From TORONTO
December 31st, 2008
You know, My Ruggedly Handsome and/or Voluptuously Stunning Reader, if you've been following along as you should (and if not, I don't even know why we're having this conversation - I spit in your lazy face! That's right.....but in a hot, sexy way. You know you love it, you filthy little slavehog, you.) Where was I?
Ahem. If you've been following along.....you will know my feelings on annual New Year's resolutions . Ridiculous, I always thought, and doomed to failure. Why bother? Why vow every year that we will become hipper, faster, stronger - when we would be better to just accept that we are pathetic, fat, uneducated losers and get on with it already.
More recently I thought, Hey (ding!), let me not be quite so defeatist about this whole thing. Why not set really, really easy goals for myself .....and then feel an incredibly huge sense of accomplishment for, say, ceasing to pee all over the toilet seat or for giving up eating cold lard in the New Year?
Hence, the last three years my New Year's resolutions have been as follows:
2006: Don't complain about the weather
2007: Take the stairs
2008: Stop swallowing gum
For the most part I've been successful in achieving these by-my-standards impressively challenging goals, though the gum-swallowing is still one day at a time. I'm not a former gum-swallower; I'm a recovering one, and will forever be.
But Lo! Behold! Hold the proverbial phone! Stop the virtual press! A heretofore unexperienced sensation has siezed me this year; a desire to set actual, real, difficult challenges for myself and then -gasp! - go about achieving them. What the fuck is going on?! Is it the lack of challenge in my everyday life? The need, at age thirty-three, to feel a true sense of accomplishment without actually, you know, having babies or getting a real job? Why so suddenly sick of easy and longing for HARD (oh yeah, baby)? Who cares why. There it is.
So, Without further ado, The Skeptical Tourist's Resolutions, 2009 Edition, are as follows:
I RESOLVE...
To Eat Some Human Flesh.
"What?!" you may be saying to yourself, "The Skeptical Tourist has never eaten human flesh? You must be joking!" But it's true, Astonished Reader. I've always meant to, of course, but have been held back by my irrational aversion to actually killing anyone. I mean, it would be a little silly to murder a whole person just to try a bite or, at most, a sandwich; what if I don't even like it? Maybe I could have some hardcore cannibals standing by ready to efficiently use up the rest? (Could be a way to meet some interesting new people.)
I'm sure, though, that I could find several individuals on the worldwide interweb who would be willing, disturbingly happy even, to volunteer to let me bite off a hunk of bicep or something.
Better yet....I'll carve a cut of my own tasty thigh, thereby also saving hours of useless toil at the gym. They do say the flavour's in the fat, am I right?
I RESOLVE.....
To Wear More Makeup and Sluttier Clothing.
Let's face it, time's a tickin'. I can't get away with dressing like a whore forever. So why not go big in '09?
To Keep in Better Touch with Mariah Carey and the Dalai Lama.
They keep having to do Mariah-Lisa-Dalai night without me. Sorry, guys!
To Make Some Negro Friends.
I have got Jamie Robinson. But he only counts as half. Plus it's hard to keep in touch with him because he's always busy eating watermelon and running fast. Then there's Marcia Johnson.... but she just wants me for my body. And you know how I feel about that these last two days.
Other from that, since I work in Canadian theatre, I haven't actually seen a real-life black person since leaving Scarborough in 1994. Therefore, Concernedly Weeping Reader, if you actually know/have seen/are a real black person, please feel free to help me with this.
Lucky coloured candidates can contact me at:
Lisa Can I Be Your Negro Friend
P.O. Box 779, Station A
Toronto, ON M6R 3A6
or at wantsitblack88@lavalife.com. (See profile in the "Casual Encounters" section.) What? Just covering all my bases.
Oh, and applicants should remember to include a photo and 500 word essay on how they would culturally enrich my life.
I RESOLVE....
To Finally Live Out My Life-Long Goal of Blowing Up Revenue Canada.
Hey, and if I do it during office hours....maybe that's where all the roasted human flesh could come from! Guilt free!
Bonus: This is bound to help me realize that other life-long dream to get a day named after me. This would for sure put me over that Guy Fawkes dude, am I right? And Sarah Polley could play me in the movie.
To Learn How to Wilfully Breathe Out of Just One Nostril at a Time.
Come on, you try it! Not so easy is it, huh, Smugface?
To Start Documenting My Dreams Once and for all.
And then use them as the basis for a multi-million dollar hit film about a hobo and a skunk and my grandma who go on an adventure in a forest which is sort of a forest but sometimes sort of like my Junior High and sort of sometimes like my living room and then these guys are there whose heads are made of rubber bands and all my hair falls out and oh yeah Sylvester Stallone and Elizabeth May are there dancing the tango* but then suddenly I'm underwater and it's so cool cuz I can breathe and all the sharks are made of gorgonzola and I wake up screaming.
Three words for you. Box. Office. Gold.
(And Sarah Polley as Stallone.)
I RESOLVE....
To Start My Own Fashion Line and Call it Leese's Pieces.
To Master Not Only Peeing Standing Up, but Pooing, too.
Wish me luck. Accompanying video and inevitable worldwide YouTube sensation to follow.
To Quit Trying to Learn New Languages and Just Make Up My Own Already.
My language would rock, admit it. Will someone donate a tropical island for me to speak it on?
To Wear a Different Pair of Underwear Every Day.
Novel, I know. But worth a try. Fans keep mailing me sexy panties; the least I can do is try to get through them.
To Jump Out of an Airplane.
Or a moving bus.
Or maybe my bed.
To Finally Give in to Beyonce's Management and Let Her Have That Threesome with My Boyfriend and Me.
NO, Jay-Z, you're not invited. Go play with your money. I'll have her back by Tuesday. She's gonna be my special black friend.
To Give Up My Only Intermittently Successful Campaign to Stop Biting My Nails, Instead Seeing if I Can Go Right Through Them and Eat My Entire Hand off.
Hey - that would solve the human flesh conundrum, too! FUCK I'm smart!
To Make Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada, Lick the Bottom of My Shoe.
You do know he's into that in private, right?
To Cause, Through Meditation, Hypnotism and Special Apparatus, My Left Foot to Grow Three Sizes Larger, While Making my Right Foot Shrink to a Five and a Half.
To Stop Being so Cold and Suspicious and Get to Know all My Neighbours. Biblically.
To Stop Cashing My RSP's Every Year to Get Through Christmas
....and instead cash them each year on some random day in July and blow the lot on popsicles and safety pins.
I RESOLVE.....
To Stop Using My Eyes for One Month to Test Whether I Develop Super-Sonic Hearing Powers.
(Or just ultra-enhanced good looks which will benefit mankind but madden me as I am forsworn not to look into the mirror to find out what all the fuss is about.)
To Stop Being Such a Wallflower and Let People Know What I Really Think.
Starting now, with you, Attentive Reader. I think you're a Dirty Whore. And God I love you for it.
All right, Sweet Things. Time to say farewell and go start off '09 in great style, doing what I do each year on New Year's Eve: Getting very drunk and forcing people to listen to Michael Jackson's Man In The Mirror at midnight. You heard me. Make that change.
(And perhaps I'll eat some flesh by morning.)
Resolutely Yours,
The Tourist
* Little known fact: Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party (and welcome addition to any dream except maybe the sexy kind), is in reality, a fine Tango dancer and good friend of Sylvester Stallone.
the norton resolutions
peg o' my heart
WINNIPEG, MANITOBA
January 23rd, 2006
My fellow Canadians: HI.
Well....Winnipeg's fine, the sun shines all the time, and the feelin' is laid back....
Oh, wait, those are just the lyrics from a Neil Diamond song. Good thing I stopped myself before the line about the palm trees, or I'd be sitting here in a puddle of tears in a minute.
So. Yeah. Winnipeg. It's actually not FOUR THOUSAND DEGREES below zero, as many BIG FAT LIARS THAT I CALL FRIENDS would have had me believe. So as far as my number one New Year's Resolution goes ("stop complaining about the weather"; closely followed by "Eat more vegetables" and "Stop killing people").....I'm kicking ass! I have now gotten 22 days into 2006 without once whining about how cold I am.
My magical Supercoat is a big help. My da and stepma got me this thing for Christmas; it's, like, a Swiss Army coat. Zipoff fur, secret pockets, knives, a corkscrew...you pull a thing and a parachute pops out; it mixes its own martinis, you name it. (GO GO GADGET BOOZE!) I don't even walk to work - a big plastic ball inflates around me when I walk outside and I roll everywhere. It's, in fact, not a coat - it's actually an intelligent life form. I'm a bit freaked out by the fact that it's been sneaking into my room and crawling into bed with me at night. I mean, that would be fine, but it whispers such strange things ("Jump off the balcony. Make a bomb. No, wait, make a bomb and then jump off the balcony........Fuck your mother.")
Winnipeg is very beautiful. No one ever told me that. The downtown still has all these gorgeous buildings from the early twentieth century. "Chicagoan Architecture", I'm told.....and chic it is. The banks look like banks, you know? You look at the Bank of Montreal here and say, now THAT's a bank. You wouldn't dare belittle a place like that by calling it BMO. Kevin Bundy, who is in the show I'm working on here, stood outside Harry's Bar the other day thinking "This place should be in a movie." And then he went to see Capote and there it was. It makes me ache to know that I live in a town that had all this, and then we went and tore it all down. Just thinking, in contrast, of the hunks of glass growing all over the Lakeshore - and EVERYWHERE - in Toronto, makes me want to tear them apart with my bare hands. Or something slightly more effective. Although I've got pretty effective bare hands; just ask any guy I've dated. (Comedy High Hat, please.)
Of course, our gang is staying somewhere neither old nor beautiful. We are at Holiday Towers, which, as one cast member noted, look about as inviting as the ones from Lord of the Rings. When I say we're all staying there, I mean all of us except for Master Playwright Michael Healey, who pulled the old "I'm allergic to smoke" scam and got put up somewhere else. Yeah - allergic to smoke! Like that exists.
We have noticed that they have all of the MTC visiting artists stacked up on room fifteen of every floor (215, 315, 415 etc.). Winnipeg officials can thereby wipe out a large portion of the local Arts Community at the push of a button, sending a missile sailing down through our section of the building but leaving our crack-addicted, house-arrested neighbours unscathed. Which is exactly what they are under strict orders to do the very minute Stephen Harper is elected. Similar strikes are planned for cheap hotels and theatre bars across the country. Tom McCamus, curiously, is in Suite 213, and thereby safely outside the COLUMN OF DEATH. But he played Wayne Gretzky's dad in a movie after all, and the government can't afford to have the wrath of Wayne on them. That's how you wake up with a severed horse's head. Rest assured that Michael Healey, safely ensconced in his fancyass smoke and bomb-free hotel, will be okay. Until they gun him down in the coffee shop. So there's the Arts Policy you were waiting for from the Conservatives. (Phase One. Basket weavers....you're next.)
We actually ain't got it bad. I quite like my room. And it's got everything I need. I found myself running around my kitchen the other day freaking out because I didn't have, like, ohmigod, a thing to close a chip bag with, when I was suddenly struck by one of those moments when you're forced to see your gross North American Consumerism in a magnifying mirror. Imagine displaced Indonesian villagers whining about their new home not having any twist ties. Well, they won't now - because I just sent a huge shipment of twist ties to the Red Cross! May those lovely little brown people never know my pain.
Winnipeg keeps you regular. No one told me that one, either. I've been pooing, like, three times a day. And I'm talking big, healthy dumps here. Okay....someone's going to make a joke about my having been full of shit living in Toronto all these years, and how I'm just now cleaning out my system. So there. I beat you to it. Just like Eminem in Eight Mile, Yo.
Nothing is open here on Sunday, which is our day off. I mean, no coffee shops, no stores, nuthin'. I guess if much of the world thinks of Sunday as a day of rest and time with family, I am squarely in the other group that thinks of it as that pain-in-the-ass day that the bank is closed. Fuck you, God! I need stuff at Shoppers! I've been trying to buy tampons for three days, for the love of Christ!
The fun Sunday event today, though, was going to see Hughie, a Eugene O'Neill play that Jeff Meadows and Ric Reid (Shaw folk, as is Kelly Daniels, who directed) are playing as part of O'Neill Fest. Every year, MTC spearheads a Master Playwright Festival, and everybody joins in for two weeks of plays, lectures, films. It's a fantastic idea. Other recent ones have been Tremblay-fest, Ibsen-fest, Norm Foster-fest (just kidding). And you can see the whole shamozzle for sixty bucks. O'Neill is particularly fitting: It's Winnipeg! It's January! If you don't want to kill yourself already, come see Long Day's Journey Into Night! Of which there is, by the way, a very fine production at the MTC Warehouse with Dixie Seatle and Graham Abbey and Shaw pals big fat pregnant Fiona Byrne and Mike Shara. It's pretty great. I love O'Neill, so Suicide Fest was made for me.
I'm also really enjoying working on my show (The Innocent Eye Test). The script is a blast - every cheap gag Michael Healey has ever wanted to write. He couldn't very well have the old dudes in The Drawer Boy farting and tripping over things, so it's all in here. It's great to work with Chris Newton again, the actors are all topnotch, the amazing Laurie Champagne is Stage Managing. I feel a bit like the kid who ends up in the Advanced Class when the teacher meant to write down "Special Ed". What am I doing with the frickin' A Team? And, no, that doesn't mean that Mister T is in the show. We've been socializing a lot, too, which may kill me eventually. Last night we had a dinner party in Tanja Jacobs house and I got so high that I came home, washed my face three times, brushed my teeth twice and shaved all nine of my legs. And then I just walked around my kitchen in circles. Wondering where the twist ties went.
I wish you love from this place.
And, oh the snow is beautiful at night......
Lisa
