It’s the night before I do a clown turn at the Red Nose Cabaret. I’ve been fretting about it for the last couple of days. Will I be funny? Will I be focused? Will I be open to failure? Clowning is like riding a unicycle. You have to flirt with losing your balance and falling…
In July, I will be putting on my first solo Clown Show at the Hamilton Fringe Festival. Gulp. This show is almost fifty years in the making, so I thought I’d reflect back on my Clown influences. Jerry Lewis was my first Clown. I watched The Jerry Lewis Show when I was six years old and…
I’m a terrible procrastinator. Which means that I’m a really good one. Anyone who knows me, knows that I put things off. Especially writing projects. Since January, I’ve been meaning to write the next draft of my play Out to the Folks, do a quick update and polish of The Lost Years because we’re thinking…
It was the first day of classes in Grade Four and Mrs. Korb asked John Hazel and me to stand up. She wanted us to be “buddies” with the new kid, George Snider. I turned and looked over to the red-faced kid with the bowl hair cut and big teeth. To be fair, he looked…
Today is a milestone birthday. Only birthdays ending in zeros or fives seem to be milestones when your age is in the double digits. But when you get to the triple digits, every birthday is a milestone again, like the first ten years of your life. I still have a ways to go before I…
One of the big takeaways I had from doing the Hamilton Fringe Festival last summer was that marketing is important. Really important. How do you get people to go see your show when there are 30 other shows they can see? And a thousand other reasons for them NOT to see it? And how do…
Sometimes we set a goal for ourselves and we don’t quite make it. Maybe we don’t come anywhere near reaching it. Do we give up? If it’s a worthy goal, you carry on. Or start over. Fall down three times and get up four times. It’s the getting up and retrying or starting over that…
Just do it. Such simple advice, yet so easy to ignore. I’ve only written 5 blog posts in almost two years. It’s not because of a lack of things to write about. Like most writers, I have tons of ideas. But getting the ideas onto the page (or screen) is the challenge. It’s frustrating because…
The 2107 Hamilton Fringe starts in less than two weeks! From July 20 to July 29, we will perform my play The Lost Years at the Artword Artbar in Hamilton. I’m excited and I’m freaking out. I’m excited to have a new play to show an audience. My last play was three years ago. Also,…
Last Friday, I stayed after work an extra 45 minutes. I was chatting with my friend, Mike, and the conversation was on a roll. It was one of those conversations that are usually fuelled by alcohol, although this one was not. We talked about life, friends, family, mortality and things we wanted to do “one…
peter gruner 