Very busy weekend. Brooke and I went to see the Second City comedy show on Saturday night. They’re a sketch comedy group in Toronto. The original troupe is in Chicago and I think they also have one now in Detroit. Very funny stuff, including a parody of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” set in some Latin American dictatorship.and a running set of sketches about the conflicts between Stephen Hawking and his priest. I’ve been planning for over a year to take some improv courses with their training centre, and I think before the end of this year, I will. We got the tickets for free, too, which is always good.
After returning around 1:30 am from that, we had to go to Kinko’s to photocopy some flyers for Cherrymag, which was due to launch the next day. We were gearing up for Canzine on Sunday, and had a lot of last minute work to do on the site as well. To make a long story short, we were up until 5 am working on it. And had to be ready by 10 am the next morning to set up at Canzine. We brought our new iBook as well as Brooke’s TV to hook it up to. Displaying the actual site on the TV looked too blurry, so I whipped up a cheesy presentation in AppleWorks and we were set.
Canzine was a roaring success, both for Cherrymag (live now!) and in general. The zine world (and by extension, Kinko’s) is alive and well in Canada, with over 150 exhibitors and a steady crush of people all day from just after noon until about 6, when things started to peter out. Brooke was tired, and her co-editor Jen was sick, but we all managed to get through the day and get the word out. We had candy, flyers, stickers, the iBook (and TV) and our sunny smiles working for us, and we managed to get about 40 names on our mailing list. The site, of course, still needs work (and writers–email Brooke if you’d like to help out). I’m going to post some pictures a bit later.
In the middle of all that, I managed to slip out for an hour to go to City Hall. There was a book (or rather, books) of condolences for Pierre Trudeau, and I wanted to sign. It was pretty impressive and moving. Lots and lots of people there, all day long. I waited in line about 30 minutes. A lot of families there with their kids, and a lot of different cultures represented (Trudeau was responsible for opening up Canada’s immigration policy and promoting multiculturalism). All the papers had tributes this weekend. I only read The Globe and Mail, but they had some really great photos from his time as Prime Minister, including lots of pictures of him with his sons. He was a really good father, and the death of his son Michel in an avalanche a couple of years ago really sapped his enthusiasm for life.