On a Sunday evening in May 2015, I entered San Francisco's prestigious Warfield Theatre to catch up with my old friends, the legendary comedy troupe the Kids in the Hall. As longtime stage director Jim Millan ushered me backstage, I found the Kids distractedly immersed in their various preshow rituals. As usual, it feel to Kevin McDonald to greet me, offering drinks and snacks before walking me over to a large round table where Mark McKinney nodded hello from behind a newspaper and Bruce McCulloch broke briefly from a conversation with his wife, Tracy, to raise an eyebrow in lieu of a verbal greeting. A jittery Scott Thompson darted in and out of the room, seeming to have misplaced something important, while Dave Foley offered me a warm handshake with one hand while nursing a soft drink in the other, having recently gone on the wagon. By this point, I had known the troupe for over thirty years, but while these five middle-aged men had long since outgrown their childlike name, very little else seemed to have changed about them since the day we met. While a sense of imminent fun hung over the backstage area, this was not a party; these men were about to go to work at the job they had created for themselves back on the streets of Toronto in the early 1980s.

From The Kids in the Hall: One Dumb Guy by Paul Myers ©2018. Published by House of Anansi.