Caution: Liz-aster Area

            There is nothing that makes quite as harsh a start to the morning as waking up and re-reading your post-midnight texts and tweets from the night before. I know I get punchy and yappy when I’m overtired, but somehow last night while tweeting with my friend Vera at 3AM local time, I went from a joke about how I’ve got to stop proposing marriage to buskers (perfectly reasonable and I stand by that assessment in the unforgiving light of day) to visualizing a man playing the ukulele while gripping my still-beating heart in his teeth while it pumps my blood all down his front. Um. What?

            I so wish I could introduce all of you to my friend Maz. She’s lovely. She’s gorgeous and clever and is possessed of a bone-dry sense of humor, and she also has some of the most eloquent gestures I’ve ever seen. She has one in particular that means “surely I must have misheard you, because no one could possibly be dumb enough to say what I think you just said.” (She’s German. They’re a succinct people.) If you know Maz, you know exactly the gesture I mean. It’s a little stiff-armed shrug combined with a side-eye, and I’ve seen it stop stampeding morons in their tracks. Somehow the critic who lives in my head has picked up the Maz gesture, and she uses it on me often. When I start talking about ukulele players and my ripped-out heart and fountains of my blood, my inner critic does the Maz at me pretty hard.

            Freya and I went to see a one-off performance of Tommy last week. We both went in completely blind – as far as I was concerned, David Hunter from the reality show Superstar was in it. He was the cute one who made me cry a lot, and I quite wanted to see him perform live.  I’m not even going to try to summarize Tommy here but if you’ve never seen it: paedophilia, pinball, Christ figure, early retirement. Yeah, it makes about that much sense onstage, too. After the end of the show, Freya and I went around back to say a genial “well done, sir” to Mr. Hunter.

            At this point, anyone who has met me ever is rehearsing the Maz gesture to perform it along with my inner critic, because you see where this is going.

            As per all expectations, I was the world’s most socially graceless little badger. I said “fuck” about fifteen times to poor Mr. Hunter, and “jizz” once, and then I accidentally punched him. It was maybe not my finest hour. Would we go so far as to call it a “Liz-aster”? I think we can. (I am totally making “Liz-aster” happen, you guys. It’s not like I don’t have enough events that need that descriptor.) Much to the gentleman’s credit, he was properly lovely to me. Of course he was! He’s a retired rock star. He’s probably dealt with weirder shit than blue-haired sweary American bitches. He really is gorgeous, though, and Freya and I spent the entire train ride home gently smacking each other in a blind fog of lust and crooning “Why couldn’t he be awful so we’d have an excuse to not fancy him?”

            If my inner critic doesn’t stop doing the Maz gesture at me, she’s totally going to get a repetitive strain injury in her shoulders.

A Bit of a Holiday Before Things Get Serious

            I spent last weekend in Stratford, Ontario, at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival with TLC. She’s been taking me there ever since I was a wee thing of eleven, and that’s a huge part of what sparked my deep love of theatre, particularly of the classical variety. We saw five shows: Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, Cymbeline, The Pirates of Penzance, and Elektra. I’ll blog a bit about the shows themselves later.

            The trip afforded me a chance to see one of my favorite-ever people, Craig: certified tall person, Lord Byron look-alike, and former London denizen. He drove up from Toronto to see me, and he escorted me to Henry V. He’s one of the cleverest, warmest and funniest men I know, and I see him so infrequently that the little time we get together is terribly precious to me.

            “I have a friend who got her MA in Publishing in England,” Craig told me. “She’s back in Toronto now. She works at one of the biggest literary agencies in the country.”

            “Oh lovely! I think I’d like to be a literary agent,” I said. “I’m not sure what I’m going to do with my degree yet, but I’d really love to get the chance to crush people’s dreams and being an agent would let me do that. Literary agent, or maybe pediatric oncologist, but that would take too much extra school.” He laughed. This man laughs at my jokes about cancer-stricken children. I’ll never find another man like him.

            Of course, in addition to outstanding theatre, Stratford also boasts a number of superb restaurants, so I dove head-first into the town’s gustatory delights. It was a weekend full of wine and cappuccinos, pastas, pastries, local-vegetable salads and crème brulees. I gained three pounds. I don’t even feel bad about it. I didn’t have an unpleasant mouthful all weekend.

            This season marked the return to the Festival of one of my favorite actors, Graham Abbey. He was in the first production I saw at the Festival – he played William Roper in A Man For All Seasons. He was just a kid then, in his mid-twenties, tall and puppyishly cute. In the decade and a half since, I’ve watched him turn into a truly astoundingly effective performer. He speaks verse like he was born to do it – he tears through it neck-breakingly fast and yet it’s sharp, clear, perfectly understandable and deeply affecting. He was in the last performance I saw this weekend, playing Aegisthus in Elektra.

I love this man, and don't even act like you blame me.

            Going to Stratford with my mother and grandmother in 1998 made me feel very grown-up. I wasn’t even a teenager, so I still had a lot of growing to do, but that experience was hugely defining to who I would be as an adult. Graham Abbey was my first proper grown-up celebrity crush, and I am so pleased that one of his performances was my introduction to the Stratford Festival and grown-up life, and another was my last hurrah before I pack up my life here and move across the Atlantic. I’ve only spoken to him once (and briefly at that, at stage door seven or eight years ago), but the gentleman has been a very important part of my life. Thanks, Mr. Abbey. You’ve meant so much to me.