[URBAN NOTE] Shuttlebus love

I was greeted on the platform at Dufferin station Monday morning by the sight of dozens of people, listening to someone's announcement made over a dying loudspeaker that there had been a "power outage" at Spadina that shut down service on the Bloor-Danforth line. Twenty minutes passed; a subway train appeared; and, just as everyone was getting settled in their seats, we heard someone else announce over a much nicer loudspeaker system that we'd have to disembark at Ossington and choose our shuttlebuses. Me, I opted for the bus that ran east to Wellesley station. That one, at least, arrived on time.

The bus was crowded with ill-tempered people, and I tried to hide from them on my seat. To my right, two people were standing, each somewhat overweight, both tired-looking, one a man and the other a woman. I heard the murmurs of their conversation, but it wasn't until I saw him hook his thumb and ring finger on her hand that I realized they weren't strangers. They stayed like that until the bus pulled into Wellesley.

[NON BLOG] Reunions

I have always enjoyed the too-rare reunions with my colleagues and friends from my MA year at Queen's University, not only because I get to enjoy their company again but for the reunion's epiphenomena. The most recent reunion saw me do karaoke, Pink's 2002 song "Don't Let Me Get Me".

Me, performing Pink.
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

My rocker poses aside, Pink does a much better job with the song.

[REVIEW] Homebody/Kabul

The problem with the Toronto performance of Tony Kushner's play Homebody/Kabul lay not with the more-than-competent actors (Fiona Reid, portraying a confused and depressed middle-aged British woman on the verge of something radical, was particularly good) nor with the staging of the Berkeley Street Theatre, but rather with the play itself. The genius of Angels in America lay in Kushner's ability to throw everything together--history, language, sex, politics, love, death--into a superb bricolage united by Kushner's cheerful apocalypticism, the play's flaw-engendering ambivalence aside. There's no such unity of theme in Homebody/Kabul outside of Reid's opening monologue, a marvellously wordplay-filled and self-annotated tale of the protagonist's encounters with an unsatisfying life given meaning by the exoticism of an old guidebook to Kabul(for something similar, see Rosie DiManno's Sunday account in the Toronto Star of a tour she made in Kabul following a 1964 gudiebook's advice). The remainder of the play, alas, is a disappointingly conventional story of a woman's disappearance in a foreign country and the efforts of her estranged nearest-and-dearest to come to terms with this disappearance even as they negotiate a strange and foreign culture with all of its perils. Reid's monologue alone was worth the cost of the ticket, and the rest of the story was enjoyable, but--perhaps unrealistically--I expected more from Mr. Kushner.