana agree to be the Special Guest improviser this month, because she’s such a fantastic performer. She’s got such a great mind for crazy references, and it seems like her brain works so super fast to come up with really great scenes, so it was such a treat/joy to get to play with her, and to watch her play with those who were lucky enough to get their names pulled with hers! That show is so much fun and personally, I think people should make it a priority to attend. (Maybe I’m a bit biased…)
ANYHOO. I went back down to Niagara on Sunday for Easter proper. Spent the day with my family, who surprised me with a birthday cake, even though I’m twenty-nine again and so technically a grown-ass adult. (Whatever that’s supposed to mean.) It was so lovely to be surrounded by the whole fam-damily. I won’t go into too many details, because my personal life is MY OWN BUSINESS DAMNIT! But I will take the time to brag about how awesome my 94 year-old grand-maman is; she was singing songs from back in the day and dancing as best she could; enjoying her chocolate eggs like a champ and chatting us all up. Here look & tell me you don’t think she’s the cutest grand-maman in the world:
With the added benefit of getting Easter Monday off, because I sortof work for the government-ish, I got to get in an important meet/chat and a headshot shoot, both of which helped put my mind at ease on a number of different things pertaining to my life/career at this stage of the performance-game.
This was a wonderful long weekend filled with wonderful people, and I think this happy feeling is going to last a while; at least for the first five minutes of my administrative workload tomorrow morning anyway.
I recently finished working as a production coordinator on a TV show, the first TV show I’ve *really* worked for. (ie. gots paid)
One of the tasks to which I was assigned in my last job was to collect the scripts and segment descriptions from the Associate Producers on the show and send them to the hosts. The documents they would send are referred to as “greens” in newspeak. Three times a week I would send out an email to the APs asking if their greens were ready. Eventually, in an attempt to make this process more interesting for them, and for me, I started doing stuff like this:
Right? That subject line makes you think!
Getting creative with Google Translate.
It’s true. Don’t go to Chicago for the fish.
Then I started to incorporate imagery to my silly emails.
He’s not, for whatever that’s worth. He’s just the only one with “green” in his name that I could think of…
I sometimes made them relevant to the people I was working with… (we did fashion segments)
I incorporated some of my own taste…
Briefly turned into a greeting card company.
…Got political. (Not shown, the email where I just directed all the APs to the Green Party of Canada’s website, I must have deleted that one. Or CSIS had it removed from my PC.)
…Got Kermi-ed.
…Got sporty.
…Used idioms to describe my feels.
Got market branding involved.
…and finally sent them all off with an epic psych-out.
I feel like a few are missing, (I most definitely deleted the one where I sent a picture of a nice, healthy crop of marijuana.)
The point of sending them wasn’t to make a blog post out of them all. That was never the intention. But because it brought me joy to take a second out of my day to think of some silly way to make my co-workers day a little bit funnier, or happier, or at least to distract them for a millisecond, I thought I’d share them with you. I was, after all, pretty lucky to get to work there.
I had a marvellous time last night at Holodeck Follies, the monthly Star Trek-inspired improv and variety show put on by The Dandies. Dale creates this wonderful sense of community in the show, which brings together two of my favourite subcultures; the improv world and the world of Trek. This month, he kicked it up another notch by putting the emphasis on the women of Trek by inviting many talented women improvisers, and other female comics to perform on the show in honour of International Women’s Day.
In a community where we see things like ‘the token woman in an otherwise all-male sketch troupe’ or the ‘obligatory one woman on a stand-up show line-up,’ it’s wonderful to attend a show that not only features women, but celebrates them. Not that this is surprising for the Dandies, or people who follow and respect the philosophy of Star Trek in general, TBH. But The Dandies continually stack their shows with a diverse array of players; and not to fulfil any sort of tokenism, but rather because they know a tonne of fantastically talented and diverse performers.
A personal thrill for me was attempting to stick to my Captain Janeway character; stern and serious, while playing against a sassy and outspoken Lt. Uhura, played by Jamillah Ross, with whom I’ve never got to play, (unless you count on Twitter.) The low-energy, severity of her character is sortof the opposite of the loud-mouthed dweeb I typically portray!
Every woman brought something great to the set, and what a fantastic group of women they were: Tracy Rowland, Deanna Palazzo, Taz Collins, Dana Jean Phoenix & Marcia De. Along with the weekly cast of the USS Albatross and a roomful of trekkies, it was spectacular, supportive show, which I recommend to all; Trekkies and normals alike.
I leave you with the Holodeck Follies traditional exit greeting: Laugh Long and Prosper!
It’s still cold, it’s still shitty out, but guess what? I went to Chicago.
That’s right, the Second City itself. I’m a little late to the draw at writing about this, but that’s because I had to spend a bunch of time putting together this cool collage:
Mmm. Collagy-goodness.
I’m not going to sit here and tell you all about the trip in super-extensive detail or anything, as this isn’t a travel blog, let’s be CLEAR about that! But what I will do, is tell you that if you think there’s somewhere in the world that will inspire you, you should visit it, even in the dead middle of February where it’s equally, if not more cold, than your own crap-cold igloo of a town, because it probably will.
Inspire you, that is.
My buddy Sharilyn had mentioned she would be heading to Chicago in February to take a Second City intensive & I happened to be “dark” the week she was planning to go. (That’s TV talk for “the stars of my show had to go to a tropical place and work on their tans,” so we had to stop shooting for a week.)
Nevertheless, bit by bit, the plan came together and sure enough, we ended up in the Windy City, catching a different comedy show every single night we were there. (And bits and pieces of the SNL40 Special, which in hindsight, we should have just watched in its entirety.)
When I was asked at customs what I was doing in Chicago, and I answered “watching a whole wack-load of comedy,” it was a completely plausible answer. I feel like there aren’t many places in the world where you can tell a customs officer that, and not be thrown into some strange questioning cell.
Despite a bout of food-poisoning, the trip was a dream. An frozen, shivering, ice-cube of a dream, but a dream nonetheless. I imagine myself one day, holding a magical green card, actively avoiding some of the dodgier modes of transportation in the city when it gets dark, and performing every night on the various stages that launched the careers of so many of my heroes.
I wasn’t sad when I came back to Toronto. Because it just so happens that a bunch of my heroes started out right here too.
Brie Watson 