Only 3 more days! (plus Patron's Pick Day) Looks like When Pigs Fly and Alice in Wonderland have already been announced as Patron's Picks for their venues, which sort of makes sense. If you're interested in supporting the Fringe AND seeing TJ Dawe, check out Monday morning at 11:30, when TJ will be performing the Slip Knot.

As we rolled into the weekend last night with some light rain and lots of folks crowding the Shakespeare Center, I noticed three college-looking kids soliciting people for photographs. I walked up to tell them about Blogging Fringe, and it turned out they were the Orlando Metromix "SHOCK SQUAD"! Is Metromix the Sentinel one, that's going to be changing their name? It's not CityBeat, is it? It's one of those. I went to see what coverage they had of the festival, and it was exactly one article - recommendations based on watching the preview. Also, no comments allowed. They asked me to link to them, and in hopes that they link back, here we go.

Check out Orlando Metromix's Fringe Photoset - lots of familiar faces in there.

Last night, I lost my festival program. Normally no big deal, but this was different - I had written all sorts of notes in my program, marked down page numbers of shows, kept my tickets inside, and started to feel like my program was a treasured item - sort of like a stuffed animal or something, now lost. I checked the Brown Venue, the Blue Venue, the Ticket Booth, and the Garbage Can too, but my program was gone. I went to the box office to get some tickets re-printed ( handy reason for using credit card or the internet to buy your tickets), and proceeded to go through the tickets I did have with the volunteer to make sure I wasn't missing any others.

Apparently, I've seen a lot of shows:

1. A Brief History of Petty Crime
2. American Squatter
3. Boom
4. *Flamenco con Fusion 08
5. Galapagos: The Directors Cut
6. **Here Be Dragons
7. *Mark Baratelli
8. Move!
9. MR. FOX
10. *Mr. Marmalade
11. **New Rochelle
12. On Second Thought
13. *once upon a time: The End
14. Oral
15. Parlour Games
16. perfectly broken
17. Power To Pleasing: The Sex Lives of Teenage Girls
18. *Red, White, and Ignorant: An American Love Story
19. **Reefer Madness
20. Shadows In Bloom
21. Skip Peril and the Players of the Lost Trunk
22. *Swell
23. The Boy's Own Jedi Handbook
24. *The Bric-a-Brac Vagabond Vintage Variety Show
25. The Cody Rivers Show presents: Stick to Glue
26. The Greg Barris Heart of Darkness Rock and Roll Circus
27. *The Slipknot: A Benefit for the Orlando Fringe
28. Totem Figures
29. TV iMature
30. *Wet
31. **VarieTEASE: No. 24 Doll Factory
32. When Pigs Fly

* Indicates shows I have not seen, but I have a ticket for.
** Shows I saw after writing this blog post.

All of these shows (that I have seen) are awesome. Go see them all. If I could only tell you three, I would include The Cody Rivers Show, On Second Thought and Boom (not in that order). I would say Power to Pleasing, but it's sold out. I continue to tell folks that if they haven't seen any dance, they MUST go - we always have great dance at this festival, and I'm seeing all of the 5 dance shows this year. Lastly, (not leastly) if you've never seen TJ Dawe, Barry Smith, Jimmy Hogg, Greg Landucci, Gemma Wilcox or any of the other out-of-town monologists (like Paul Hutcheson from On Second Thought, mentioned earlier), they are all worth your time and money. This is also not counting Patron's Pick day, where I plan to see some shows that have floated to the top, but I managed to miss. It should be a fun experience.

What was also a fun experience was getting a random contact from some folks from Rake Theatre down in Boynton Beach - they're putting on Fluency this week at the Fringe. Apparently, they are wanting to start an all-Florida arts blog - a very ambitious project. I have about 3 such very ambitious projects in my head, in the works with locals, or I at least own the domain name for them.

The South Florida folks' project is called, of all things, Florida Arts Blog, which is a Wordpress.com site right now, but for some reason the posts about Fringe have disappeared... ::shrug:: Something and someone to watch in the coming weeks and months. I am trying to sell them on Florida Creatives myself, blogging can come later. They've also got a link to Mark's Orlando Arts Blog up there... I wonder if they've been emailing him too...?

Other things happening this weekend would be:

Orlando Silent Rave (see a video)
Saturday, May 24th, 5:24PM @ the Green Lawn of Fabulosity

Kite Flying 2.0 with Radio Rickshaw and Greg Barris
Sunday, May 25th 11AM - 5PM @ the Green Lawn on Drunkenness

Zombie March 3.7 with Rich Weirdos and Friends
Saturday, May 24th @ 3PM Park Ave and 5PM Lake Eola

If you know of more cool stuff, leave a comment and we'll get it listed.