CNE 3: EVERYTHING ELSE

This is going to be the last post, with video and pics, from our two days at the Canadian National Exhibition at the end of August. Day one of the Ex was primarily taken up with the Air Show and the Jump Jet performance by Cirque Orange.

Those two events pretty much took up an entire day and there were still a lot of Ex activities to indulge in, like hunting for stuffies and stuffing our faces ... hmm, a stuff theme. Oh yeh, and there was beer. I know ... Collette and I attending an event that featured beer. Shocking, I know.

Unfortunately, we were not the only people with that idea. The weekend we went to the Ex happened to be, weather wise, the best weekend of the summer; unfortunately, it was the LAST weekend of the summer. So we went to the Ex. And every person in Toronto went to the Ex. And all their relatives went, and all their barbers went, and everyone who had ever heard of the Ex went ... there were a lot of freaking people at the Ex.

So off we go on our stuffie hunt ... stuffies would be stuffed animal, bagged and displayed in Collette's classroom. We basically have two methods of obtaining stuffies. One is the Birthday Game, where you put money down on a month of the year, toss a ball and whatever date comes up, there's your winner. So this is a case of blind luck, though in Collette's hands it becomes a game of deliberate skill. Hence this lovely terrapin that we carried around the Ex all day and hauled home on the bus.



Our other game is the water gun game, where you shoot a stream of water into a clown's mouth and the first one to pop a balloon wins. The main skill here is my ability to intimidate a bunch of 10 year olds in order to win a stuffed Nemo or something.



Besides stalking stuffies and seeing how many pogo's and tiny donuts and beer we could shove down our throats, there were a couple of other shows we wanted to see. One was a rodeo, apparently the first time a rodeo has been at the CNE in something like 50 years. These were participants from the Ontario area, competing for standings that they would carry to the big rodeo that happens at the Royal Winter Fair.

I haven't seen a live rodeo since I lived in Calgary (it had to be live because television was yet to be invented) and Collette had never been to one. It was pretty entertaining; barrel racing, team and individual calf roping, a bullwhip expert, bronc riding and .. my favorite .. bull riding.

They had a "rodeo clown" who was supposed to be funny and was .. kind of .. and the bullfighters who were there to protect the cowboys. I will give the clown credit though, during the bull riding, he popped himself into a barrel out where these thousand bulls were blasting around and that is a risk that, in my opinion, is best viewed from the cheap seats.

Now let's talk about the guy with the bullwhip. He performed stunts with an eight foot long bullwhip, including slicing up a newspaper held up by his wife .. in front of her face. This is when you want to make sure that the relationship is secure.

So this dude was tough. Not because he could pluck out your eye with his whip from ten feet away, but because of those white boots. Brother, you hang around rodeo cowboys while wearing boots, you are double tough.

Another married act we saw was this husband and wife escape artist team. Well, she was the escape artist, he was a magician of sorts. The main feature of the show was the water torture escape, one of many that Houdini made famous. You know, chain somebody up, toss em in a tube of water, and watch them escape.

The duo claims that this lady is one of the few women in the world who does this stunt and the only person of any gender, who performs the entire escape in full view of the audience. They brought an audience member up and she cuffed the performer around her ankles, her wrists and her waist ..... in Vegas you'd pay a lot to do that to a girl. Besides the shackles, there were something like four locks on the lid.

While she was submerged you could see her working with her straight lock picks; there was no illusion how she was escaping, it was more her skill, and the fact that there was no external oxygen source, she held her breath for the whole time. While she was underwater she was working pretty hard, picking the locks, putting her feet up on the glass to get at her ankles, reaching up to the lid .. she was in the water for almost two minutes and forty seconds. Pretty impressive.

So that was our visits to the Ex. Video is here. Shot with the Samsung palmcorder, a sort of highlight from the rodeo and Krissy's entire escape, unedited.

CNE: Rodeo & Escape from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.