Red Eye Rocks

What a great, long day. The plan was to drop postcards and/or bumper stickersin as many places as possible. Someone I met through the Fringe website sent me a big, long list of places to leave them - I don't know what I would have done without either that list nor my brother's help. Where to go and how to get there, that's what it's all about.

Pretty much every single place we went already had stacks of cards for other shows, I was proud of ours. They are color, they feature the sitting pose - one person said I look like Stanley Tucci in them (Toni will be so pleased) and a hostess at the Bryant-Lake Bowl said, "Oh! Can I have one?" so brightly when I showed them to her, I was wildly flattered.

The list features over 100 places. Denny and I hit over 30, not bad. And driving around Minneapolis on a beautiful day in Denny's Mustang convertible doesn't suck, either.

Nick arrived a little after three, Toni had made dinner, and the five of us got caught up before Nick and I had to endure Twin Cities rush hour traffic to get to tech by five ... or so.

Red Eye Rocks
The Red Eye Collaborative is a great space. It's not as large as I thought it might be based on the floorplan, but it is certainly larger in scope than either CPT and Dobama - and yet more intimate than both. The seating units are wider there than in the other spaces - so they do not go back very far, I am not very far from anyone. The floor is often used for dance companies, which explains why it is so wide and deep.

Thanks to John and Ron, our technical assistants. And the slides are going to look HUGE. We got all the cues down, but did not run the show, we hadn't planned to. Nick knows the show very well, I am in good hands. Now if I would only stop talking so much so my voice is well rested for tomorrow night.

Big Pimping
After tech Nick and I went to the Bryant Lake Bowl to try and chat up people after the "Out-of-Towner" showcase, the one we missed because I was dumb and scheduled our tech during it. We showed up just as everyone was leaving and stood as part of this narrow, receiving line, one of a number of other Fringers handing out cards: "Hi, I'm from out of town, too ... My name's Dave, come see my show ... thank you so much for attending, come see my show ... this is Nick, he's from Cleveland, too ..." It was quite a coup, and excellent timing.

Oh, and this is good - earlier I ran into some people outside Red Eye, showing up to drop off postcards. They asked what my show was, and I said, "I Hate This" and as they looked at my card one asked, "Oh? And what do you hate?" and I said, "oh ... uh, I, ah, my wife and I had a stillborn child, and,uh, this is about that." "Oh," he said kindly and I said, "Yeah, I really gotta work on the pitch."