A Nice Clean Place to Play...

Because Oliver was in Zoo Camp this week, I had been arriving very early at the Fringe Site to avoid going home way up North and back down South to Strathcona again. What's the point of all that driving? Instead I would do a few errands and then head over to the site. Sometimes I would even get out of paying for parking because the booth wasn't set up yet. I always had my $5 ready, but on 2 of the days there was no one to hand it to. That was nice. Then I would head to Chapters, or the Strathcona Library or Shoppers or walk around Whyte and kill time until my show (usually around 12 noon). The most important thing I saw when I got there so early was the gang of Volunteers cleaning up the site. Those people, with their rakes and gloves and garbage bags, are the real stars of the Fringe. You'd be disgusted by what is left on the site each night if you saw it at 9:30 a.m. the next morning and thanks to those volunteers who took on the messiest and most unpleasant of jobs, you didn't have to see it. Kudos to the volunteers of the Fringe! We forget about all those people who put in so much of their time to make that tremendous festival happen. It's not just the clean-up crew, but the beer tent workers, the box office personnel and ushers, the information booth people and many, many more. I cannot imagine how many volunteers it takes to do it all.