I’ll be taking my solo show, A Cynic Tells Love Stories, to the Rogue Festival in Fresno and the Edmonton Fringe. I’m also #1 on the wait list for Vancouver Fringe and Ottawa Fringe, and the Winnipeg lottery is coming up soon. Plus I’ve applied for both Cincinnati Fringe and the first annual Chicago Fringe. More details to come…

The Minnesota Fringe Festival is over and I’m in San Francisco getting ready to do it all over again, West Coast style.

As I mentioned earlier, I was originally near the end of the waitlist for Minnesota Fringe, but I got a slot literally a week before the festival opened because another company had to drop out.

It was a crazy week of constant writing and rehearsing, little sleep, and slightly excessive amounts of both coffee and alcohol (followed of course by the Fringe itself, which was the same only with a less writing and more alcohol).

I averaged a little under 30 people at each performance, and the response was incredibly positive.

All in all, I’d say No Stranger Than Home had a successful run in Minnesota – especially since I had so little time for publicity. Though let’s see if we can’t bring out bigger crowds for San Francisco…

In addition to my one-woman show “No Stranger Than Home,” I was also part of Shakespeare’s Land of the Dead: “a true and accurate account of the Elizabethan zombie plague,” which takes place backstage at the Globe Playhouse in 1599.

The cast, the direction, and the script (written by company member John Heimbuch) were all phenomenal. I am proud to report that we were the top-selling show at the Fringe and got great reviews from pretty much every local media outlet. More than 1200 people saw the show, and Walking Shadow has received numerous requests from companies who want to produce the show themselves.

I was just a grunting zombie who got her neck snapped, but it was quite an honor to be a part of this production.

The first review of my show is up on the Fringe website:

This show amazed me with what can be done through simple storytelling! With minimal props, the artist brought us with her around the world– we looked over her shoulder as she flirted with a girl in East Africa, or had her foot brutally readjusted (with success!) by Nicaraguan witch doctors. I appreciated her humor, poetry, and honesty in presenting these tales… each building upon the next, until by the end, I truly felt like I’d gone someplace and back with her.

The review comes from Malia Burkhart, who is also doing a one-woman show, The Survival Pages. I haven’t seen it and I’m not familiar with her work, but anyone with such good taste is probably worth seeing.

Midwesterners can now see No Stranger Than Home without traveling all the way to San Francisco.

Two companies dropped out of the Minnesota Fringe Festival at the last minute, and I stepped in and took one of the slots.

It’ll be great for me to have a first run in my home city, where I have a lot more contacts and can get feedback and make last minute adjustments before I head out west, where I’m a complete unknown.

But it’s going to be a stressful week – I haven’t actually finished writing the show yet, and it opens one week from today.

I say: bring it on…

I performed a five-minute excerpt from my show last night at the Minneapolis “Anything Goes” poetry slam. It seemed to go over well; I won the slam and came home with this trophy, which is just under four inches tall and made of plastic.

Because it was the “Anything Goes” slam (a fundraiser to send the local team to nationals), none of the regular slam rules applied – you could use props, you could go over three minutes, and the regular judging system didn’t apply. Instead of individual judges ranking the poems on a scale of one to ten, the emcee asked the audience to clap or boo after each piece to show how much they liked it, and then she picked a random number that she felt reflected the audience’s judgment. My score was 8,000-something.

But all wackiness and unscientific judging aside, I got some incredibly positive feedback from the audience, along with promises that they would tell all of their friends in the Bay Area to see the show. All in all, it was a good debut.

Last night was the lottery for the Minnesota Fringe Festival line-up, and I was not selected.

I’ve been a spoken word performer in this theater festival every year but one since 2003, but this was the first time I applied to do my own one-woman show. Alas, the ping-pong ball with my number was not drawn until late into the night – so late, in fact, that I am 115 on the waiting list. A lot of people would have to drop out for me to get a spot.

Fortunately I also applied for the Boulder and San Francisco Fringe Festivals as a back-up. The Boulder lottery isn’t until February 21, but I did get a slot in the San Francisco Fringe, so I will be producing a show. It’s a collection of stories from my travels abroad and within the U.S., possibly including new material from my upcoming trip to East Africa.

And in case a company has to drop out of the Minnesota Fringe at the last possible minute, I’ll be ready to step in…