I placed ads, answered ads, swapped dirty pics and dirtier emails, all while exploring every idea and fetish possible before exciting myself to the point of having to do laundry. Upon completion, I’d stare at my computer screen, spent and completely depressed and disgusted by the images that had turned me on just a few seconds earlier. — from the story “Gay Keith” by Scott Edgecombe

It was in answering the ad of Gay Keith that Edgecombe learned he was not Gay Scott.

Edgecombe, whose autobiographical tale of being gay for 40 minutes is bittersweet in more ways than one, is the star of the festival circuit short “GayKeith,” directed by Leslie Hope.

The story of how “Gay Keith” the story became “GayKeith” the movie is uncharacteristically kind, filled with Thank You notes, looking out for friends’ well-being, and liberal self-deprecation; all privileges guaranteed by Canada’s Constitution.

“It’s not something I laughed about years later,” Edgecombe says. “I laughed about it in the car on the ride home.”

If his performance is fearless, it might be because Edgecombe says he does not have an internal censor and that he is rarely, if ever, mortified.

“Sometimes I’ll finish telling a story about myself and it’s only about a minute after I’ve stopped talking that I realize I must have really shocked someone,” he says.

Edgecombe spent 15 years in Los Angeles trying to get acting jobs before he returned to his native Toronto. While he never became famous in Hollywood (“Why is Seth Rogen getting all my parts?”), he seemed to weather the downside of the quest for stardom in the amicable way Canadians have while building up the type of short-on-salary, big on one-time-only skills resume common to the out of work actor.

“Among other things,” Edgecombe says, “I was a manny. I took care of my friend Leslie’s son.”

Leslie is Leslie Hope, a fellow Canadian, documentary filmmaker, and actress in series ranging from “Knots Landing” to “24″ (she played Jack Bauer’s doomed first wife, Teri) to “The Mentalist.” She also adapted “Gay Keith” for the screen.

“Scott always told stories,” Hope says, “and he was encouraged to write some of them down. He gave me ['Gay Keith'] and I just bought it.”

“You mean you believed it?” I ask.

“No, I paid for it,” she says. “I wanted to make it, and I wanted him to star in it.”

“So my first real acting job in 15 years — ” says Edgecombe.

” — was after he went back to Toronto — ” says Hope.

” — and I was essentially living right around the corner for all that time — ” says Edgecombe.

” — and I had to fly him back to Los Angeles.”

Hope began acting in her British Columbia boarding school. She is modest about her credits.

“I was not a genius actor,” she says, “but I definitely did not want to be a lawyer, which is what I was being groomed for. I had a certain look that was popular for teens in the 1980s and I was very fortunate to work with some great people early on.”

One of those people was the director/actor John Cassavetes, who worked with the then-19-year-old Hope in “Love Steams,” one of his final films.

“While there was no questions that [Cassavetes] was the boss,” Hope says, “what was very attractive about what he did was that he was allowed and able to work collaboratively. I never wanted to just be an actor—I mostly felt like a fraud doing it—but working with him made me creatively aware of the fulfillment he might have been feeling. I wanted to work with people.”

Hope moved to Los Angeles while still a teenager and says the experience was heady and disconcerting.

“The excess that is available to you for so little made me uncomfortable,” she says. “The grips worked much harder, and at that time for me, jobs came relatively easy. It was easy to become un-grounded, if that’s a word.”

So Hope got back in touch with her humility by co-founding a small Los Angeles theatre company, The Wilton Project.

“99-seat theatre in Los Angeles is tough,” she says. “Theatre is not given its due in Los Angeles like it is just about everywhere else. If we were a smash hit, we’d just break even, but many nights there would be more people in the cast than there were in the audience.”

But theatre was a way of staying versatile, Hope says. “I acted there, directed here, wrote this or that, and in the process met a lot of people, and learned how to ask nicely” for favors that could be put to use in plays or other labors of love, like “GayKeith.”

Edgecombe’s time in Los Angeles was not as financially or creatively rewarding.

“I wasn’t represented by an agent and I was both overweight and a starving artist,” he says. “And don’t get me wrong, I was very often at a loss to explain what I was doing in Los Angeles, but it always seemed more of a great story than a crushing disappointment.”

Indeed, it is Gay Keith himself (poignantly played by Ho-Kwan Tse in the movie) who is most disappointed, and Edgecombe apologizes profusely and gives him a hug.

“I got to leave with the assurance I wasn’t gay,” Edgecombe says. “But I don’t think he got anything out of the experience.”

Hope called in a lot of production favors and paid people “a lot less than their talent would suggest” to make this film, which debuted in Los Angeles at the Downtown Film Festival and will continue to festivals in Palm Springs, Albuquerque, and Miami, with aspirations for Park City’s SlamDance.

“Collaborating is about asking well,” Hope says. “You ask in the first place, you believe in your project, you feed people well, and you run the show professionally even if—and especially if—people are doing it for free. And afterward you make sure to write Thank You notes.”

Contributing the carnival-like soundtrack was yet another Canadian, Jeff Danna, whose scoring work includes the great soundtracks to “The Kid Stays in the Picture” and Terry Gilliam’s “The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus.”

“["GayKeith"] was a really cool movie to work on,” Danna says. “Maybe because it was such a small project, there weren’t so many cooks in the kitchen that the fun was dissipated.”

“Getting Jeff was a coup,” Hope says. “He put us over the top in terms of legitimacy.”

Edgecombe and Hope aren’t sure where “GayKeith” will go; whether it will be developed into a feature detailing Edgecombe’s other L.A. adventures or expanded to a series.

“There’s so much behind the scenes in this little story that I think it wouldn’t hurt to explore it at length,” Hope says.

It’s true. And what someone else might relate through the lens of despair, or at least as a cautionary tale, in “GayKeith” comes off as another intriguing party performance that is as sweet as it is uncomfortable.

After his failed tryst with Gay Keith, Edgecombe gets in his car and goes for the tin of Altoids.

It was 12:40am Christmas Eve.

I started to laugh uncontrollably. “I’m not gay,” I said aloud. Sure, I still had a bad taste in my mouth, literally, but at least I was now absolutely certain about one more “what if” in my life. Some of my gay friends think it just may not have been the right guy, but you don’t hear me telling vegetarians they haven’t found the right meat.

Edgecombe, who has since become engaged and booked TV series cameos and a national commercial in Canada, isn’t worried that airing a potentially embarrassing real-life incident will hurt his acting career.

“The story seemed to make a lot of people happy,” he says, “and it doesn’t embarrass me. I’m sure even Keith got over it.”

See also: “GayKeith” official site, Scott Edgecombe, Jeff Danna, Downtown Film Festival, L.A.

Mission statements of government agencies rarely have such recognizable taglines as does the U.S,. Department of Education’s “No Child Left Behind.” But at what cost?

As an act and as a motto, the 2001 NCLB (or Nicklebee, inviting comparison to both the overearnest but flawed Dickens character Nicholas Nickleby and also to the Canadian VH-1 staple Nickelback) is widely viewed as a failure, underfunded and unsupported by its Bush Administration sponsors, and onerous to teachers, who feel the program teaches to a test and sets unfair expectations.

The Obama Administration seeks to revamp NCLB, even changing its name to reflect the Department of Education’s new “race to the top” strategy.

And what better way to slap the Nikelbackwash from our mouths than with an unlikely combination of The Five Stairsteps, Guns ‘n’ Roses, and Deep Purple?

What better way???

“Ooh Sweet Child o’ Mine Left Behind in Time” will still, Obama said on Saturday, “set a high bar — but we also provide educators the flexibility to reach it.”

The overhaul will shift focus from punishing poor schools to rewarding good ones.

“Under these guidelines, schools that achieve excellence or show real progress will be rewarded, and local districts will be encouraged to commit to change in schools that are clearly letting their students down,” Obama said, adding that the only child left behind in the new plan will be “that horrible Bush baby.”

People of a certain age remember their mothers telling them to finish what was on their plates in deference to “the China babies.”

The understanding being that China babies were starving and that my eating my creamed tuna on toast would mean that my mother would not be forced to add insult to their injury by sending them the uneaten, vomitous sludge.

“Seriously,” the China Babies’ Collective would say, “eating this will make us starve more.”

Anyway, search engine giant ^TM and King of Pop^TM Google appears to be more and more ready to leave China behind, due to its failure to convince that country not to censor Internet searches.

“We’re pulling out of China,” Google said, “and, just in case you were wondering, that does not mean we’re going to push back into it an hour later. We don’t even get that joke, to be honest.”

Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology officer Li Yizhong warned the Mountain View company that it will face consequences if it fails to obey Chinese laws.

Rather than play by China’s rules, Google will likely shutter Google.cn within the next few weeks.

A spokesman for Chinese search engine Baidu, whose stock has risen sharply due to expectations of Google’s imminent departure, said “things are gonna get easier.”

See also: Nickelback, Guns ‘n’ Roses, The Five Stairsteps, Deep Purple, Google, U.S. Department of Education

This means that, four decades after the seminal group of the 1960s broke up, The Beatles are still raking in cash from a perpetually reimagined catalog.

Not only that, but a campaign to package the constantly evolving Liverpool lads that began when each was alive and that capitalized on their own whims – mop tops, impishness, psychedelia, Indian music, peace – has also updated the group for contemporary consumption, and created myths only vaguely connected to the source material.

Maybe because they were so iconoclastic in life, and perhaps even more so because they’re dead, John Lennon and George Harrison have been the major beneficiaries of mythmaking marketing. On the new Beatles website (http://www.beatles.com), a group of travelers is seen trekking across Abbey Road, interacting with a Lennon who is beatific and Christlike.

Anyone who has watched the great anti-date movie “Let It Be,” a film that documents the Beatles’ unraveling, knows that Lennon at the time was more into the crucifixion downside of being bigger than Jesus. His joyful wonderment at “Rockband”‘s release seems out of character.

It was Harrison’s experimentation with Eastern religion in general and Indian music in particular that proved such a Godheadsend in the 60′s, as the Beatles’ marketing machine finally knew what to do with him. To Paul (cute), John (sarcastic), Ringo (pathetic but lovable), could now be added George (mysterious).

So in an animated “Come Together” video released in 2000, we see a cheerful, Jerry Garcia-like John, an eight-armed George, and an along-for-the-ride Paul and Ringo, waiting only for their deaths before they could be reinvented as The Walrus and Snuffleupagus, respectively.

The Beatles have been a financial sacred cash cow in each of the decades since they disbanded. In the past 15 years alone they have released their B-sides “Anthology” containing group versions of two John Lennon songs (“Free As A Bird” and “Real Love,” with a posthumous Lennon lead vocal, were the “Unforgettable” of the late 90s), the Beatles’ BBC sessions, a rerelease of their Number One hits that itself reached Number One, and Cirque du Soleil’s “Love” soundtrack, an elegant Beatles mashup produced by Sir George Martin and his son, Giles.

Clearly there is something equally elegant about the choice of 9/09/09 for this major product launch (adding the numbers together, we get 27, and 2 + 7 is also 9; four numbers greater than the sum of their parts, much like the four individual Beatles’ solo careers – it is unlikely that Ringo will issue a major retrospective on 12/12/12) but, to quote an early Lennon/McCartney song released on “Let It Be,” what can we expect “after 909″?
<ul>
<li>Following resolution of Apple Corps’ copyright infringement suit against Apple Computer, Beatles-branded MacBooks</li>
<li>Phil Spector’s jailhouse remixes of “Yellow Submarine” and “Sgt. Pepper” (with Billy Preston)</li>
<li>Wings and Plastic Ono Band reunion on a charity cover version of “Valotte”</li>
<li>McCartney successfully sues for partial credit on “Pet Sounds” and “At Her Satanic Majesty’s Request.” Mono and stereo versions re-released</li>
<li>George Harrison lyrics shoehorned into “Quadrophenia.” Mono and stereo versions re-released</li>
<li>NASA resuscitates Space Shuttle program, somehow involving payments to Yoko</li>
<li>Celebrity cover band versions of Beatles catalogue includes The Police (“Revolver”), “Rubber Soul Coughing,” “Yo La Tengo Submarine,” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Dave Matthews Band” (with J. Geils)</li>
<li>Monkees start a rumor that Peter Tork is dead to boost sales, but Peter Tork actually dies</li>
<li>U2 and Van Halen collaborate on “Let It BU2.” Bono and stereo versions released</li>
<li>Corporate naming rights sold for selected properties, such as “Being for the Benefit of Bank of America,” “Across the Universal Studios,” and “I Want to Hold Your Spam”</li>
<li>And, as usual, the Kinks get nothing</li>
</ul>
It is said that the Beatles will make more money this month than they did in the year 1965. Credit counselors suggest that completists have got to hide their wallets away.

See also: <a href=”http://beatles.com/”>The Beatles</a>