Charlie Petch’s No One’s Special at the Hot Dog Cart is a one man show about his experiences as a hot dog vendor in Toronto and his subsequent life working as a 911 dispatcher, on the front desk of an ER and as a hospital bed allocator.  It’s currently being presented by Theatre Passe Muraille and Erroneous Productions.

Collage and poster design by Emily Jung | Pictured: Charlie Petch

The hot dog vending phase happened before Petch’s gender transition so for that bit he’s describing his experiences as a woman.  There’s also an explicit subtext; de-escalation is always better than the opposite so don’t call the cops.

As you might imagine being a hot dog vendor on the late evening and night shifts at Dundas and Yonge (before it went pseudo Times Square) and Gerrard and Church involves meeting a lot of people who are marginalised, broken and downright weird.  It helps not to see what one shouldn’t see.  Petch describes his encounters with sympathy and some gentle humour.  Occasionally we get an interlude of dissonant, overlapping sounds and clashing lights to remind us where we are supposed to be.

In between the anecdotes about the street people and sex workers who he meets we get snatches of his “afterlife” in some of the most difficult places to be in the emergency response/health care system.  What characterises them is that the front line workers are being asked to do the impossible in a system/situation they can’t change and where they are the point of contact or the pivot who has to manage the mess.  It’s sad.  One has to empathise with someone in Petch’s position and his emphasis on de-escalation.  It doesn’t ever fix the problem but it stops it from getting worse; at least for now.

No One’s Special at the Hot Dog Cart is a fine example of a lot of contemporary theatre in Toronto.  It takes a real, important and neglected issue and turns it effectively into drama.  I’m seeing a lot of plays of this type.  They leave me full of admiration for the creators and performers but if I see too many such I risk ending up drained of the will to live!  Such is life.

No One’s Special at the Hot Dog Cart runs at Tneatre Passe Muraille until March 23rd.