The Island Fringe Festival

When I moved to Prince Edward Island, in the early 1990s, I was 27 years old.

And as near as I could tell, every other person on the Island was older than 50 or younger than 15. It was as if a reverse-Logan’s Run-like event had occurred, sucking all the cool young rockers out of the city.

If there’s any demographic change that’s happened in the intervening 20 years, it’s that the young, creative minds are, more and more, choosing to stay here at home. And you can see the result in the art, the food, the film, the music, the theatre, the coffee, the fashion. It’s a change that makes the city, and the Island, ever-more-liveable.

One of the events that’s an obvious expression of this demographic retention is The Island Fringe Festival, which runs next week here in Charlottetown, from August 6 to 9, 2015.

Apparently I was a sponsor of the festival in a previous year – all memory of this has escaped me – which prompted Josh Coles (one of the selfsame didn’t-leave-the-Island-for-Toronto young) to snag me on the street this afternoon and as if I was willing to re-up.

How could I say no.

And so we of Reinvented Inc. are now officially (re)minted corporate sponsors of the festival. Not at Maritime Electric-level “Rising Star” level, I imagine. Perhaps at “Muddled Star in Deep Space” level?

As a result, I doubly-encourage you to attend all of the events under the festival’s banner that you can: you will enjoy yourself, and you’ll be sending a clear signal to the teetering youth that the Island is the place to stay to make interesting fringyness of all sorts.