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“Any food that comes out of the ground is a massive surprise to me. Just the delight in knowing that it was in the ground, all that time, waiting for me to pull it out.”
The humorist Sandra Shamas is speaking from her farm north of Toronto, where she has chickens and a love affair with carrots. “I get to eat food that I planted and cooked, and to be in congress with that,” she explains. “It’s a very visceral kind of romance.”
The author Raymond Carver once remarked that, “It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.” Shamas is quite unashamed, thank you Mr. Carver. She is single, but her love life, in a manner of speaking, is full and completely worthy of discussion.
Playing at Toronto’s Winter Garden Theatre, Wit’s End III: Love Life is the final instalment of her trilogy of one-woman shows that she began performing in 1998. Wit’s End refers to the name of her farm and her frame of mind when she moved there, post-divorce. She still lives on that country plot but, otherwise, she’s in an altogether different place. “I adore being in my 50s,” she exclaims. “Oh my god. I can highly recommend it – it’s pretty beautiful.”
Beauty, of course, is in the eye beholder. And Shamas, the carrot-farmer, is loving what she beholds. “I’m looking at a tree,” she says. “I’m happy to see it. I like it.”
Liking the look of tree – a small thing, right? No, not really. City dwellers develop blinders, unconsciously shutting out what Shamas calls a “cacophony of sights.” Concrete-walking people out of necessity walk around with their eyes out of focus, as there’s too much they either don’t want or don’t really need to see. In the country, Shamas takes it all in: the rural images and the internal landscape both.
“One can hardly be surrounded by this nature and not have one’s nature reflected to them,” she says. “I have the luxury of time and space to investigate to that.”
There are small delights and discoveries in the city, though, aren’t there? When she mentions the carrots, I counter with a story about finding a quarter on the street. “Absolutely,” she says, agreeing that one woman’s vegetable is another man’s coin. “Anything that adds to the measure of your delight, I think, is romantic.”
Shamas adds to my delight, her conversation soulful, straight-forward and, yeah, funny. I tell her I Googled her. “Of course you did,” she laughs. “I felt Googled. I sensed I was being Googled.”
When I suggest that candidly offering her life as comedic material must leave her feeling exposed, Shamas disagrees: “Transparency is the safest place for me. It’s big, cozy, sweet-vanilla filling.” Is that where men and woman differ? “I have no idea,” she says firmly and quickly. “Never been a man.”
And when I compare her country ways to the back-to-the-garden life of Joan Baez (who sometimes sleeps in a tree house), Shamas flips. “That’s fantastic,” she gushes. “She’s a god to me. I love her.”
You know what else Shamas loves? Her (strongly female-based) audience. “I love my relationship with them,” she says. “With my shows, I’m talking about my life in very honest ways, about topics that are particularly female. And the depth of the response to whatever topics I’m offering lets me know that I’m not alone.”
That’s what it comes down to, the give and take – a writer-performer and everyone else can ask for nothing more. “We were speaking,” Shamas says, “and I offered you my experience with carrots and you offered your experience of finding a quarter. I mean, I love finding money – are you kidding me?”
And me? I like carrots.
Sandra Shamas’s Wit's End III: Love Life continues to March 13 at Toronto’s Winter Garden Theatre (416-872-5555).
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