Not crossing The Line

Before I started revamping the front yard, I had looked very seriously into replacing our tree with a more elegant, flowering tree.  As it turns out, almost the entire front yards of most houses in East York are in Toronto's road allowance, which means the city has control over what can be done with those areas, and specifically no trees can be removed.  (On "private property," i.e. the back yard, small trees can be removed, but large trees cannot be removed, or at least not without going through an elaborate permitting process, which was beyond my limited patience.)  I found not being allowed to upgrade my front yard extremely frustrating, but turned this into a short play.

I had meant to get to this sooner, but between work and preparing for the Fringe show, I just didn't have time.  Finally, the deadline for SFYS sprung up on me, and I carved out a tiny bit of time.  I wrote the piece in a white hot rush, basically taking 45 minutes to do it.  I did go back through today and made a few very minor edits, but it is pretty much just as I wrote it yesterday.  You can check it out here.

Or you can see it performed this Monday at Sing-for-Your-Supper, at Tarragon Theatre at 8 pm.  I just heard it was one of the pieces that was accepted onto the slate!  It's really quite gratifying how I have hit my groove with them.  I think all of the pieces I submitted in the past year have been accepted, even those that I squeezed out in just a day or two (or in this case 45 minutes).  Not quite enough acclamation to give up my day job, but it's still very nice.