Ha! Gotcha! Thought you were going to make it through the Fringe without me rambling in your…well not your ear exactly, but rambling in your eye sounds painful, unsanitary, and apt to require the attentions of an opthamologist.

I could have used one to help me notice the date so I would at least have showed up before Saturday night (when I made a tour of The King’s Head, the patio, the beer tent, and back), or sent a list of show requests to, and received subsequent assignments from, Murray, your web-master extraordinaire, bringing all this to you at the touch of whatever wi-fi enabled mobile device is your choice, (or, for Luddites like me, your home computer).

Back in the print-on-paper days. I would be Fringe fatigued before the Festival even began, what with selling and organizing ads, communicating and meeting with Jenny staff, organizing and presenting a Prevue, contacting all of the groups about SSPs, photos, and ads and the resultant correspondence with many of them, contacting and contracting with a printer willing to put up with our nonsense, putting together basic 8 and 12 page layouts with Dave Cramer, and so on.

Ahh, but here on the net there are neither the constraints imposed by the 8.5×11” page, nor by print shop hours. Nor do we have to chop copy just to make it fit. Here we can just go on and on…(a ripple of fear runs through the crowd).

So why don’t you? We could use a little running run from the masses, here. Ray, Kaitlyn, Lisa, and Murray, Jenny’s crack team—who might just be on crack given the huge whack of shows they’ve reviewed—don’t have the only opinions and, whether you agree or disagree with their assessments, we’d like to hear yours.

To hasten the deluge of contributions that invitation should invoke, I impose a deadline. It’s mainly fueled by the renowned Jenny Awards, (held 10pm-ish Sunday night at the King’s Head), where the categories are determined by whim and the winners by cacophony.

For any show to be eligible to win a delightful little hand-made donkey, it must have had some mention made of it on this site before 6 PM, Saturday July 29th. It can be in The Buzz, Shameless Self Promotion, or Letters sections, a column mention, or just by performers submitting copy and adding the name of their show after their own by-line. None of these guarantees nomination, but it does establish eligibility. (Buying us beer works too).

Now I must finish this and get back to this fabulous new thing I’m trying out—actually seeing shows. I’ve been to three already! That’s as many as I’ve seen in the last the decade. So as long as my cash and my stamina lasts, I’m going to keep doing it. So should you.

Coral McKendrick