I'll see you in hell.

It had to be about five years ago (or was is six?) that I met Reimer at one open mic night or another. He had just arrived from Calgary to attend the Humber College comedy program. You meet a lot of people when you're toiling in the comedy trenches. Most often they are friendships that start off intensely, burn bright and end quietly. That's just the way it is. Performers are strange. Writers are complicated. Comedians? All of that and more. So much more. Reimer and I hit it off immediately and in the years we've been friends we've also been able to perform together and work together (at CSIS). For a couple of years there we saw eachother every single day...so it's going to be very strange for me now that he's flown the coop and moved to Boston to be with his wonderful and talented girl. If you have to put one of your dearest friends on a bus out of the country at 11pm on a Tuesday night it's nice to know that they're going to someone who is more than worth it.

So Tuesday night at 11pm I did just that. Put the boy on a bus. But first, he wanted me take some publicity stills of one of his characters "Todd". Todd is a rockstar and we thought it might be fun to take the pictures late at night at the oh so scenic Toronto bus terminal, home to white slavers, abuse victims, drug dealers and an assortment of colourful personalities. Reimer wouldn't even stand out in his outlandish costume. Right?


I've put all the Todd shots into this photo set if you are curious to see the rest. Just for frame of reference, I'd like to include a photo of Reimer, how he usually looks in the this post. And there is one picture in particular that I'd like to share. The thing is, I can't give you my honest description of it without potentially offending, well, EVERYONE, so I'm going to temper you, dear readers, with a disclaimer first:

It's been said that If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedians laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs.

Reimer and I at a Christmas party last year...


A few months ago when I was going through my iphotos I stumbled across this. Reimer had just left to do his one man show in Edmonton. I emailed him the following message under the subject "mindset":

Hello Friend,

Hope you're still tearing up Edmonton.

I was cleaning out my old iphoto library and I found this picture of us at the Christmas party. It ALWAYS makes me laugh because I think it looks just like the pictures they use on CNN when they're memorializing the victims who worked at the World Trade Centre. Look at us! We totally work in finance and we were totally trapped on the 105th floor.

Our respective families lived in Connecticut. You had two kids and a golden lab and I lived with my widowed father. I cooked him pasta every night and none of them ever knew about our secret affair.

I'll see you in hell.

Nolan xo

And you know, I sincerely hope that I will see him hell. He'll be the cheerful one starting the sing along of campfire songs...