Oh Calgary, you were so much hotter when we were still just courting.
The first couple of dates were great, and now that your all comfortable in this relationship, suddenly you’re showing up to watch movies in jogging pants and sandals. It’s just to soon to show us your back zits and all.
Calgary was a bit of a roller coaster ride.

Let me start with the drive. It was all peaches and blue sky’s on the drive from Kelowna to Calgary. We were Cruising the Dub on the reg, making friends with gophers and enjoying the Rockies.

Here’s a couple of gems from the road.
This is me and Fierce in matching coonskin hats that she almost wouldn’t wear for the photo because the ponytail part made her feel weird like she was wearing a purse.

Here’s another great pics of Fierce and Miche in some seriously fast glasses.

From the second we got to Cow Town, Stampede and all the stress suddenly mounted. Not only were we throwing a dirty-after-party-illegal-boozecan the next night, but it seemed that there was little promo out for our Get Er Done date at Hi Fi.

So what did we do? Go to the Rodeo of course. I must have whistled a hundred times at beefy, red faced cowboys just for the fun of it. After leaving Vancouver and all those damn sandals, it was like an instant boner to see men in jeans and boots, clean shaven and bulky in the 30 degree Alberta sun. Ah yes, the smell of men being men, which as we found out later, means dudes chasing and tying up small animals and a lot of late night date rape at Stampede. Yeehaw!

The Hi Fi is a gorgeous club. One of my faves in the whole country. The staff are a wicked awesome group of boys, the club always had dope art on the walls, and we got to hang with Wax Romeo, our tour mascot and funniest man alive. Here’s a good quote of his from Tuesday: “Do you know how hard it is to get jeans when you’re a small man. I mean, not that you’ll ever have this problem, but I’m really skinny. And that’s why I hate Dior.” ZING!

Betti Forde, a Calgary native originally, showed up in a shoulder padded, one piece acid washed jean dress. That was it for me. I shot my load.

Other highlights include: The dirty after party we did at Art Life, kicking the Hi Fi party’s ass ten ways to Sunday. Betti Forde noticing aptly that our posters were the only ones absent from the club’s walls.
A lot of Politics. Touching baby piglets while they suckled every so sweetly on their mom’s teet, testosterone, and those god damned Van Gogh espresso vodka shots we drank by the dozen!

It started out kinda tame. We stayed with a couple of creeps named Rosa and Berger who are so level eleven out of ten that Fierce and I wrote down some emergency numbers and gave them to the Bitchin’ girls in case we didn’t make it out alive.

One of the biggest differences about touring with girls over boys have been the level of care and thought put into even the most banal things. Here’s an example: girls get dressed up and sorted out before they leave the house to DJ

and they always manage to find some way to incorporate unicorns and other girlie accoutrement’s
into the everyday

As an aside, the ladies somehow convinced me that i should wear this out. That I didn’t look slutty at all, and that I should be proud. Looking through the pictures today has taught me that girls lie. A lot.

Everything was chillin’. We made it to Lotus on time, the crew of creeps in tow. Betti Forde started off the set, the sound was banging, and that’s when it all took a nosedive.

Suddenly the music went off and the bar manager came running over all, “gimme five minutes”, the club had filled with smoke and it was clearing out fast. We make a lot of jokes at Pink Mafia about how we’re gonna burn the party to the ground, but we never thought it would actually happen. Apparently a bass bin caught on fire, or was set on fire, we’re a little fuzzy on the details.Here’s a really shitty video clip of the fire, shot by our creepy friend Rosa.

Being as skin tight/all night as we are, we just packed it up and moved it up to another room in the complex. Some club called “Honey” with a DJ booth ten feet above the dancefloor that required some serious skills to climb into. Here’s a lovely photo of the rider we found when we got up there.

Fierce Helder took it from there and tore that place a brand new one.
There were some sad moments of course. Honey was significantly smaller than Lotus, and there was a lineup four people wide and a block long trying to get in for most of the night. But luckily, Rosa and Berger were fantastic at keeping the party going. Here’s a nice one of Mama Miche holding Berger up when she wandered into the secret door that lead to the tree house ladder you had to take to get to the DJ booth.

On several occasions Berger asked me where she was. And here’s another gem of Rosa with a super soaker she found in the back kitchen at the club.

As it was with the Whistler show, so too in Vancouver the bar had to ask us to stop playing three times before we actually did. But for serious, every time Fierce shut it down, the crowd screamed for so long, we had little choice but to throw it back on.

Four hours of sleep later and we were off to Kelowna.

I won’t bore you with the details of our fantastic trip through the mountains, some political bit involving Pine Beetles who are apparently destroying Canada’s old growth, or how gorgeous the pool was at the house we stayed in. It’s just another day in the life around here anyway. I’ll let the photos do the talking.

Here’s Fierce Helder with a Gay Apple. She looks sad cause she had to let it go.

Oh yeah, and here’s Fierce again with her new boyfriend, Mikey. She met him outside of a pub AND liquor store called Whiskey Jack’s. Basically, he straightened her out and they now have some plan to meet up after the tour and live the good life. We’re not sure what “the good life” is exactly but we know this much: it involves ranching, those man sandles and cruising around in his Jeep in fast glasses.

We’ve also tightened up our rider a bit so we can attract all the babes and cause now that Fierce is straight, she won’t stop about the Bacardi Breezers and Zinfandel spritzers.

There’s more to tell and show kids, but mami needs a beer and a nap and a smoke so I’ll leave you with this gorgeous shot of yours truly; working on my tan at the pool.

Honourable mentions: A&W veggie burgers, East Hastings looking kinda tame for once, Berger’s thong keg stand first thing in the morning, losing phone chargers left and right, drunk mathematicians, male promoters giving us white roses, but not more beer like we asked, and the promise of Mandeep’s party pins in the distance.

Check out http://dose.clubzone.com/photos/gallery11680.html for more party pics!

We all met up in Van City for the drive to Whistler. Miche drove in from Calgary (I know, hardcore right?), Kenzie took the ferry from Victoria, Fierce and I fly from Toronto, and Betti actually lives here.

From the second we piled in that car, it was clear that Whistler was about to get it. Two and a half hours of heavy chic conversation. Legal talk. Tech talk. The Chronic on repeat and so many jokes, I almost pissed myself a dozen times. We get to Whistler and of course it’s gorgeous. And filled with 20-25 year old kids unwilling to grow up, so they snowboard, smoke weed, pass around STDs and all have Australian
accents. The Holiday Inn there is like 10 times better than any of our cribs (sorry, there’s been a lot of rap music on this tour).

Big shout out to Maxx Fish for being dope down the line. No need for a shakedown, they had all the gear set up right and they put our rider together in a very respectable four foot tub of ice on wheels.

I’m not really sure who ran the train, us on that tub or the tub on us. But the tub of booze won, that much I know.

The ladies tore that club to shreds. Dancefloor full, booze flowing. Ladies losing it. And all the boys kept giving us the respect eyes (which is when they look at you like they wanna fuck you but they hope
you can’t tell cause they know they haven’t a hope in hell). All, “you’re pretty dope for a bunch of girls”. No shit buddy.

We shut er down and started the stumble back to the hotel to get a solid 4 hours of sleep before driving back to Van. Except Fierce and I (at 5am no less) decided we couldn’t go to sleep without smokes. We took this long winding retarded walk through the desolate cluster fuck that is Whistler Village in search of a 7-Eleven. We could’t have stood out more in leather biker jackets and big sunglasses. Finally some pedophile out for a morning jog with half a dozen boys gave us halfassed directions and we made it.

In the morning, we get up all feeling like shit fresh from the oven and start the descent back to Vancouver.

And that’s when Betti Forde started barfing everywhere.
Lucky for us, the drive from Whistler to Van City is one of the most beautiful in the world.
Here’s a picture of Betti puking over a barricade on the side of the
highway. Notice the beauty in the background.

And here’s two more: Fierce and Kenzie and Miche, Me and Kenzie sitting
on a barricade on a separate stretch of highway when Betti puked “must
have been the orange juice” up later.

Finally, here’s a choice pic of me and Fierce in the forest when we
pulled over on a nature trail on the side of the road so Betti could
puke up “there’s the eggs. Girls, I think I’m good”.

Somehow (even after making a stop at some dudes apartment and sorting out Betti with some meds) we made it to UBC to do Betti Forde’s radio show, The Broadcast on CITR in time.
Take a listen to the podcast with Fierce Helder on the one’s and two’s,
Betti Forde dropping the puck and me ruining a perfectly good interview.
http://playlist.citr.ca/podcasting/audio/20080704-130000-to-20080704-140300.mp3

Here we go Vancouver. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s update which will no doubt include notes on:

the mind-blowing level of men in sandals here, god damned rain, and the promise of a one-piece pink spandex shorts suit a girl named Berger said she was wearing to the club to be our go-godancer tonight.