Much like shit, you can smell love once you've stepped in it. You become hyper aware of your surroundings, wondering if anyone else notice that love is on you (in you).

I recently saw this poster for the new Jennifer Aniston movie, Love Happens, in the 5th Avenue Station. Some lonely soul tagged it, "2 everyone else but me...". And it hit me how lonely people are in general. How people are hungry for love, so much so that they cry out on movie posters in subways.

Solidarity.

Exes and Oh's will join you in your fight for love. Let's step in love together. We can sit back and laugh while we watch everyone wrinkle their noses as they try to figure out where the smell is coming from.

I'm a new PRI: Sound of Young America convert. A delicious podcast that features interviews of people I like, doing things I like. Recently SYA interviewed Charlyne Yi about her film, "Paper Hearts," an exploration into Yi's theory that love doesn't exist.

The Sound of Young America


WARNING: I have not seen the film, but I will review it anyway.

I loved this film. Charlyne Yi is a woman who's never been in love (you can wipe that horrified look off your face now) and thus questions whether or not she's capable of it. The film offers, simultaneously, solidarity and hope that love exists for those who have it, and the potential exists for those of us who've yet to find it.

The cool thing about being a performer is that when we're on stage we can be, do and say those things that we can't be, do and say in real life. We can fall in love. Whenever we want. And we do. Every time we take the stage in Exes and Oh's. So, stop worrying about your own quest for love, and sit back and let us find it for you.

We have been assigned an official time for performance in the Toronto Improv Festival -

10pm on Friday, September 25th, at the Comedy Bar.

See who else will be there!

Check back to find out how to order your tickets for the lovefest!

Courtesy of Soulpancake.com an Article by a penny for the old guy

The first time I fell in love, I was driving us home from the movies. I remember it being dark, with regular stabs of yellow light for every streetlight we drove under. She was huddled up with her legs against her chest on the passenger seat. No one spoke. I was about to turn off the main road when she said, “No baby, keep driving.” I did. Some minutes passed. At a red light, I looked at her, smiled, leaned in a bit so she might kiss me, and asked, “Why?” She didn't move. She had the saddest face, looking right through me, like I was already a memory, before saying, "So that it never ends." Her name is Tameeka. Her song is Drive by Bic Runga.

Memory is a funny thing: building association upon association, layering our senses atop one another, linking neuron to neuron, binding songs to images to words to moments forever more. Maybe that's why Tameeka—and everything about her—is folded and packed into that drive home. And that one song is that drive home.

With ----- (we don't say her name out loud), it was the night I fell asleep in her lap. Truthfully, I fell in love with her every time I saw her, but the sharpest memory is that night. She played with my hair as I mumbled, trying to keep the conversation going. Shhh. Sleep, baby, sleep. (I swear, if asked to choose between the memory of her saying that and all 10 of Mahler's symphonies, I'd pick her.) Her song is Wild is the Wind, the Nina Simone version.

Distilling the essence of a singular moment into a song is an expansive process. The whole experience of that person, the course of an affair, the atlas of a person's body, the dictionaries of words between you, that miniature history of two people—all of it captured in a song.

Then something odd happened. It was Vanessa's song—Gravity, also by Bic Runga. At first, it was just her song. But soon I found myself sneaking other experiences and ideas and memories and people and moments into it. Of course, it's still hers and everything I am grateful to know of her and have of her. But the song means more to me now.

Gravity is my song for the whole of love and everything that it encompasses.

Obviously, the music gets my heart racing. But it’s the lyrics. They're just soo ... real. There’s the bleak, unfair reality of having to say, I'll promise you what I can. No more than that. Just what we can. I remember that. I remember it from when ----- asked me for more, and I couldn't give it to her (and I felt soo small because a man is such a tiny thing when faced with the illimitable). Or the lines:

I forget myself when I'm with you/Please remind me who I am

Looking at faces and being unable to separate time and distance and fantasy—the dream of it, the constant sadness in my gut, the premonition of endings and goodbyes. Gravity is my song for love because, for me, love is pillow-fights in the living room; the sound of their voice when they say your name, how gorgeous it sounds; the heartbreak of discovering your own fragility—and wanting to be better, stronger, to improve. And promises you want to make, you dare to make, unafraid for once, in the face of time and making-rent and long-distance-phone-calls-across-datelines and every conceivable obstacle. Because you are not yourself if that person does not say your name…

Say my name aloud/And make it new/How strange the sound,/How strange the sound...

All of this… packed into 3 minutes and 40 seconds.

Homework: What song gives you the most honest and real construction of love? Describe its memory, its experience here.

:: a penny for the old guy