This, to the left, is part two.

This performance took place July 22nd, 2008, at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival, by the way. The venue was the Prairie Theatre Exchange.

And this, to the right, is part three.

The recording engineer was Sean Neville. These photos of TJ were taken by Alec Toller.

Go to George Carlin’s website which includes a timeline of George’s life and a place where you can order his albums & DVDs & books & stuff

TJ’s favourites include

Jammin’ in New York

A Place for My Stuff

It’s Bad For Ya

FM & AM

and the audiobook of When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops

Visit John Fahey’s website, which includes a discography, interviews, articles, a link to purchase his book How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life and transcriptions of many of his songs for guitar players

TJ’s favourite Fahey albums include

America, The Legend of Blind Joe Death, The New Possibility, the Great San Bernardino Birthday Party and Yes! Jesus Loves Me.

John Fahey’s entry at allmusic.com

Luke Skywalker is the main character of The Star Wars Trilogy. The three original Star Wars movies are readily available for sale and rent.

Visit the imdb pages for Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi

Go to Bukowski.net, with forums, articles, photos, works, and Bukowski’s paintings.

TJ’s favourite Bukowski books include the novels Ham on Rye, Hollywood, Factotum and the poetry collections War All the Time, Dangling in the Tournefortia, the Last Night of the Earth Poems and The Pleasures of the Damned.  Run with the Hunted is an excellent anthology of his poetry and prose.

The Hobbit is a fantasy novel by JRR Tolkien, widely available in new and used bookstores. Read the wikipedia entry.

Watership Down is a novel about heroic rabbits, by Richard Adams, also widely available new and used. Read the wikipedia entry.

The Hobbit, Watership Down, Star Wars and TJ’s story as described in Totem Figures follow the pattern of the hero’s journey, first outlined as a cross-cultural myth by Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Campbell wrote many books on cultural and personal mythology, which helped shape the ideas in Totem Figures. TJ’s favourites include Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion, The Power of Myth, Myths to Live By and Thou Art That.

TJ’s father is alive and well, retired and living in New Westminster, BC with TJ’s mom.  How did he feel to have himself so extensively described in Totem Figures?  Here’s his response:

“I would like to express my feeling in a song.

You have given me the flowers while I’m living

And you let me enjoy them when I can

You didn’t wait until I was ready to be buried

To slip some goddam lilies in my hands.”  John Hartford

That’s how I feel about making an appearance on TJ’s Mount Rushmore and to being on his Totem Pole. As one of only two still living characters who grace this play, I would like to speak for the living and the dead, and for the carnal and for the fantasy folks. We are tickled to death to be so honored. And if you would like to translate that sentence into Japanese and back again into English it might come back as “They scratched themselves till they died.”

It is always a surprise and a delight for any of us to surface in his presentations. The first time it happened to me was in “Labrador” and that was just a little embarrassing as the audience at the Cultch started looking for me among the 23 people present. I was more pleased to find myself as a behind the scenes character in “The Slip-Knot.”  I was the one who found the buyer for the Dodge Caravan; the buyer who soon wanted his money back. I like being behind the scenes.

To be acknowledged in his script as a role model because I was a teacher and storyteller whom he got to see and hear every day in his high school years is very satisfying. We both lived in that little school as if it were a small village. We knew too much about each other in that village yet we are both better for it. On my last visit to St. Oasis H.S. in Mount Pleasant, I proudly accepted for both of us the title of “Shanachie” bestowed in assembly by the best English teacher I ever saw work with students. She of Irish heritage knows a shanachie when she hears one.

Several years ago TJ’s mother Mary Jo and I were interviewed about TJ by Dr. Keir Cutler. He was researching for another play in his “Teaching” series. This one is to be “Teaching TJ Dawe.”  If I am successful in buying the rights to this, I could join him on the Fringe tour in some future year or at the least get a tent at the Edmonton Fringe to display artifacts like his bedroom ceiling. He used to charge his schoolmates to see this  Michael Angelo Escher creation. It’s never too late to chase dreams and get revenge.

Another totemic influence for TJ is Joseph Campbell who describes  the mythic hero as someone who ends a journey with one of two kinds of heroic acts. “A physical act in which the individual gives his or her life in sacrifice for others, or in a spiritual act in which the hero returns to share an extraordinary experience, and thus deeply benefits the community.”  This could well be what he is doing.

Follow this link for a brief look at the life of Robertson Davies

Buy his books: Fifth Business, What’s Bred in the Bone, The Rebel Angels,

A Voice From the Attic, Robertson Davies: Man of Myth (a biography, by Judith Skelton-Grant)