It’s amazing what you find in something when you’re looking for it.
“Write this article for me,” he said, “and relate it to the word fringe.” What is the fringe? Where would I find it this weekend at the Regional WUSC Symposium?
If you’ll bear with a loose Matrix analogy, the fringe, it turns out, is all around us. You could feel it in the layout of the art show, drawing viewers to engage with serious global issues or lighthearted reflections on everyday reality. You could see it in the stories from places from Afghanistan to Tanzania. You could hear it in the social justice warriors ruling Wilf’s on Saturday night. Throughout the weekend, we were woken up to the reality of the fringe: the unreported and underreported, the misrepresented, the stories told in hope of one day finding an audience.
Every day the fringe is within sight, and it is the choice of each of us whether we wake up, bring it into a fair light, and engage with it, or stay in our stupor and leave it on the horizon to haunt our dreams later.
Something like that.
The point is, if you’re not among the dozens who registered for the symposium weekend or the scores more that were sad to leave Wilf’s in the weest hours this Sunday morning, you missed a special–and, with thanks to Tom Phoolery for this description, ass-shredding–event that brought artwork, television, crafts, contemporary music, media, and culture back to the radix of human development. Our local WUSC committee brought the best of the fringe right to Laurier, and you missed it. That’s like not showing up for your wedding. Shame on you.
You could’ve been playing Charades with the masterful Afghanis, hearing and watching the work of famous and should-be famous artists, and hearing the struggles and solutions of the underdeveloped world, including the ones in our backyards. See, the fringe is not as far away as we’d like to think it is. It’s been there all along. We can ignore it only for so long..but then it’s 2:55 AM and your Blueprint article is supposed to be in and you’re really sorry, but hopefully the hour is a testament to what a good time was had.