Well, I didn't quite make it through NaBloPoMo. But you know...fuck it! HA ha!
So...Anne Made Me Gay: When Kindred Spirits Get Naked. I was going to stop Anne-ing it up on my poor beleaguered blog, but then I got the pictures back. So suck it, Anne-haters! Wooooo!
First of all, special thanks to ace photographer and all around fabulous guy Mondo Lulu, who captured the evening in such style. We had a photo booth where audience members could don Anne's red braids and pose. And they DID. Click through for photos! Do it! You know you want to.
Anne Made Me Gay co-curator/tableau vivant creator Moy-anne King went first in the photobooth, to set an example. She's so fetching in gingham...And Buddies artistic director David Oiye gave his best Emo Anne. Who died, David? Oh, that's right...Matthew Cuthbert. Sorry. Carry on.
The beautiful Juana Awad read "romantic friendship" poetry in the lobby before the show. You can see her audience is really...listening. And by 'listening', I mean 'staring at Juana's rack'.
We sold out. Clearly, Anne made a LOT of people gay. I KNEW it! Yes, that IS gingham on the podium.
There were hot, girl-on-girl tableaux vivants throughout the evening. I spent most of the night blushing in the dark behind that podium.
Evalyn Parry shared her Anne in my Mind song, before blowing us all away with her original audition video for the CBC Anne of Green Gables mini-series. If she will give it to me, I will post it. Because she clearly should have gotten the role.
The always sexy Scandelles got in on the action with their video of Anne as a phone sex worker. "And I'll talk and talk and talk and talk..." I, uh...wrote the number down for later. For a friend. Not me.
Moynan thought we should include some "actual facts" and "real research" in the evening. So we brought in the brilliant Professor Kym Bird from York to raise the tone.
Then I lowered the tone.
Liz Pounsett (Anne) and Renee Olbert (Diana) helped prove my theory that Anne and Diana were totally doing it.
Clearly, Anne and Diana had an effect on the audience AND the crew. Way to keep it classy, technicians.
We couldn't do a show about Anne without a nod to Laura Ingalls Wilder. Fortunately, the lovely Kate stepped in with her controversial thesis, Half-Pint to Homo.
As I mentioned, Nathalie Claude, Natalie Mathieson and Sasha Kovacs performed hot tableaux vivants throughout the evening. Sigh...
Mariko Tamaki and Lindy Zucker's Silence of the Annes was the kind of gothic tale that Anne herself would have loved. If she was a real sicko. I also want to thank Mariko and Lindy for calming my preshow hosting jitters by letting me accompany them to dinner and then telling me a great story about another performance artist singeing his balls while shitting into a heated Mason jar. Thanks, guys.
The lovely, artfully dishevelled Rose Cullis treated us to a few new additions to Anne's vocabulary. Very...steamy.
Then Dayna McLeod tucked her dress up into her pantyhose and brought the house down with her Anne of Green Gables/Anne Murray Karaoke Mash-up performance, which KILLED. Never has "You Needed Me" rung so true!!
There was only one way for the show to end. That's right - corsets in the air! The extraordinary aerialist Rebecca Leonard's piece Cat's Cradle took Anne to a whole other level, both in a metaphoric sense and a stupid pun sense. And I don't want to judge - but if you weren't moved by Rebecca lifting Nathalie-Anne up off the ground for a kiss at the end, then you're DEAD INSIDE.
I think the audience left...a little gayer. I don't know if you guys were drunk or what, but you were hands-down the best audience Anne could have wished for. Thanks so much to everyone to came to laugh and, of course, be educated.
I also have to thank the amazing crew at Buddies, who (along with Katr) spent far more of their day than they should fiddling with my PowerPoint issues and who ran the show so smoothly. You guys are the wind beneath my wings!
Thanks to all of our amazing performers and to Moynan and Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, who called my "let's have a gay Anne night" bluff and helped create what Anne Shirley would call "an epoch in my life". For an Anne fetishist fan like me, it was every sick slash fiction dream I have had come true...and more. Can I ever return to normal life after this? Well, apparently I have to, because Katr says so. But I will carry the memory of it with me all my days.
Check out the rest of the photos at the Anne Made Me Gay group on flickr. If you have any to add to the group, please tag them "annefest08"!
