Jeff Spevak, Writer

Resilience was the theme Saturday at Catharsis Time. A relaxed, mental-health Rochester Fringe Festival show – is “show” the right word? – at School of the Arts.

This was the fourth year for these Catharsis confessionals. And sure, this evening opened as a show, with High Strung, the ukulele duo of Sara Zavacki-Moore and Christa Marshall. Yet the music was also the introduction to guests with some heavy thoughts on personal resilience. As Zavacki-Moore noted, “Too many years I’ve been wasting my thoughts on the wrong things.”

Starting with psychotherapist and improvisational wiseass Laura Fleming recalling, after some teenage misbehavior, the evening the cops escorted her son home. Leading to a parent-child understanding Fleming labeled as “Radical Acceptance.”

The catharsis moments continued to unfold with Luane Davis Haggerty, sharing her dyslexic ways, in “The Write Way.” Patty Farneth’s “Peace Garden” veered off in a tribute to Kamala Harris before she shared her own youthful resilience as “an attention-getting device.”

Tricia Campbell, a longtime Fringe performer, pointed out that the calendar can always be your savior in “Wake Me Up When F*cking September Ends.” Peter Haggerty coined a theme for the evening: “Long live resilience in whatever form it takes.”

Laura Taylor shared her weight struggles as a child: she survived that trauma nicely, although some issues may remain in her role a host of local murder mystery dinner theater shows.

In Matt Moore’s “Weird Resilience,” the playwright, cartoonist and the show’s co-creator noted the seriousness carried within resilience: “If we believe absurdities, we will accept atrocities.”

Penny Sterling, a familiar face on the local theater scene, revealed an unfamiliar aspect of herself. In “Balance,” she stood on one foot, like a stork. Storks are good with balance. Then she sat, rolled up a pants leg, and showed how she had lost the lower part of that leg in an elevator accident. “Every step we take,” Sterling said, reflecting on her lost leg, and life in general, “is a leap of faith.”

Catharsis Time returns, with some of the same cast members, and a few different ones, at 7 p.m. Sept. 26 at School of the Arts, 45 Prince St. And, a bonus: some of the Catharsis Time cast will be at the Henrietta Public Library, 625 Calkins Road, presenting a free expressive writing workshop from noon to 1 p.m. on Oct. 3.

Jeff Spevak, a former sportswriter, a former arts writer, a former radio commentator, can be reached at jeffspevakwriter@gmail.com.

The Rochester Fringe Festival. The Spiegeltent. Five o’clock, Friday afternoon. We’ve been festing hard. Time for a drink. The event is called “Dram-ocracy.”

They check my ID at the door. I am 69 years old. I am allowed in.

Our host is Brian McKenzie, from the Finger Lakes Distillery Company, on Seneca Lake. We sit. In front of each of us, seven tiny plastic shot glasses. Seven tastes, ranging from reposado to rum to rye to seven-year-old single malt to 11-year-old apple brandy to five-year-old barrel gin. Gin, “I have a friend who calls it ‘werewolf juice,’” McKenzie says.

We learn stuff like whiskey is grain based. Brandy is fruit based. Duffy’s malt whiskey, made in Rochester, was once advertised as it “would also cure habitual drunkenness.”

Four of these are cask-strength tastes, McKenzie warns, “so use your water.” I do so. To tame the werewolf in me.

Jeff Spevak, a former sportswriter, a former arts writer, a former radio commentator, can be reached at jeffspevakwriter@gmail.com.

The show was called A Young Man Dressed As a Gorilla Dressed As An Old Man Sits In a Rocking Chair For Fifty-Six Minutes And Then Leaves.

And that was pretty much it.

We do not know if it was a young man in that gorilla costume, as the mask was never removed. But let’s assume it was a young man. He also wore a beige sportscoat and reading glasses (both unusual for a gorilla) and held a spoon in one hand.

We can further explore this Thursday-evening event in the Rochester Fringe Festival’s Spiegelgarden. Sudden bursts of applause from the audience followed a moment of more-vigorous chair rocking by the gorilla. Cheers when a woman from the audience climbed onto the stage, kissed the gorilla and handed him a canned vodka cocktail.

That opened the floodgates for more people to climb onstage to cheers as they had their picture taken with the gorilla. A member of the bar staff briefly sang “No more monkeys jumping on the bed,” people moved the rocking chair into new positions and re-arranged two and three hats on the gorilla’s head. Three people sat at his feet playing cards as a slightly overweight guy in an orange thong pranced by.

Then six people picked up the gorilla in his chair, held it high, and rocked it.

As previously stated, that was pretty much it. The audience was the show. While a few folks inexplicably chanted “Lake Ontario,” in defiance of President Trump attempting to re-name our lake, the gorilla got up from his chair and left the stage.

My friend Laura Jahelka Fleming pointed out afterward in a Facebook post, “It actually renewed my faith in humanity, acts of kindness were cheered for, acts of hostility were loudly booed.”

Tea for ‘the future you’

“Have you had tea before?” asked our host, Jessica Creane, a tea-drinker from Philadelphia. Not surprisingly, her audience of maybe 30 people – that’s a sell-out in the cozy Garden Studio, a room next to the Spiegelgarden – nodded, or quietly murmured yes. “Great!” she said.

Except, they likely hadn’t experienced tea and death in the same 80 or so minutes of The Tea Party at the End of the World, now playing through most days of the festival.

Creane is quirky. “It takes a great deal of energy to be in all three tenses at once,” she explained, then confessed: “I come from a long line of dedicated coffee drinkers.”

But Creane has jumped that fence. Her tea presentations are delivered in tiny cups, an experience she called “an offering,” or an act of “communal tea.”

“All tea comes from the same plant, a ‘Fuck you’ to Lipton teas,” she said. “All of the green things tend to be counterfeit.” She dismissed tea prepared in boiling water is “motel-lobby behavior.”

Creane urged her audience to “touch hands and fingers with the person next to you” (we did so) while extolling the virtues of tea’s many varieties. Any tea, “might not be for present you. It might be for future you.”

Sampling Jasmin pear tea, she told of visiting the Arctic, where she learned that tea is like glaciers, in that many things can be found in either. The Arctic is a land where Creane confessed to worrying about “polar bears swallowing your vomit.” As the Spiegel Garden audience listened to a recording of ice formations breaking into pieces, what’s known as “calving,” she said, “I found myself wondering if I could be trusted with the end of the world.” Leading to, “How old will I be when I die?”

Tea as a life-expanding exercise. While Creane steered her new acolytes into a communal exercise of gazing into the eyes of the stranger sitting next to them, she urged everyone to ask themselves: “Have I enjoyed the ride?”

Jeff Spevak, a former sportswriter, a former arts writer, a former radio commentator, can be reached at jeffspevakwriter@gmail.com.