my regina

From REGINA, SASKATCHEWAN

October 2nd, 2007

EYE, TOURIST
Week three in The City That Rhymes With Fun, and I finally have stuff to report. It isn't that Regina gave me nothing to say, dear reader.....it's just that I didn't see much of it at first. Or of anything. This may come as a shock, especially to you, with your secret crush on me, but I NEARLY WENT BLIND OH MY GOD. Or sort of, anyway. (What, dramatic, me?) Here's the rundown, as best I can explain:

September 15th:The Tourist turns a healthy, happy, hot-ass thirty-two years of age. Plenty of fun is had by me, friends, family, and the delighted employees at the liquor store who have the pleasure of serving us and later cry when they remember they are not on commission.

September 16th, 3am: I wake howling in agony, sudden shooting pain all in my right eye. I am a right whiny bitch about it.

All that day: Tears, tears, constant tears. Pain, pain, constant pain. Light of any kind becomes the enemy. Running of last-minute errands before leaving the province while lurching around in sunglasses with a bandage covering one eye, yowling, alternately "Out of my way!", "Don't look at me, I'm hideous!", and "Well don't just stand there, help me up, motherfucker!!!!" I go home and have to pack my bags. Boyfriend comes over and says OH MY GOD YOU LOOK TERRIBLE. I kill him and then myself.

September 17th: 5am trip to St. Joe's emergency. Hell of a way to spend your last morning with your main squeeze before leaving for months. Am told that my expired health card is probably still okay. Doctors look at me, look at each other and shrug, walk away. One holds my eye open with a light shining into it (which, in my state, makes for the closest thing to hell I've ever experienced) and scrapes my eye with a sharp pointy metal thing. Shrugs, walks away. Sit listening to a man down the hall scream his head off in pain. Wonder briefly what would happen if I did that; if instead of flinching politely while they poked around in my eye, I let loose with "AAAAAAAAARGH! I'M DYING!!!! OH GAAAAWWWWD!!!" Ponder whether that would be liberating and fun. (As it no doubt must be for the man down the hall.)

7am: Say goodbye to the squeeze in a waiting room full of hacking, dripping, oozing people. Make out on a gurney next to an old lady with one lung who keeps wheezing, "I have to go to the bathroom." HOT. Wait some more for a referral.

8:30: Can't wait any longer. Walk home (directly into the horrible, burning, full-on sun) and finish cleaning my apartment for my subletter.

12noon: Pearson Airport. Almost get bumped from my flight, thanks to Air Canada's standard policy of booking eight thousand people per flight and then being really, really surprised when they all show up. Decide to play the emergency/sympathy card by lifting up my shades and showing the gatekeeper my puffy, blood-red, hideous eye and telling him I need to get to a hospital in Regina ASAP. He passes out, comes to, and gets me a seat, on the condition that I never subject anyone to such a thing ever again.

2-6pm, Saskatchewan time: Regina General Hospital. Sit, wait, weep, get told jokes, eat a sandwich, fall asleep in a chair. Make out with an old lady on a gurney who keeps saying "I have to pee" (not as into it this time, but whattya gonna do?).....Get diagnosed with a corneal ulcer, caused by all the stress of having to look at things all the time. I knew I should have hired someone to do that for me!

September 18th: Globe Theatre, first read of The Melville Boys, at which I wear huge sunglasses, making all the wonderful staff there think I am some egotistical cunt from Toronto who thinks she is a movie star. I tell them all to kiss my ass and go do some coke in the bathroom. First visit to ophthalmologist Renatta Varma, who explains the ulcer: I scratched my cornea with a damaged contact lens or some such thing....then, as I slept, Evil Goblins crawled into my eye and danced around and had a germ party, causing an infection and eventually cultivating a hard white crust on my eye as a tasty Goblin snack. This happens to people like me from time to time, I am told, who lead a generally unchristian lifestyle (drinking, screwing, doing drugs out of wedlock...). I am given a bible and some eye drops and welcomed to Saskatchewan.

September 19th to now: I develop a close, intricate, and pleasingly kinky relationship with Doctor Varma, whom I see once every two or three days, and who is now the person in town I know best. The two-hour wait times at her office fill me with a tantalizing anticipation. Our visits leave me shaky and excited. She gives me eye drops; I try to get her to wear a sexy nurse costume. She says things like "Well, you're lucky it wasn't a little lower or you could have gone blind"; I say, "Yeah, bitch? You're lucky my fist isn't up your nose!" We make out. On a gurney next to an old lady yelling "I'm peeing!"

ACTUAL PICTURE. OF SOMETHING.

FYI: On the third floor of Regina's Pasqua hospital, where Doctor Varma practises on Mondays and where I therefore spend half of every day off, there is a department called the "Hair Care Centre". So this is where they do all those scientific studies on Pantene Pro-V, I thought. I peeked in the door and saw several statuesque beauties flipping their hair around while people in lab coats shouted, "Four in five doctors say you look FANTASTIC!" Weird. But we all have a right to universal hair care.

DYE, TOURIST!

Speaking of hair care...jeez. If my eye wasn't enough trouble....
A little before I left town I got bored and wanted to do something with my hair. I was going to take it to Canada's Wonderland and let it ride some roller coasters, but nooooo. I decided to dye it instead. I had an audition to play the grown version of some stupid kid in a movie of the week, and the kid has light brown hair. I thought "A-ha! This is what I'll do! I'll lighten my hair so at least they won't have that particular excuse to not hire me." (Turned out my ass was too fat. I'm having it removed next Tuesday.)

Anyway, the drugstore bottled brown looked pretty good, but a few weeks later, in Regina, my dark roots were starting to show and I thought my natural colour would go better with my costumes. So - and here is where I went wrong - I bought some dark Nice N' Easy in SOFT NATURAL BLACK to get my hair back to what it had been. Now I don't know what part of "soft", or "natural" the nice people at Clairol do not understand, but I'm thinking they're missing the whole concept. My hair came out Ugly Goth Chick Black instead, which is the new name I propose they put on the box. That way, If ladies are strolling the aisles at their local drugstore thinking, "You know, I just look too good. If only there was something I could do about that...." - there it will be! Ugly Goth Chick Black to the rescue! Never be hit on again, except by pimply boys in the park and people online who can't actually see you! Live your life alone! In the dark. Drunk and full of Mars Bars.

THE NEW ME

Seriously, it looked pretty bad. And it turns out there is nothing nice nor easy about getting black hair dye out of your head. You can't just colour over black dye with another shade - it won't take. I went online and typed in a few key words and found about a million horror stories of women who had done the same stupid thing, and their methods, both successful and not, of trying to tone down the goth. Hot oil. Dish detergent. Laundry detergent. Head and Shoulders. Prell Shampoo, which I think you can only get in the States, and which, from the sound of it, could strip a car. Dude, I tried anything I could get my hands on. Actually washed my hair in Tide. Let a dog poo on my head. (That wasn't on the list, I'd just always wanted to try it.) Invited a voodoo priestess over for tea. She liked the look....but did teach me some handy curses to use on people I don't care for. Finally thought, oh YEAH....the salon.

Luckily, Scarth street, on which the Globe Theatre is situated, is lined with about twelve salons per block. Downtown, my castmates and I have noticed, has a suspicious proliferation of hair salons and travel agencies. Because everyone in Regina just wants to look good and then get the hell out.

I settled on Snax. "The World's Coolest Hair Salon", says the sign - they can't even bother changing the fluorescent lighting inside, they're THAT cool. Angie, who is cute as pie (gives Doctor Varma a run for her money, though she doesn't have that same bitchy, spicy edge) has returned my hair to its -ohthankgod - normal-looking state. So I won't need the hospital's Hair Care Centre after all. Although it looked like fun. Don't know if I'm tall enough.

DRY TOURIST
A trick I learned last year in Calgary:
Any of you Ontarians who visit the prairies and find your skin gasping for moisture.....just go to the steam room at the YMCA for a half hour once in a while. Close your eyes and it's like Toronto in July. Especially if you make loud honking noises and shout in a variety of languages. Which people at the gym will love you for. Dye your hair black too, and you are guaranteed a wide berth.

I just moved from a temporary billet - on Athol Street, the name of which makes me giggle as it always puts me in mind of someone with a lisp saying "asshole"- with a really nice guy who does the morning show on the talk radio station, into a place of my own. My new pad, in a colourful neighbourhood conveniently around the corner from the Arts Board and The Schizophrenia Society of Saskatchewan, boasts a humidifier, so between that and constantly slathering myself with olive oil, I'm coping.

And the show goes well. I'm having fun, which is easy since I don't carry too much responsibility in this play. My role is mainly to prance around being flirty and generally threatening to take off my clothes and bang everyone. Looking forward to the post-show talkbacks to see what the fine people of Regina think of that. I await the acquisition of a few more bibles. At least I'm not actually in my undies this time around. By now I've achieved such a level of implied sluttiness that I don't need to strip down anymore. Fully clothed Norton is like naked anybody else. Hey, that's why they pay me the medium bucks.

Promising more actual Regina news next time, and, one of these days, the long-awaited Random Crap Issue (I know, I know, what's everything else been?).....

Your girl in Snatch City,

The Tourist

Your comments below. Please. It's lonely out here.