Photograph Alyssa K. Paoro

Tony Burgess and Derek McCormack

How does a literary festival with the theme “the book is dead” kick off? If you’re Scream in High Park, you draft Derek McCormack, author of the gayadelic vampire novel The Show That Smells, and Tony Burgess, author of the wordy plague-novel Pontypool Changes Everything, to host your opening night and put on a cheesy variety show with — rumour has it — a glow-in-the-dark castle set.

Readers may remember the witty repartee of Sonny and Cher, Donny and Marie, Ian and Myra, but now, meet “Tones and Corm.” EYE WEEKLY spoke to the future first family of variety entertainment about how they would get poets and writers to sing and dance.

EYE WEEKLY What the hell are you doing?
 
Derek McCormack We want it to be a sort of ’70s sketch show, H.R. Pufnstuf meets The Hilarious House of Frightenstein. It’s set at a reading festival in Transylvania. Tones has brought a bunch of Canada’s brightest young lights to read with him. I am the host: Count Cormula. I don’t care about books; I care about boys, and their butts. We’re hoping it’s the worst thing people see all year, and that everyone regrets being involved with it at all.

Tony Burgess Really? Well, for the record, and you can quote me, I am currently in the process of revising some of Corm’s work on this and he’s right, it isn’t very good. But, as the talented one in this partnership, I vow to make this a celebration of the entire Scream community — a revel full of bright song, stirring dance and sparkling comedy. And not the tasteless art canard that “Cormula” wants to mount.

EYE WEEKLY It sounds like Tony wants more of a Sha Na Na variety show vibe whereas Derek would rather see Bowzer strung up in a dungeon. So, on one side of the room there are vampire fashion designers. On the other side are linguistic zombies. Who will survive and what will be left of them?

Tony Burgess To start with, there are no zombies. At least not on my side. On Corm’s side there are tush-fixated “flat” characters. Cursory inventions meant only to direct attention to their creator. And second, ask Corm how many songs he plans to contribute. Can he actually dance? Has he ever survived the cut from long list to short list? Maybe. His mom would know. Better ask her.

Derek McCormack Sha Na Na! That sounds tops. I recall contributing sketches to a comedy/variety show when I was in grade eight. The show was performed in the school auditorium. The Oscar Meyer Wiener Show, it was called. I don’t remember why.

I played the French chef in my grade six production of a play called The King’s Cream-
puffs. Tony is, of course, the talented one in our collaboration. He is Marion Davies to my Hearst. He is Pia Zadora. I don’t have his magic touch for creating fully fleshed-out characters. Did you see Pontypool? That zombie girl had seen action in Afghanistan. So topical. And for your information I didn’t even make the long list for the ReLit Awards. And the long list had 372 titles on it.

Tony Burgess What kind of person, for god’s sake, actually remembers the exact number of people on a long list from, like, 10 years ago?

EYE WEEKLY You have poets and writers performing. If you had an unlimited budget what else would your show entail?

Tony Burgess I would have Corm dressed in a tight, skunk-coloured, body tube singing “The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat” while spraying from a gland of some kind of large Busby Berkeley–choreographed poolside crowd consisting of exactly 372 writers who then tumble into a pool they believe is filled with tomato juice but really is blood. I don’t know. Does that sound good? I’d watch it.

Derek McCormack Lots of guest stars and surprise guests. It’s very comedy/variety show to do so, don’t you think? I would love to have loads more people in our performance, but que sera. As for a dream cast: Judy Garland would be good! But I’ll be happy if Tones shows and doesn’t screw the whole thing up.