Kerfuffle

By Dorothy Ellen Palmer

A funny book about the Toronto 2010 G20 protests that includes a talking cat?
A novel that finds humour in sword stealing, unplanned pregnancy, and surviving loss?
An OwnVoices novel where disabled improvisors share the stage with abled comrades?
Kerfuffle is all this and more.
Jumping on and off stage, the diverse, five-member improv troupe called Kerfuffle make sense and nonsense of their complex lives and the 2010 Toronto G20 protests. Uncertain which player is her baby daddy, nine-months-pregnant Nellie Wolfe wields her crutch as both prop and weapon to hunt him down. She bands with feminist friends to teach the troupe's male members about the responsible use of their members. From hidden weapons to Jesus Toast, simmering personal and political secrets build to an explosive on-stage reveal. It's an inside-Anarchy exposé of G20's crucible moments from black balaclavas to a burning police car to being kettled, incarcerated, and freed to continue the struggle. Satire at its best, it offers both belly laughs and a demand for justice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Renaissance Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781990086373

Book preview

Acclaim for Kerfuffle

Dorothy Palmer’s Kerfuffle is an intellectually bold and comedic tour-de-force into the intriguing world of theatre improvisation. It combines zany surrealism, political activism, and an innovative style similar to the cerebral ingenuity of Sylvia Plath. Kerfuffle will intrigue, seduce, delight, and provoke readers in equal measures.

Lindsay Wong, award-wining author of

The Woo-Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug Raids, Demons, and My Crazy Chinese Family

The G20 remains an unsutured wound in Toronto but with her unique and character driven approach, Palmer revisits that time with humour, compassion and a keen sense of the city’s history, geography, and neighbourhoods. The consequences of that event still echo today and have even repeated, so Palmer’s is a timely and necessary reflection on an event that haunts the city still.

Shawn Micallef, urbanist, columnist,

bike rider extraordinaire, author of

Frontier City: Toronto on the Verge of Greatness

"Kerfuffle boils over with the energy, (re-)invention, truth-telling, and wit of great improv. Like a protest or a parade, we’re pulled

along by the story, moved, confounded, delighted, and

fascinated by its participants as they explore relationships, compassion, love, grief, friendships, activism,

and possibilities of improvisation. Kerfuffle is ultimately about being seen, about allowing yourself to be seen, about seeing yourself."

Gary Barwin, author, winner of the Stephen Leacock

Medal for Humour for Yiddish for Pirates

"Kerfuffle is that kind of rare book whose wit and charm adds colour to a very dark time in Toronto’s history. The heart and passion demonstrated by Palmer’s characters shines against the shadow

of the G20. With disabled characters written as a disabled

person might want their story told, this is a tale built

on the delicate composition of community and friendship,

leaving you on the edge of your seat until the curtains close."

Melissa Graham, disability activist,

co-founder of Toronto Disability Pride March

KERFUFFLE

A NOVEL that speaks spoof to power

DOROTHY ELLEN PALMER

––––––––

Renaissance Press Logo

This is a work of fiction, including a fictionalized interpretation of historic events. Any similarity to any institutions, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and unintentional. As a work of parody and satire, it claims the exemption of fair dealing under Canadian copyright law.

KERFUFFLE ©2022 by Dorothy Ellen Palmer. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact Renaissance Press. First edition.

CONTENT NOTE

Please note this work contains references to and some depictions of the following: death - suicidal ideation – abortion - child physical and sexual abuse - issues of sexual consent – ableism – eugenics - police brutality – racism – homophobia. Please read with care and discretion.

Cover art and design by Nathan Frechette. Interior design by Nathan Fréchette. Edited by Jade Crevier, Aleksandar Cimesa, and Molly Desson, and Myryam Ladouceur. Dedication photo by and © Pat Tapia.

Legal deposit, Library and Archives Canada, 2022.

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-990086-21-2

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-990086-37-3 

Audiobook ISBN: 978-1-990086-26-7 

Renaissance Press - pressesrenaissancepress.ca

Printed in Gatineau

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

Text Description automatically generated Table Description automatically generated with medium confidence

To all those who attended the Toronto 2010 G20 protests,

for all the work you did before, during, and after it,

with especial recognition to those who were kettled and incarcerated,

this book is dedicated with my abiding respect and gratitude.

I’m no fan of reality,

but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal.

― paraphrased from Groucho Marx

Act One: Friday June 25, 2010

Some buildings are as alive as we are. Some live like cats.

They purr; they hiss.

They get prized and petted or neglected and abused.

Gifted with a long view of history thanks to their more than nine lives, buildings become wise by staying curious. As their keen eyes pierce decades and darkness, they see all humans try to hide.

In the dark before dawn on this steamy June weekend, our redbrick, green-eyed grimalkin—Blakkat Theatre—is restless. She slips her back window, climbs ivy, scales the roof, and mounts the chimney. Hers is a panoramic view of iconic Toronto crossroads. Dotted along Queen Street, scurrying up Spadina Avenue, streetcars squeak by like massive Steampunkian mice.

But more than vermin are afoot tonight.

Blakkat’s prowling eyes are not the only beams of light.

Flashlights. Five of them. Quickly on, quicker off. Greenhorn night stalkers cloaked in black. Inexpert hunters attempting silence but proving too eager to succeed. Hefting weighty backpacks, they sneak up her flank to scout her obviously empty alley.

Blakkat squints her emerald eyes. When they should be sleeping, these silly kittens are out losing their mittens.

On purpose.

Disguised by darkness, they zip open their packs and scramble about losing all manner of black apparel: gloves, scarves, hats, t-shirts. All get fiercely scrunched up and furiously packed down. Every back-alley bin, all the dark crannies of old buildings morph into hidey holes: Here! Stuff your hoodie under this dumpster! Your balaclava? That’s bloody well what drainpipes are for.

Blakkat concludes the obvious: young humans are mad.  

Aggrieved and infuriated.

She also notes the eagerness, the pride. If they weren’t so earnest, she’d call it bravado. These kittens stalk the dark so clumsily; she hears every footfall, each whisper.

There’s something so satisfying about a black act in the black of night.

For sure! Batman black, cauldron black. This black is totally beautiful.

Too bad the museum isn’t a cache point. I’d happily brew them up some Black Death.

Not Black Death, Black Life. When The Bay Street Men in Black see our black being born, they’re gonna shit themselves in their pretty black suits.

Blakkat recognizes that laughter. She tenses her shoulders, flattens her ears.

We’re midnight calla lilies, a softer voice offers. Anarchy bursting into bloom.

For our Blakkat, this is a kerfuffle of quite a different colour.

It is not the late-night petting she has hoped for.

She stiffens as naughty kittens reach for her awning, as five pairs of human claws maul her furry fabric and prod her metal bones. She gasps at the knife, at the tearing of her tender striped skin. At the jagged push of weapons thrust into her belly, she screams. Again, and again. Until her awning sags, impregnated with baseball bats, crowbars, bricks, and the unmistakable edge of an axe.

Kittens snigger and fist the air.

They douse their flashlights and scatter like shrapnel.

Meanwhile, until dawn’s curtain rises, feel free to peruse your program...

Welcome to the steamy kitchen of Blakkat Theatre!

Home of the improv troupe known as Kerfuffle.

Please pull up a chair to our scrumptious satirical show.

With your help, we’ll all speak spoof to power. Together, we’ll cook up all manner of meaningful malarky because Kerfuffle is our name and our goal. It’s what we whip up and what feeds us. It’s a tasty old Scottish word for commotion or disturbance. Uproar. Agitation. Hue and cry. Flavoured by kebbie-lebbie, with hints of sweet cockamamie and the sharp tang of brouhaha, we’ll do our best to fricassee your funny bone.

Please welcome our host for the evening, our Feline of Ceremonies, Blakkat.

She’s our muse, philosopher, badass guide, and the beating heart of this theatre. It’s one of the greatest joys of improv to suspend all disbelief, to accept that just as humans play multiple roles, the little cat inhabiting our theatre is both talking familiar and the embodiment of the building itself. For our enlightenment and entertainment, she is a cat and a kitchen and a theatre all at once.

It’s five minutes to show time.

Moments away from hubbub and hullabaloo.

That’s just enough time to share a few tidbits about the kind of comic fare we like to rustle up here at Blakkat. We cook on our feet, so please don’t expect the scripted sketch comedy of Saturday Night Live. In improv, there are no scripts and no rehearsals. You also won’t see the victim humour and put-downs of stand-up comics. In our kitchen, we reject the competition of cooking shows and the banishment of bake offs. Instead, we collaborate. Cooking with improv gas, together, we sauté justice and flambé whatever needs burning. Blending sweet and bitter moments into spicy and salty scenes, the good cooks of Kerfuffle co-create a brand-new full course meal for each and every show.

Will you lend a hand? Join us and join in?

We hope so. Pots need stirring.

Here at Blakkat, there can never be too many cooks.

Or taste testers.

To whet your appetite for the three-day feast ahead of us, please accept our amuse-bouche, known in improv as the suggestion. It’s every show’s first ingredient, the single word we use nonstop to inspire, spark, shape, and flavour every moment of play. Our suggestion always comes from you, Dear Audience/Participant. On this verdant June weekend, thank you for giving us the word that inspires and empowers all our kitchens: green.

Please feel free to slice and dice it as your own.

Toss it into the whirling food processor that is your brain.

What comes out?

Green suggests nature, hills, trees, money, snot, jealousy, and Kermit the Frog. It sparks St. Patrick, a green knight, a jolly giant, little men, a Hulk, a Lantern, green cheese, Greenpeace, the Emerald City, and that classic Sherlock Holmes movie, The Woman in Green. Green evokes organic, fresh, birth, promise, hope, naivety, immaturity, a wicked witch, and the eyes of a cat.

Blakkat adds that, in improv, every suggestion always includes its opposite: unnatural, cities, streets, a lack of money, the refusal to be a knight, hopelessness, destruction, and death.

You’ll taste and retaste all these flavours again and again because recursion is the Cuisinart of improv. Revisiting and remixing the suggestion gives us all renewed time and space to deepen the drama and advance the scene by raising the stakes.

On this June weekend, the stakes are planetary.

For the 2010 G20 Summit, Canada’s Conservative Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, has invited leaders from twenty countries to discuss how his definition of recovery and new beginnings can cure the global recession. Everyone wants Toronto the Good to live up to its name. Unfortunately, we do not all share the same definition of good.

There’s the flashing green light.

It’s three minutes to showtime.

Blakkat invites you to please join us in the improvisor’s pledge to look, look, and look again. Let’s begin with the photo on the dedication page of the program you’re holding in your hands. Shot on the muggy afternoon of Sunday, June 27, it’s the crucible moment of the Summit, when protestors were kettled—tricked, trapped, silenced, intimidated, threatened, and held against their will—trussed at Queen and Spadina by a tightening cord of riot police. For five hours.

For engaging in peaceful protest.

For buying groceries. For not crossing the street fast enough.

For being hot under the collar about a cold-shoulder future.

For being young at the wrong time.

Do you see your neighbour, your faith leader, your child, your co-worker, or your auntie?

We wonder, Dear Audience/Participant, can you find your own face?

Perhaps the ambivalent edge of your shorts or sundress flutters outside the frame?

Wherever you stood then, Blakkat invites you to reheat that weekend with us now. Let’s move beyond the one sure place we all saw ourselves: in singular reflection, our faces mirrored by TV and tablets in the hushed moment we finally turned them off. In improv’s recursive revisioning, the eyes gazing back at us are always collective.

Torontonians were kettled and Torontonians did the kettling. Both can’t be good. On stage and off, that’s the conflict that steams our city and fuels our show.

In our kitchen, to restoke that heat with new light, we must be willing to sample storytelling anew. Together, we can chop English teachers to bits and sweep their tired recipes of chapters, plot graphs, character arcs, and heroic quests into the trash. Instead, let’s spice up characterization and complicate the boring binary of sweet and sour traditionally baked into heroes and villains. Let’s reject the very idea of a main character and the moral of the story, because all stories are collective and the juiciest bites of most tales are immoral. In improv, good and bad characters can, and do, switch roles at the drop of a proverbial hat. In our kitchen, we serve and serve up everyone: model citizens, monsters, and hot mess mixtures.

Blakkat asks you to please turn over your program to meet our Cast of Players:

NELLIE WOLFE: age 28, recent orphan, pregnant disabled avenger, and sword thief

ANDY MCLEAN: age 21, redhead, devoted bike rider, Smurf hater, and aspiring Anarchist

CONSTANZIA FORGIONE: age 28, reluctant waitress, emerging gay poet, and Nellie’s BFF

CALVAIRE PERSONNE: age 29, Ph.D. candidate, brother to a living sister and a dead twin

SHERMAN SILVERSTEIN: turning 30, father, maker of Jesus Toast, married, for now

YOU, OUR AUDIENCE/PARTICIPANT: at every age, your input is an essential ingredient

The curtain is rising, and the kitchen is open. It’s showtime!

Let’s put our hands together to strike fun alight.

Meanwhile, back at the museum...

Nellie Wolfe checks her watch. In the Roman Britain Wing, it’s 5:00 pm. It’s closing time. She lays a shielding hand over her nine-month baby bump and clenches her crutch.

Stop the damn dillydallying, she whispers. "Just get the dirty deed done."

Do all improvisers talk to themselves?

Often abusing alliteration. Absolutely.

So, yesterday, when the sword in the stone display case began to speak, Nellie did not question her sanity, only his motives. In Fortress Toronto, all speech is suspect. On the brink of the Summit, Gladius Britannicus 5th Century C.E. is either opportune or an opportunist, her saviour, or a sleeper sword. For all her six years at the museum, it’s been as mute as Harpo Marx, foisting no jab until it began chanting this refrain nonstop: Behold the once and future sting! Take me up; cast me away!

Nellie concludes the obvious: This sword wants to be stolen. Wants it bad. In Arthur’s day, it severed ears. Today, from the far side of Plexiglas, it talks them off.

She leans in. She listens. In pun and proclamation, its rousing cry is clever. In gift and dare, it’s a tease, a gauntlet thrown down. As a rusty blade still rasping to qualify as sharp, it’s valiantly loyal to the dream of Camelot, which makes it truly desirable. But if stealing from any museum is unwise, pinching an ancient Arthurian artifact that can scream bloody murder is docent suicide.

This should, but does not, give our Nellie cause for pause.

Her Friday smash and grab must be now or never. Thanks to the Summit, the museum will be closed for the weekend. They all got the bulletin: Preventing Catastrophe: The Proactive Protection of Property. It said nothing about the protection of persons. Perhaps because persons are the catastrophe expected.

You’re quite the cut up, Mr. Blade, she finally whispers back, carefully lowering her guitar case to the creaky hardwood, but if you want me to break you out of here, cut the rapier wit.

Thus engaged, the sword finds the full tang of its tongue.

List close, my fecund lady fair! To win my freedom, I would spin you a tale. A new Camelot of mists and spires, of knights so bold and ladies bolder. It won’t be the soft keen of a bard. It won’t be the way you’ve heard our tales, but all those you’ve heard from so far had a tongue tied to the telling. Mine is forged in fire. Mine pierces flesh. I’ll thrust my words in vernacular yours, not mine, to ensure their hearing: Arthur was an asshole; Gwen was a whore; Lancelot a pedophile, and Merlin a charlatan in a stolen hat. But Mordred, now there was magic! There was a boy worth stabbing.

Nellie winks. That’s one slick pick-up line, Sir Blade. You had me at list.

Then, Milady, perhaps you are too easily had?

Nellie snorts and glances at the security guard, Maks. Taking a quick break in his cubby before making his final rounds, he’s still on guard, but not as if the museum needs one. With the earbuds of his iPod lodged skull-deep in his ears, he snaps his fingers and rocks on his heels.

This time, it is Excalibur’s turn to snort.

In your doubly delicate condition, Milady, you require a champion, not a chump.

Doubly delicate? How on God’s green earth do you know about my twins?

As your Excalibur, I humbly repeat myself: ‘Behold the once and future sting!’ Has it not always been thus, that the issue of a man’s sting may serve fittingly to sting the stinger?

Nellie jerks upright, tugs her navy docent’s blazer back over her burgeoning belly.

I beg indulgence, Milady, if my point like my tongue is soiled. Passed through the rough and tarnishing hands of multiple men, I see myself in your face mirrored. Each of us, far from pure.

Nellie raps on the case. I don’t have forever here, sword. Get a grip!

I have one, Milady. It is yours I question. When she recoils, the sword bends quickly.

No offence, my triple-hearted one! Please tell me none taken? When men think with their squirty third leg, they sport four—as either kine or swine. But I promise: take me up and I will not cast you away. Unlike men, I am good for more than a night of riposte and repartee.

To fight fatigue and pain, Nellie rests her left arm on the display case and leans in.

Okay, Mr. Goodsword, I’ll bite. What else are you good for?

Of course, the sword doesn’t move, but it does draw itself up to its full height.

You have three, do you not? Three boys worth stabbing. I will happily oblige.

A decade of Blakkat training brings the next line trippingly to her tongue. To advance the scene, she must accept that offer and make another, a transaction known as the "Yes, and..." She leans all the way in. Excalibur’s glassy bin fogs with her breath and a kiss of lip gloss.

Yes, my rapacious one, and I’d love to help you stab all three of those little pricks.

Blakkat knows that whenever we talk to ourselves, it’s the answers that matter. She also knows this: Improv lives everywhere! Even in a building as staid and reified as history’s dustbin can be, sometimes life hands you the stupendous offer of a talking sword. It gives Nellie three choices.

If she doesn’t accept the offer, if she chooses to keep both feet in Crutch World, a.k.a. reality, she can block and deny, pretend she heard nothing but hormones. If she wants to play it safe, to keep one foot in reality, she can wimp and waffle: hear the sword but not fully accept its offer, make a joke of it, tell Kerfuffle when she gets to practice that she might be a bit unbalanced, but that sword is truly bent. Such warped delusions of grandeur! she could wink. A scrappy old piece of junk proclaims itself Excalibur and puns on Arthur, the once and future king. Sheesh! Or she can play. Fling open her heart, and play. Césaire always made it sound easy: Stay in the now. Be brave! Accept every offer with full commitment. Always say ‘yes’ to the drama.

Making her choice, Nellie mimes a pinched cigarette and hunches her shoulders, the requisite Casablanca prep for any riff on Bogie. She gestures with her cigarette at the glass cases around her and mutters, So, Mr. Blade, of all the bin joints in all the world, you whack into mine.

If a sword can smirk, this one does. Here’s lancing at you, Milady!

She swings her knapsack deftly over her crutch and plops it on the display case. It’s verboten. When they met five years ago, when Maks told her not to use cases as tables, she’d smiled. Able-bodied people should get to make all the rules they want—for each other.

Maks had replied, By definition, Ms. Wolfe, a workplace rule applies to all employees.

Nellie had shrugged, Let’s see. She’d handed him her knapsack, asking him to both hold it and get her wallet out with one hand, as if the other held a crutch. When he solved the problem by setting her bag on the floor to open it while crouching on his haunches, Nellie had hooted.

Silly twat-bucket! If I could bend or balance like that, I wouldn’t need a crutch, would I?

To his credit, while neither personally nor culturally accustomed to being called a twat-bucket, Maks had apologized. He’s still a church-lady stickler for rules, but he ignores her improvised tabletops. While Nellie has since come to regret the ease with which he also ignores her pregnant body, today she needs to ensure he won’t see her breaking some serious rules. When he heads out on rounds, she slips into his cubby, grabs the glass cleaner, a polishing cloth, and his spare keys.

Whispering, Oh, look, a distraction! she rifles through the junk procreating in her knapsack. It masks the scrape of a guitar case being pushed against the display by her stronger right foot. Thank goodness it’s one of the old cases. While they all sit on faux stone bases, new cases are all plexiglass and digital. This one has an old oak frame with a hinged lid. It opens with a good old-fashioned key. She opens her empty guitar case, stands quickly up, and commences a dedicated polishing.

Between squirts of lemony freshness, she notes the curator’s error. They’ve labeled the case Equipping the Legions of Roman Britain, but Excalibur is not a gladius. That legionnaire’s short sword is twenty-six inches; her chatty blade is three feet long. He also lacks the Roman scabbard of Romulus and Remus suckling the she-wolf and his standing man pommel marks him as Celtic.

War really does makes strange bedfellows, Nellie whispers.

That is indeed a topic on which Milady is an undisputed expert, Excalibur replies.

Really? Nellie sniffs. In this case, quite literally in this case in front of me, you’re the one sleeping with the enemy. Your bedfellows are all weapons of Roman mass destruction.

Taking the risk to lean her crutch against the display case to simultaneously keep polishing and hold her nose against the increasingly nauseating smell of a spilt lemonade stand, Nellie catalogues each weapon: a battered shield or scutum, a heavy javelin or pila, and a double fan of daggers and darts—missiles that sound like Bar Italia appetizers—pugio and plumbatae. In battle, a legionnaire threw his pila first. When a heavy pila protrudes from your scutum, you drop it quick. Then, safe behind his own raised scutum, the brave soldier hacks and chops at feet and ankles with his gladius. Of course, Rome wasn’t built in a day. It was built by the vicious tenacity of citizens willing to lame the enemy. To disable them without guilt. To believe that even on their own land, Britons were barbarians, not citizens. So, go ahead, do your job, fight dirty.

Maks passes by. Nellie recentres her crutch and slips her stolen key into the lock.

A pair of high-heeled sandals, replete with golden tassels, strides to her side. Celine Seraphina loves to walk through walls without warning. Casually dressed on this hot afternoon in a billowing white silk toga, crowned with a foot-high beehive hairdo laced with sparkling gold ribbon, when she shakes her head, pin curls at each temple snarl into frizz. She points a golden-tipped nail at Nellie.

Girlfrien, hits not wert it. Hif you get caught stealing dis silly sword, dere will be no big sting to get da revenge on dose nasty boys on Saddurday night.

Is it worth it? Nellie runs her own quick internal, three-question Stakes Inventory.

What do I want? I want the cowardly boys to pay.

What are the obstacles? Legality. Possibly morality. The fear of getting caught.

If there is a solution, what does it cost? Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.

But it’s time to go big or stay belittled.

To Celine, she whispers, I’ve made my choice. Excalibur will be the pièce de résistance of my last show.

La résistance? Celine snorts. Dats something you coulda used nine months ago.

Nellie glares until Celine grinds a golden heel and melts away.

Do all improvisors have imaginary guardian angels with stereotypical Quebecois accents?

Blakkat would say likely not. But Nellie needs the company.

Last night had been another sleepless night all alone in the basement of Russell Street, trying not to hear the empty house weeping above her. Months of sleep deprivation fuelled her decision that freeing an imprisoned sword was both an act of sound judgement and Christian charity. After all, she was a minister’s daughter. Excalibur of Camelot, gift of the Lady of the Lake, sworn defender of Arthur Pendragon; he needed her, and she needed him. They would free each other.

Nellie still needs a pep talk. "Don’t be such a twat-bucket! This should be easy peasy for you. Burglary is