BLOG: Merry Fringe, Everyone!

Sorry. Fringing. Hey, everyone. This week's News and Notes blog is going to be very short. Sorry about that, but the Twin Cities theater scene is currently hunkered down in the middle of the Minnesota Fringe Festival. Not only is the major theater coverage in town centered almost entirely on pumping out reviews of the 169 shows going on right now, but I am also almost entirely centered on performing my one show and seeing as many of the other 168 as possible. While there is a part of me that would like to abuse my position at Minnesota Playlist to plug my show, I am going to display some journalistic integrity for once and refrain. (Though, if you're really interested, you could probably search my name on the website and find it.) Because I have been obsessively refreshing the Audience Review page on the Fringe Festival website, desperately seeking to affirm my sense of self worth through the chance words of strangers, I do not have a huge amount of things to talk about this week, other than the fact that, oh my God, why are you wasting your time reading this column when you could be out seeing Fringe shows or thinking about what Fringe shows you want to see? Fringe is my World Cup, my Super Bowl, my whatever the final playoffs for hockey are called; except I actually get to be a part of it. And like that one obnoxious friend who loves soccer and zealously tries to recruit people to join him at a pub to watch beautiful Europeans running around feigning injuries, I zealously try to recruit people to spend 11 days running back and forth between theaters. I know we're supposed to be good Minnesotans and not act like this is any kind of competition, but, come on, it totally is. And there is nothing wrong with competition in the arts. I know the sheer mass of the Fringe Festival can be daunting, but there are many different strategies to maximize your Fringe experience. The fine website you are currently pointing your eyeballs at is doing its own unconventional coverage, and our editor, Alan Berks, recently turned out his own strategy guide to the Fringe. We're only at the halfway point of this year's festival, which means I've still got 6 more exhausting days of performing and viewing left to go. I'll probably see around 30-35 shows on top of performing my own, because I am a crazy person (though, not as crazy as someone I know who is performing in four different shows this year), but there's no reason you have to push yourself that hard. Even though the number of tickets sold per performance is up slightly, there's still plenty of room for you to join us. Vindicated! A long time ago, in an era nearly lost to the mists of time (I believe it was last March), I wrote a column that started off with the complaint that the "more seats per capita than anywhere but New York" factoid reprinted in every feel-good article about Minnesota was probably a big steaming load of BS. Not to sound like the painfully hip guy who was way into that band you like before they were famous, but, friends, people are starting to agree with me.* I know it sounds like a petty little thing to harp on. What's the harm in letting the the Minneapolis visitor's bureau have a little something to brag about? For me, it's not just the fact that the "fact" is not a fact at all (which is still a pretty big deal to me), it's that we bothered to make up a fake statistic that still puts us in second place to New York. Come on, people, if we're making stuff up, let's go all the way. Where's your good old fashioned American "We're number one!" spirit? Seriously, though, it is this constant placing of ourselves a rung down that bothers about this. The entire nation's theater industry has such a massive inferiority complex over New York that we're willing to fight each other over who gets to play second fiddle; while in real life, no one chants "We're number two!" I know I've harped on this before, but I think that Bitter Gertrude has an even better take on it. In a recent blog post, she writes about the massive class divide between New York and the rest of the country that only exists because we believe in it: "We accord New York theatre an enormous amount of privilege that we’re denying theatre elsewhere for no reason other than that we DO." So, there's your homework this week. Read that article. Think about how awesome it would be if we all put our energies into making our own theater scenes more awesome. And go to the Fringe Festival. It's the largest unjuried festival in the country, and that is an actual fact that you can be proud of. *Thanks to Jay Gabler at The Tangential for linking back to one of my articles in his article. I'm glad I was able to link back to his, thus continuing the recursion. If we keep this up, we can make up our own bogus statistic and have enough "references" to convince everyone.