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O-Town Hoedown needs YOU to help

We’re just about done booking up the O-Town Hoedown and we’re gonna need some help from a few volunteers. Email us directly if you’re interested in helping and we’ll sort something out.

hoedown@leftymcrighty.com

There are two types of help we need:

Logistics team – wrangling musicians, poster crew, promotional stuff – this will be a heavily involved thing with emails flying back and forth – not for the faint-hearted, but you’ll be a big part of keeping the Hoedown from collapsing on top of us. Serious applicants only, for serious.

Street team – less involved (read: more stress-free) – we need folks to put up posters around town at various times. It’ll only take a few hours of your time, and the payoff is… ok, we haven’t figured that out yet, but it’ll likely involve t-shirts and CDs and a Hoedown All-Access Pass.

Don’t know what O-Town Hoedown? Where the hell have you been for the last 4 years?

Check out www.otownhoedown.com to see what we’re all about.

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Recount of this Past Weekend’s Give to Live Poutine Crawl

How do you turn poutine into $1266 to fight cancer?

You find a great cause. In this case, Isabelle Rivard’s (@spoonsie) Give to Live challenge (isaonabike.com) to cycle from Vancouver, BC to Austin, TX (a 4300 km trek) and raise $10,000 to fight cancer.

Proceeds go to The Lance Armstrong Foundation, Craig’s Cause for Pancreatic Cancer, and The Canadian Cancer Society.

You find seven generous restaurants who make specialized takes on the dish that normally tops crispy fries with squeaky cheddar cheese curds and veloute-style gravy.

You contact culinary tour guide Paola St. George (@cestboncooking) who is also the marketing manager behind C’est Bon Cooking.

You sign up 35 poutine enthusiasts to join you in a tour of Ottawa’s ByWard Market, including Mark Warburton (founder of Ottawa Foodies), Kaitlin (Ottawa food blogger behind Heartful Mouthful), and Jodi (Ottawa food blogger behind Simply Fresh).

You split the group in two and take everyone on a 2 km walking tour of downtown Ottawa.

The result: 7 very generous restaurants. 37 happy p0utine enthusiasts. 2 km of walking tour. $1266 raised to fight cancer!

Poutine crawls are not unheard of. Earlier this year, Toronto food bloggers organized one. Theirs was not a fundraiser, just poutine enthusiasts, trying the various takes on poutine their city has to offer. The dish that has been long derided, often referred as “fat lumber jack food”, has slowly colonized the city.

With the help of friends, the bloggers behind Endless Simmer organized a “Tour de Poutine” in New York City. In total, they visited 7 eateries and sampled 7 takes on poutine. As Rebecca Marx of the Village Voice blog wrote about the poutine crawl, it revealed Brooklyn to be an unlikely poutine paradise. The most interesting to me was the one that came from a lunch counter in the Essex Street Market, Shopsin’s. Dubbed the “Last Supper Poutine”, it was topped not with cheese curds, but three poached eggs.

Well, Ottawa neighbours Quebec, the province that gave poutine birth. This is a city that knows good poutine. Here’s what its ByWard Market produces.

The Courtyard Restaurant (21 George Street)

Jenn and I unfortunately did not get the opportunity to try Chef Hay’s poutine. Sous Chef Arleigh Martin assembled the poutine to order. According to one of Chef Hay’s earlier tweets, the sauce involved “French fry consomme.” The torchon looked like it was frozen with liquid nitrogen and “smashed.”

Zak’s (16 ByWard Market Square)

Home fries, cheese curds, hollandaise, and paprika.

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The Son in My Eyes: Ken Godmere

Ken Godmere opens the chapters of his childhood for one special evening of  reading, ‘righting’ and arithmetic.

Ken Godmere (actor, director, teacher, comedian, writer, and father) has recently returned from the depths of a debilitating degenerative brain disease. In fact, he is currently writing a trilogy of plays retracing his steps into, through, and eventually out of a world of mental illness. How has this man—this husband and father of two—been able to adapt and survive with his spirit and sense of humour intact? How did he learn to be positive, productive and progressive in the face of darkness and destruction?

 

On Tuesday June 15 in a live performance at the National Arts Centre’s Fourth Stage, Ken Godmere will share the powerfully positive stories in his memoir, The Son in My Eyes; accompanied by some very close friends including Ottawa’s hardest-working musician, Matt Ouimet; one of the city’s most striking soul singer/songwriters (who cannot be named due to her upcoming concert in the Ottawa Jazz Festival); and, in his debut as Master of Ceremonies, Ken’s 15-year-old son, Andrew Godmere.

 

Written in 1996, The Son in My Eyes was Godmere’s key to identifying, understanding, and breaking the cycle of abuse he experienced in his childhood. “How can I be a father when I never got the chance to be a son?” This one-night-only event will be filled with hot button subjects and some very cool music. The reading: a gripping, moving, inspiring performance of The Son in My Eyes by this dynamic author and story-teller. The ‘righting’: a powerfully positive atmosphere underscored by strong soul music to affect the possibilities of healing and growth in others. The arithmetic: a tallying of 100% of the net proceeds to be donated directly to The Youth Services Bureau of Ottawa Charitable Foundation.

The Son in My Eyes is, as Ken describes it; the back-story of the man who finds light in the dark; “The Hobbit” to his trilogy of plays on surviving and thriving; and the setup to the premiere of the first of those plays, “It’s Just a Stage” at this year’s Ottawa Fringe Festival.

 What:  The Son in My Eyes

When:  Tuesday June 15, 2010 at 7:30pm

Where:  The National Arts Centre’s Fourth Stage

Tickets:  $20 at the NAC box office

(or through Ticket Master  at 613-755-1111)

video courtesy: Jean-François Dufault,  JDL Pictures

 

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