4 August 2019, Sunday

This morning, or rather early afternoon by the time we are on the road, we head back to Mabou for the Sunday Farmers Market. It’s a crowded place! I hop up the 20 plus steps to the Mabou Athletic Center drawing comments of “Wow, you’re brave!”

“Or foolish,” I reply with a smile. Inside the center are many vendors of local crafts; weaving, knitting, wood carvings, pottery, and various jams, jellies, soaps, honeys and some fresh local veggies, not to mention a musician playing guitar and singing. We spend about an hour here and then drive about 50 minutes to the east, to the town of Baddeck to see the Sunday matinee performance of “He’d be Your Mother’s Father’s Cousin.” The play is based on a radio show, which was then rewritten as a one woman show and now is performed by five actors. The story involves a dysfunctional Nova Scotian family. Their daughter has moved away to Toronto, so Mom, in an effort to save on long distance phone call costs, records long messages, stories and gossip on a cassette and mails these to her daughter. Her stream of consciousness ramblings are interrupted by her cantankerous husband, her even more cantankerous mother and a cat (puppet) who embodies Grandma’s idea that every cat has at least three drops of the devil’s blood. Two men walk through the set singing songs which note scene changes. They also play a variety of other parts. Along the way we get some Nova Scotian quotes:

• “During a power outage: “It’s as dark as a coal miner’s armpit!”
• “He’s so ugly he’d make the eyes pop off a potato!”
• “She’s as loose as a pan of soot in the wind.”
• “This food (in a hospital scene) is so bad I wouldn’t feed it to a Tory!”
• “The road to hell is paved in an election year.”

The play brings lots of laughter and the almost 2 hour performance flies by.

After the show we stop at Big Spruce Brewery to buy some local craft beer – some for sipping now and some for this year’s Thanksgiving beer tasting. Then back to Whycocomagh for supper, with beer of course, a chat with S, a chat with our new camp neighbors who also have a Sprinter and are from Halifax, and then to bed.