Being leader of the Green Party has led to lots of new experiences, but none was as unexpected as posing on a motorcycle in Truro last weekend (not a place I have been before, not Truro, the back of a motorcycle... I am not Deb Gray!) or learning how to operate a chain saw ...which I did yesterday for the Rick Mercer Report.
I was resistant to the idea that the best way for the leader of the Green Party to make a splash on Rick Mercer's show would be to cut down a tree. Of course, Rick got Liberal leadership hopeful, Bob Rae, to literally "make a splash" with a skinny-dipping closing to their fishing segment the other night. I tried to convince Rick that it would make great television for him to help me study for my theology exam, which is what I had been planning between arriving back in Ottawa from Halifax Wednesday morning and writing a make-up test at noon for the class I missed in Amsterdam....Rick thought a quiz on ethics and moral existence was not the stuff of political comedy. He was pretty firm on the chain saw lesson.
We compromised on his promise I would not be killing a tree. He said his producer's cottage had a ready-to-order dead tree. Ice storm damage. So off we went in the pouring rain for several hours of being soaked to the skin while learning how to use a chain saw and fell a tree, but not on anyone, or the cottage!
It was actually fun. But I don't have a strong desire to use a chainsaw everyday....I rushed to write that exam (fingers crossed), met up with CBC national for an interview on the Harper non-announcement of the non-Clean Air Act and to Aboriginal Peoples TV and the Don Newman show on Newsworld before heading to Orillia... where one hundred people were waiting to hear about the Green Party....
It was a great (wet, cold) day....watch for Rick Mercer taking on the Green Party next Tuesday!