Ottawa

14 hours in a car for 1 hour on stage, that's how Pepper and I spent the last 24 hours.

As it turns out, labour day weekend is a busy time to drive from Guelph to Ottawa.

Traffic was arduous but in this country a necessary evil to the performer. It's funny trying to explain to our European friends that we have to drive 19 hours just to get out of our province heading west for shows, or even simply that Pepper and I live 90 minutes away from each other. As Canadians, we just become accustomed to the fact that we literally need to travel large distances for simple items, and as Canadian entertainers those simple items are literally our audiences.

It was a lovely gig though.

We played the Algonquin Commons Theatre (ACT), a 700 seater on the Algonquin College Campus. The room was about half full of first year students who had literally JUST moved into residence for their first year of college away from home earlier that day. Before we began I went out and had a chat with the largely 17 year old group, urging them to not be scared by the horrible things we were about to do in front of them. They seemed enthusiastic and puzzled but after giving them all the opportunity to back out we opened with our 'Raining Men' routine where we shove syringes through our faces and hands. Fun times.

Definitely a new experience for those children.

But it was honestly a blast. We quickly won them over and we even had a line of 50 or so of them hanging off the front of the stage for high fives at the finale. The kids had a great time and goddammit that theatre is a pleasure to work in. The staff and techs are lovely and 'get it', and the student union that brings us in are a pleasure to work with. Gigs like this make me happy that we quit doing 'bar shows' a while back and decided to focus mainly of festivals and theatres. The show was a bit rushed as our call time got bumped up by an hour so we literally threw on our fancies, jammed hooks in my arms and hit the stage.
Fantastically, my Pokemon Go material actually hit, and the kids seems to enjoy my rants about weedles interspersed with swears.

Ahhh... timeless comedy.

These campus mixer events can sometimes be a grab bag of ridiculousness with a lot of different things shoved together. As it turned out our opener was a 60 minute drum circle. The guys on stage with the drums were totally killing it, it just seems like a hilarious juxtaposition to go from a drum circle then to us.

I posted a video on my of it from backstage https://www.instagram.com/p/BJ6bs7tjmlH/?hl=en

We made it home in one piece in pretty decent time. We narrowly missed the highway being closed due to an accident that happened juuuuust in front of us which would have set us back a few hours. Thankfully we made it through harm's way unscathed and continue forward into next weeks gigs.