It’s a bit of a secret at the moment but we are just confirming the debut of a brand new show coming up this Fall in Toronto. We have formed a brand new company, called In-House Productions, and we are carefully crafting a brand new loving comically inclined play! Stay tuned for more details!

so, i just turned the heat up, and grateful i can do it on this windy cold night, even though in labrador it will be minus 45 or thereabouts.

still, the minus 13 here feels like ice trying to creep inside my bones. at the end of this long work day in the comedy mines i finally have time to reflect on how today began.

i was in a local tim’s, you know the drill, in the line up for the morning fix. a lovely elderly lady came in and stood behind me, pulling one of those grocery trolleys that elderly ladies have and that we all need. she said to me, i like your hat. thanks, i said. i explained to her that my knitted hat with the pink white and green emblem on the front came from a craft store on the burin peninsula. i then looked at her and said, i like your earrings, referring to her dangling sparkling earrings which resembled little christmas trees filled with bulbs. oh, she said, i got those somewhere ten years ago, i wear them all the time, not just christmas, because it doesn’t matter if i lose them.

she pulled a toonie from out of a little change purse and pressed it into my hand. here, she insisted, i want to buy you a coffee on this cold morning. no, said I, rather stunned, no, why should you, of course not. no. oh yes i am, she said, and insisted i take the toonie. she said, i always say to my son, if i’ve got money you can have it, and if i don’t have any, you’re out of luck. i asked her where she was coming from, thinking it was early to have been grocery shopping or visiting friends, being just past nine a.m.

oh, she says. i just finished my paper route and i’m getting a coffee now to warm my hands while i wait for the bus to take me home. i get up at 5.30 every saturday morning to deliver the paper. what odds about the cold, if it gets too cold and windy i just put my hood up. i gave her a closer look now and saw her gesture to the grocery trolley which had plastic wrapped around it to protect the papers. her slightly worn winter gear, her wispy hair, her change purse with perhaps six or seven toonies inside of it.

i accepted her gift of a coffee and touched her arm on my way out of the tim’s and though she said goodbye i could see her eyes upon the bus stop across the street, perhaps wishing to be home now, perhaps not.

i went on to work and my lame attempts to describe the experience were…well…lame. i felt touched by something mystical and humbling and incredibly sad. tonight i turn up my heat and hope that she can too, where-ever she is.

 

I write things for people who want to write. I write things for people who have a vision and need the words. I write, therefore I am.

Berni Stapleton, In Conjunction
http://bernistapleton.com

So for Christmas I got the flu. But I was nursed oh so interestingly by one Dr Who, courtesy of the Space Channel marathon and every time he turned up he was someone different! What a thing! But Dr Who aside, the flu did make for a somewhat solitary and melancholy Christmas. I always find Christmas a little melancholy, the contemplation and reflection packed in amongst increasing bustle and fray which I resist with varying results. Now emerging from the cocoon to spend my birth day and new year with the dearest of friends in Salmon Cove I can count my blessings and will! What a year for my company In Conjunction with new plays in development for TNL, Rising Tide, Brazil Square about to launch at the Hall in a few weeks and the crazy Revue with Rising Tide, the great Comedy Ark of Sanctuary for the Comedy Creatures who still survive and work on the stage.

I am grateful to Donna F. and Creative Publishing for my new book This is the Cat coming out in the spring of the year, as my beloved Uncle Bernard Butler always said, there is always something to look forward to in the spring of the year. I think I will take the heart of that thought and try to apply it to every day this year, springing forward, springing along, basically keeping on going with the creative universe, invested with the power of fives, being fifty plus five on this day, a really really nice halfway number, I think.

And “The Remarkable Life of Clementine Parsons’ my new one woman play co-devised with Charlie T is bursting out like little crazy weeds all over the garden and that’s all I’d better say about that….for now!

The best time ever was touring the province with Amy House in The Importance of Being Foolish, the best reminder of how to have a great time in a great province, how to dream big and make it happen with licks and promises and whispers and wishes. In the spirit of Hobbits I wish you all a very merry un-birth day and a healthy and happy new year. My family and friends are all spectacular and I am in awe of ye all every single day and somewhat astonished to have been chosen by ye but here I am all the same.

Also this year I learned what emoticon thingies are.

 

I write things for people who want to write. I write things for people who have a vision and need the words. I write, therefore I am.

Berni Stapleton, In Conjunction
http://bernistapleton.com