Patrick – Thanks for the comment. You didn’t need to explain your reasoning – it makes perfect sense. The wine & cheese is a very nice gesture and I hope we can do it justice and get you a good return. As I said to Milan, though, we’d do it for a couple of free tickets, too.

Nancy – They’re 16. Everyone over 25 is ancient to them. They’re also not the most articulate critics in the world. And “okay” is actually quite a compliment coming from them!

While by no means a perfect process (this is the event’s second year, and my first running it), we looked for local blogs that were frequently updated, had a large audience (when the information was available), and who we believed would be interested in the event based on the archives of their blog or their bios (as this was an outreach event, we puposefully did not invite any theatre bloggers; and while a history of writing about arts/theatre was not necessary to getting an invite, if you have a blog dedicated to say, Monster Truck Rallies, we probably looked you over). We also invited everyone who attended last year, and our performer-bloggers (Fringe artists who are blogging on our site during the festival)

Ease of contact was also a factor in invites, I have to say. Those with email addresses on their blogs were more likely to get an invite than those without, and I filled in some “contact me” forms as well. If the only method of contact was to leave a comment on a post, then I didn’t pass along an invitation for the sole reason that the W&C wasn’t a public event, and I didn’t want the information out there for all to see.

As for not sending out the invite over the Breakfast list, it was simply a matter of knowing who (and how many) people were invited. While I completely respect the privacy of the list, I hope others can respect our need to know who may possibly be attending.

A perfect system? Far from it, but we’re slowly growing the W&C, and hope to turn it into an annual event. Any suggestions or comments for future years are more than welcome.

- p

PS – and you are correct XUP, the budget was not large at all. We invited 30 total – 25 local bloggers plus our 5 performers.

Nat – Well, Fringe is a pretty inexpensive theatre investment. And most of the shows are only an hour or less, so it’s not even much of a time investment And there are a couple of child friendly shows as well!

Jamine – You can’t see everything. And you’re right, there is suddenly SO much going on everywhere you can’t possibly do even half the stuff you want to do. I’ve always maintained that we all ought to get July and August off work so we can enjoy those few paltry weeks of summer we get and all the festivals and other fun things going on. Let’s start a Facebook petition!!

I am still laughing after Paul Hutcheson’s On Second Thought and today we saw Inclement Weather, which was really neat. As I write, I’m still a bit sad that we’re in, as House was on our list of things to see and we’re missing it at 8, which is in ten minutes. Remi has a bike trip tomorrow and has been “fringing” all weekend.

It’s hard to get people to come out to anything, even when all the invites are sent to the right people. I watch yoga class attendance ebb and flow with weather, hockey games, other yoga trends, but I keep on

We saw some interesting things at Fringe in our PC (pre-child days.) I keep meaning to invest more time in theatre…