I went back to the Fringe Festival and the strangest thing happened.

I was meeting someone in the outdoor food and drink area, so I sat down at a table to wait and I noticed that one of the women at the next table was Amy Salloway – the very same Amy Salloway who wrote and performed Circumference, the subject of my mixed review on Monday.

So, you know, I eavesdropped for a couple of minutes. You would have eavesdropped too, right? I can’t even remember what they were talking about. Then my friend showed up and I turned my attention to him and stopped eavesdropping. A few minutes later Amy got up to leave and I looked at her and she looked at me and she said, with a friendly twinkle in her eye, “Were you eavesdropping?”

I was tempted to deny everything, but for some reason I believe everybody will be able to tell I’m lying if I lie, so I generally try to avoid it.

“I wasn’t eavesdropping just now,” I said, “but I was earlier.”

And then I totally outed myself.

“I saw your show the other night,” I said.

“Oh?” she said.

“I blogged it,” I said.

“Oh?” she said.

“On knitnut dot net,” I said.

Because, you know, I know she’s read it because she mentioned my review in a comment she left on Milan’s blog, and this somehow compels me to confess.

So there we are. It’s all out there; the truth is floating in the space between her (the unfunny comedien) and me (the humourless reviewer).

Then she told me that the part of the conversation I hadn’t eavesdropped on was precisely about my blog post about her show. She said she had just been quoting my review to the other people at the table.

“So,” I said, “Did I totally miss the boat in my blog post?”

“Yes,” she said, “It was okay that people thought it was funny. It WAS funny.” And then she said a bunch of stuff, which honestly I don’t remember but I do remember thinking a bunch of times that I was changing my mind. She defended her show quite enthusiastically and with intelligence, integrity, conviction and humour.

And she’s really such a warm, vibrant, beautiful woman and she’s got sparkling eyes and a very engaging personality. Maybe I was mesmorized by all that and that’s why I can’t remember what she said.

All I know is I’ve changed my mind. Go see Circumference. Feel free to laugh! Tell Amy I sent you!

(It’s playing Thursday at 9:30, Saturday at noon, and Sunday at 5:30.)

After all that, I’m sure you have total confidence in my reviewing abilities, right? So here’s another (and I reserve the right to change my mind about this one too.):

A mini-review of Making Deals With Gods

This show is comprised of three 30-minute plays in quick succession: The Miller’s Daughter (Rumplestiltsken), A Brief History of Christianity, and Medusa, performed by five local actors. They took three ancient tales and modernized them with modern language and contemporary humour. The result was a fast-paced, lively and witty show; the hour and a half was over before we knew it.

Details are here: Making Deals With Gods.

We were going to see Iron Sticks after that but we ended up drinking wine instead. Two thumbs up for the wine.

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I’ve changed my RSS feed settings. It used to be that you could read the first few sentences of my posts in the feed readers, but you had to click over to my blog to read the rest. I’ve changed it so that you can now read the whole post in the feed readers.

There are advantages and drawbacks to both approaches.

If I just send out a few sentences, people have to visit my blog to read the post. And it’s nice when people visit. They get counted in my blog stats, they get to know the sheep at the top of the page, and they’re more likely to leave comments, click on my links and visit my friends. It’s nice.

When they read the whole post in their feed reader, on the other hand, it’s more like a drive-by. They’re still reading my content, but they’re “out there” not “in here.” It’s like they’re not really visiting me, they’re just reading a postcard from me.

All other things being equal, I’d have stuck with my original feed settings. However, I recently learned that my blog has been blocked by the City of Ottawa. City employees can read my feed, but not my blog. So, as an act of solidarity with the employees of the City of Ottawa, I’ve opened up my feed for full content syndication.

As for the rest of you, I hope you’ll all still visit my blog from time to time, instead of just reading the feed. My stats and comments have dropped since I implemented the change. I expected it, and I accept it, but God help me, I’m still hooked on metrics and I do love comments. (Robin once told me that he read somewhere that ‘comments are the blogger’s tip jar.’ So true.)