Turns out that the Fringe page does provide a way to share your "queue" (i.e., favorites list) with your adoring public. It's a little checkbox under "Privacy Settings" on your Profile page. I have now checked that box, so others can now see my queue, I guess.

I'm not sure how you find my profile, though. Has anybody found a way to search for other user's profiles?
Here's a link to mine. http://www.fringefestival.org/2013/profile/?pid=11720

A fun evening, but nothing spectacular. R spent the morning at the Powderhorn Art Show, arriving home barely in time for us to bike downtown for one more spin around the Hennepin Avenue venues. Usually by this point in the Fringe we have spent an entire day on the West Bank, but this year we haven't been there once. Getting over there seems like too much trouble without at least 3 shows to see, and so far that hasn't happened. I wouldn't mind seeing the Joseph Scrimshaw show, but that one is inappropriately booked into the tiny Experimental Theater, which means it is selling out days in advance (and we aren't planning that far ahead).

So for the 2nd day in a row we biked up Aldrich to Franklin, up Lyndale to Loring Park, up Nicollet Mall and over to Hennepin. A pretty easy trip heading north, but with a total Bike Trail Fail on the way back. There is now a nice 2-lane asphalt bike path running along the east side of Lyndale from Loring Park almost to Franklin Avenue ("almost" being the key term here). About 2 blocks north of Franklin the bike path ends abruptly, dumping the bikers onto a narrow sidewalk with features like a large light pole right in the middle of the pavement. Then the sidewalk degenerates into a goat trail as it passes Rudolph's Barbeque, which has taken over half the sidewalk for outdoor tables. If you're headed north you can ride in the street on Lyndale at this point, but heading south you have no choice but to stay on the diminishing sidewalk. That's right where Lyndale and Hennepin merge and there is no way to get across to the west side of the street. I've slowly glided through that goat trail numerous times before, but on my way home last night I cut a little too far to the left to avoid the dropped handlebars of a bike chained to a pole (as if the space weren't restricted enough!!) and brushed against the iron railing separating the cafe tables from the tiny scrap of sidewalk. Unfortunately, it's not REALLY an iron railing at all - it's a free-standing divider that just kind of falls over if you lean on it. Which it did, carrying me and my bike down with it practically into the laps of the horrified diners. I wasn't hurt, just a little embarrassed, especially as I was trapped in the mess of bike and iron railing and somebody had to lift the bike off so I could get up. The rest of the trip was uneventful.

_______________________________________
5:30 Illusion Theater Four Humors' Lolita: A Three Man Show  ?????
(Four Humors, unaccountably billed as FatBottom Jones Productions)

I just don't know how to rate this one. Everybody else who has seen it apparently rates it 5 stars, and I suppose it probably is. But I found it just a little too meta. I'm still not sure what the point was of casting Lolita and her mother as large, hairy men. Perhaps to make a statement about the male gaze? To remove any possibility of actual eroticism from the story? Surely it couldn't have been just for cheap laughs? It is possible that my relationship to "Lolita" is too complicated to allow me to appreciate it as a comedy (I read the book while in high school and was simultaneously horrified at the subject matter and utterly seduced by the style). I have never seen the movie. I suspect that if I had I would have found the play much funnier, since there were clearly visual jokes based on images from the movie and a big deal made over a minor character that I don't think even appears in the book. Not entirely grokked, but recommended.
_______________________________________
7:00 New Century Theatre Schrödinger's Apocalypse   * * *
Rooftop Theatre Company

This is exactly the kind of play that makes me miss the old anthology format that used to be so popular at Fringe. It's a clever bit of fluff that would have been just dandy as a 15 or 20 minute skit, preferably paired with a couple of other short pieces with a little more heft. As a more or less hour-long show it just draggggggs. Not recommended unless you have time to kill and an Ultrapass.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
INTERLUDE: Dinner at Rosa Mexicano, a handsome bar/restaurant at 6th & Hennepin with the most comfortable outdoor seating short of Stella's rooftop. I see from their website that they are a national chain, which I wouldn't have guessed. Well, it's a very nice chain. The raised, covered deck was much more pleasant than tables right next to the street, and the food was good. And boy, was it handy!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

____________________________________________
10:00 Illusion Theatre GLITCH! * * * 1/2

More people should see this show. It's a very original, inventive, slightly amateurish 2-person show of the type that used to be thought of as quintessentially "Fringe-y" until the quintessential Fringe show became a musical Shakespeare mashup. It nicely complements the Robert Sawyer book I'm currently listening to about the Internet developing self-awareness. Some of the multi-media dance scenes went on a little too long (esp since only one of the two players can actually dance) but the light toys were always fun to watch. The story was simple but the writing had 10 times the heart of the much more polished show we saw before dinner. Recommended.

On my own for this one, since R was busy with game party. Left work early again, since absolutely nothing was going on, and they're closing the place down in a few months fer God's sake, so why sweat it? To avoid the problem I had on Thursday when I stupidly started a closely scheduled Fringe evening without supper, I stopped at Kowalski's on the way home and bought dinner at the deli counter. Unfortunately, by the time I finished eating it, changing into bike shorts, packing my travel bag, etc. there was not enough time to make it to Red Eye (for a show I had only a passing interest in anyway) so I stopped at the first venue I passed, which happened to be HUGE. Serendipity! The Press Conference At The End Of The World was my first 5-star show of the Fringe. Loved it!

I also had a nice time chatting with two pairs of middle-aged ladies sitting near me. Unfortunately, I quickly forgot their names, but recognized them when I saw them again 2 shows later and sat with them.

5:30  HUGE The Press Conference At The End Of The World  (Kelvin Hatle)   * * * * *
Solo shows are always a gamble - not every performer has the chops to hold your attention for an hour. This one does. Watching him change character by swapping to a different pair of glasses and then conduct a hilarious snippet of a seemingly random press conference is worth the price of admission. But there's more! There's actually a plot (sci-fi), funny throwaway lines that riff on politics and media, and an increasingly endearing main character. Some of the throwaway topics are just the usual inanity that comes out of press conferences, but some of the seemingly pointless questions wrap around and tuck into later ones and one seemingly silly thread actually turns out to be the main point. This one is great - don't miss it!

7:00 Theatre Garage Lord of the Files  (Lesley Tsina)    *  *  * 1/2
This one is hard to rate - a little amateurish and probably not everybody's cup of tea, but given my situation I got a full 5 stars of enjoyment out of it.  It feels a lot like a heart to heart chat with a colleague about what happened the last time she worked for a tech company that was closing down the site where she worked (reread my opening paragraph if it isn't immediately obvious why I had to see this one). There was so much I could relate to, from the HR lady's desperate "morale calendar" to Lesley's helpless inability to stop caring about her increasingly pointless job responsibilities. About the time her office cliques reformed into "the serious people" (including poor Lesley) and "the fun people" I decided that my new career goal was to be one of the "fun people" at my dying office. And here I was, leaving work early two days in a row to go Fringing - maybe I've succeeded.

8:30 Intermedia   night train / red dust (Sheila Packa and Kathy McTavish)  *  *  *  *
I liked this one quite a lot, despite the fact that it put me to sleep.  I was expecting a mixture of music, stories and poems. Instead, it was one woman standing at a podium reading poetry with trance-like cello in the background and flickering images on the screen behind.The poetry was really quite good, in the free form half coherent style of Walt Whitman. But what with the cello droning on, and the rhythmic voice of the poet, and the barely understandable images on the screen it was hard to avoid dozing off occasionally. Oddly enough, this made some of the images more compelling, as I listened/watched while drifting in and out of dream space. Yes, I guess it does make sense to use the train as a central image for comprehending the Iron Range. Trains in, iron out, iron rails and train cars back in to pick up more iron.

Unless something important comes up in the next 45 minutes, I'm planning to leave work early so we can do a full schedule this evening. Here's the plan:

Last year, Fringe hiked the price of the Ultrapass from $150 to $225 - raising the break even point to 23 shows. So we didn't buy Ultrapasses, and saw just about half the number of shows that we usually see. I was not suprised to note that both the number of tickets sold and their overall revenue last year dropped by 4% after years of constant growth. I'm sure the number of Ultrapasses sold dropped precipitately.

Apparently they've rethought this strategy a little bit for this year. Publicly, they're keeping the $225 price, but behind the scenes they are offering a heavily discounted pre-reg price of $175 to former Ultrapassers who declined to participate last year. That's a break-even point of 18 shows, which seems reasonable to me, so I bought two. This offer is not available online, only with a mail-in form. I made a copy of the form. So if anybody wants to get advance Ultrapasses at a reasonable price, let me know.

I was a little burnt out on Fringe last year any way, besides being annoyed by their attitude, but I find I'm really looking forward to it this year.