This shameless promo photo of RobbieRobTown by Tyler Stalman at www.stalman.com is just the sort of thing I'm complaining about.

Dear “Sirs”:

This is the last time I visit your appalling website. I was here minding my own business, reading your supposedly “amusing” articles, when I stumbled across this tedious, self aggrandizing nonsense form your staff writer TBinns. I found the whole thing sickening, and you can read it here if you dare to be sickened:

http://www.thecorrectness.com/writing/blackout-a-work-of-microfiction-by-tony-binns/

I couldn’t believe your collective gall. Your collective gall is huge and swollen. Your gall is so swollen it is making you impudent.

The internet is no place for advertising. It is an immense public forum that runs on goodwill, and charitable government servers, and rainbow kisses. Primarily rainbow kisses. I would be immensely, immensely disturbed if anyone were to mention that RobbieRobTown has a musical going up at the Edmonton Fringe Festival. Why would you bother to tell me that he has written all the music, or that he is starring in the show? That sort of corporate pandering is deplorable, gentlemen. We have all had enough quirky puppet musicals with banjos. The Muppets got there first, and Jim Henson controls the copyright to all things fabric with banjos.

Imagine how angry I would be if you provided information about the songs, some of which can be found here:

http://www.myspace.com/robmitchelson

I would be disgusted if you pointed out that I could listen to songs from the show on that page. Furthermore, if you had the audacity to mention the following:

Rob Mitchelson’s Music n’ Such | Promote your Page too

Then I would throw up in my mouth, again and again, until the puke leaked out my nose, and possibly ears. That would be quite a feat, as I do not believe the Eustachian tube functions like that. At least the puke blockage would prevent me from hearing those catchy pop songs.

I will certainly not attend this event at any of the following times:

The Tornado: A Musical Prairie Tragicomedy runs at the Edmonton International Fringe Festival from August 12-22, 2010 at the Strathcona Branch of EPL (8331-104th Street).
August 13 10:15 pm
August 14 4:00 pm
August 15 5:30pm
August 17 6:30 pm
August 18 9:30 pm
August 19 1:45 pm
August 20 6:00 pm
August 21 2:00 pm
August 22 7:30 pm.

Who do you people think you are? I am tired of hearing about the intriguing narrative, the “fringe genre” story choices or the fabulous special guest stars as the titular Tornado nightly. What kind of show called “Tornado: A Musical Prairie Tragicomedy” would let hilarious Canadian theatre celebrities take on the most important role?

I am leaving this site forever and never coming back. I seriously mean it, not like those other people who have left the site forever and are never coming back, who you can read all about here:

http://www.thecorrectness.com/writing/cult-diaries/

Sincerely,
Some Angry Dude

P.S. Don’t you dare refer me to the website of that talented photographer.

http://www.stalman.com/

Dear Hippies:

I used to be a street performer, professionally, and God knows I have been a hippie too, professionally, and I’d like to offer you some advice. I see you are putting on a show this year, to raise funds to repair your Westfalia microbus, and decorate your entire body in henna in the carefully drawn image of an entire other person, allowing you to apply for a credit card finally. I have a very high tolerance for you guys, really I do. I had a hemp necklace, I slept in a tipi.

So, if your multiple-scarf-wearing, shoeless, sodden-footed friends are sitting around you in their pancho hoodies, and lounging on their sleeping bags, and you have a kitten on leash and a hat laying out for money, I have some terrible news for you. That is not a show. I will not pay you.

A kitten on a leash is not a show.

Two scarves maximum, please, per person.

Likewise, if one of you has a guitar, and if the rest of your dreadlocked, pot-smoke-reeking crew are somehow emanating a nostril-shattering assault of body odour over and above the pot smell, and if you are playing on your guitar songs which came to you from Mother Moon, and if you have set your instrument case too far back in your communist den of stench so that it will be intimidating for me to navigate through your commune of friends to give you my change in disgust, you are not doing a show.

If you make it hard to pay you, you are not doing a show.

You are having a traffic blocking kitchen party.

Finally, if your drum circle isn’t drawing a crowd, and so you add, without regard to their skill level, two women with hula hoops, and if they look sincerely intense as they gyrate, eyes closed in the tragic fiction of rapture, and if you throw in someone fire-spinning in a pair of wrap pants you brought them back from your trip to Kopipi, and once every ten minutes someone makes an announcement that this is a show, and if there is no sense of order, structure, focus or purpose to your fiery, hoopy, shitty circus, then that is not a show.

I would rather give money to the kitten on a leash, which, may i remind you, is not a show.

At least the kitten on a leash is short, both in duration and height, and entertaining.

I even like hula hoops, just, not like this.

Send your smelly friends home, make eye contact with me, have a point, don’t denigrate street performers by trying to pull off this modified pan handling.

Oh, and speaking as a street performer again, yeah, I do have some change, i just earned a lot of it putting on a real show that makes sense and is entertaining, so NO you can’t have any of my change.

Sincerely,

RobbieRobTown