by Phillip Andrew Bennett Low | 8/1/09 • Last year I did my first car-less Fringe. It, er, wasn’t really a matter of choice for at the time, I’m afraid — but now I’m a convert to the experience. No traffic, no parking — but perhaps best of all, it led me to discover what I’m calling the synchronicity highway. The way this works is: I start my day by walking to the venue that happens to be physically closest to me. After seeing a show there, I strike up a conversation with another audience member, ask what show they’re going to see next, and ask if they’ll give me a ride. The upshot of this is I never know what I’m going to see next.
This raises two key points:
| womb with a view is the blog of phillip andrew bennett low, one of seven bloggers covering the minnesota fringe festival and other theater for the daily planet. |
1) first of all: I see a lot of shows with people who I know or work with involved in them. This isn’t nepotism; this is symptomatic of the fact that I’ve been doing the Minnesota Fringe for six years, and by now know a huge percentage of the recurring artists involved. When faced with the choice, I generally try to see work by people I’ve never seen before.
2) on the flip side of that, I apologize to those of you whom I know whose shows I will inevitably miss. I make an effort to see everybody, but that’s of course physically impossible, and the tradeoff of the fact that I’m hitching means that I end up with a lot less control over my own schedule.
Either case — looking forward to seeing you around.
Phillip Andrew Bennett Low (maximumverbosityonline@gmail.com) is a playwright and poet, storyteller and mime, theater critic and libertarian activist, who lurks ominously in the desert wilds of St. Louis Park, feasting upon the hygienically-prepared flesh of the once-living. His main claim to fame is probably as co-founder of the Rockstar Storytellers, and as founder/producer of Maximum Verbosity, a garage-band-like theater troupe that is in a state of constantly re-defining itself.
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