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Paul Bellini and Scott Thompson have been comedic and creative partners since university. They made pizza with Pee-Wee Herman and met Kurt Cobain at Maple Leaf Gardens. fab’s Troll columnist looks back and then watches as his beloved friend heads to a few altars to become…

TV's wedding fairy - by Paul Bellini

We met in first year at York University. I was a film student and I needed an actor to stand in front of an oncoming car, but there was only one brave enough to take the challenge. Since then, he’s taken every challenge, because he’s a born risk-taker. I’m talking about my old pal Scott Thompson.

Over the years, we’ve collaborated on many things – plays, student newspapers, experimental videos and recipes. For several years we even had a ridiculous punk-rock band called Mouth Congress, in which we would wear several layers of clothes and strip down to our underwear over the course of the set. We also spent six years working on The Kids in the Hall, and later wrote a novel called Buddy Babylon: The Autobiography of Buddy Cole, which got shitty reviews, even though no less than Johnny Rotten told Scott he was a fan.

But Scott’s newest venture is something totally different – a reality series about gay marriage called My Fabulous Gay Wedding, which kicks off its six-episode run on Global June 1 at 10pm (and sometime soon on the new American gay network, LOGO). I’ve followed Scott from the campus to the chapel, and we’ve always had adventures, like having dinner at Pee-Wee Herman’s house (he made pizza with cilantro), getting high with the Black Crowes on their tour bus, meeting Kurt Cobain at Maple Leaf Gardens just a year before his death and having to babysit Rip Taylor when he came to town to guest-star on Kids. Rip was having a suede jacket custom-made for himself at Skin and Bones and wanted me to model it for him because of our “similar builds.”

After the Kids wrapped, Scott moved to Los Angeles to become a regular cast member of The Larry Sanders Show and, later, oddly enough, the family values-friendly Providence. Then things went awry. His boyfriend at the time, Joel Soler, made a documentary about Saddam Hussein called Uncle Saddam (2000) that led to their house in L.A. being vandalized by pro-Saddamites. But this was just the beginning of a run of bad luck. In the summer of 2001, we began writing what was supposed to be Scott’s comeback show, a collection of new monologues featuring all his signature characters called The Lowest Show on Earth. The bad luck started when Thompson was invited by Daniel Richler to perform at the prestigious Griffin Awards, an event meant to celebrate Canadian poetry. Scott chose to do a monologue based on a new character, a French Canadian with a giant shlong called Ti-Jean who believed that everyone wanted to suck his cock. Scott had a big phallus fashioned from nylon stockings and birdseed, and the result was quite convincing. But the monologue wasn’t quite ready, and neither was the audience. Legend has it that he wagged the big dick in Margaret Atwood’s face, causing her to flee, and the next day the National Post turned it into a scandal.

“I didn’t even see the woman walk out,” Scott admits. “She could have been going to the can. Hilary Weston should have been the one to walk out because it was her I offered to pee on.” As I said earlier, he’s a born risk-taker. “I thought Ti-Jean was an excellent choice for a poetry awards presentation because he was a poet who wrote dirty limericks about bikers and sluts. I did hear some of the security guards laughing at the back of the hall.”
“Scott’s like a bull,” says Daniel Gelfant, his director on My Fabulous Gay Wedding. “If you wave a red flag at him, he will charge.”

Notes Scott, “I thought the incident hurt my career and made people think that I was a loose cannon, but it stopped me from having to say no to hosting stupid events.”
Things got worse for The Lowest Show on Earth. Scott and I toured the States all summer, culminating in a successful run at Just for Laughs in Montreal, and we were poised to open the show at the Bleecker Street Theater in New York City, on September 18, 2001. The poster, featuring a picture of Scott’s face dripping with cum, was plastered all over the vicinity that a few days later became known as Ground Zero. At one point, Scott considered reviving the show under the new title September 10th, but eventually abandoned it out of despair.

Luckily, the dark ages didn’t last, and the last year has been one of his busiest. In fact, in the last few months, Scott has appeared in such productions as Train 48, Puppets Who Kill, Instant Star, Popcultured, the Vin Diesel movie The Pacifier and Jeanne Beker’s Fashion Television (as clued-out fashion correspondent Danny Husk). But none will have quite the impact of My Fabulous Gay Wedding.

“I’ve worked with a lot of reporters who don’t have as much empathy as Scott does,” says Gelfant, a documentary filmmaker who was in the West Bank during the Gulf War when the Scud missiles were launched. He chose Thompson to host when he realized that the series needed a focus. “It’s new turf,” says Gelfant of a show that blends humour, pathos, whimsy and fact. The balance is something he is always aware of in the editing room. He dubs it “docucomedy.” Gelfant’s smartest contribution is thinking up interesting ways to integrate Thompson with the couples. Over the course of the six episodes, Thompson plays bagpipes in a kilt, buys adult diapers for one couple’s incontinent dogs, breaks into another couple’s home and crawls into bed with them, introduces performances by Lea DeLaria and Ashley MacIsaac, and even does some role-playing.

“There’s a scene where he role-plays a lesbian’s old Russian mother, and the girl was so moved she just started bawling,” says Gelfant. “It’s proof that you can use humour to get to people’s truths.”

“There’s a scene where I’m dressed as a camp counsellor with a megaphone, right out of a Carry On movie,” says Scott of a scene in which one young, outdoorsy couple is forced to portage through Moss Park with a canoe. In the same episode, he’s in bondage, with the newlyweds eating cake off his crotch. “Well, we didn’t have a table,” he explains.

The show is also totally Toronto, showcasing many of the businesses in the gay Village. “We couldn’t make this show in the States because they can’t get married there,” explains Scott. “And besides, how many exciting gay couples are there in Massachusetts?”

The content of the show hit relatively few snags, but LOGO nixed the original opening credits sequence in which Thompson, as a self-proclaimed wedding fairy, dances about wearing huge butterfly wings. “They were concerned that some people might think that calling myself a fairy might be misconstrued as homophobic,” Scott says, his eyes rolling. He happily wore the wings for fab’s cover shoot.

Perhaps the only thing about the show that doesn’t satisfy Scott is the dearth of visible minorities. Gelfant screened over 100 couples, but found the applicants to be overwhelmingly white. “Gays are everywhere, and I think it’s important to encompass the world,” says Scott, “but generally, non-white communities are more closeted. There aren’t a lot of out gay Jamaican men around.”

“Plus a lot of ethnic communities don’t want to show their lives on television,” adds Gelfant. “It would be great to see a gay Hindu wedding, though,” dreams Scott. “It would be our Bollywood episode.”

The one thing the show won’t be is political. Gelfant studiously kept out the screeching tenor of the current gay marriage controversy. “Gay marriage is the ‘abortion debate’ of this decade,” says Gelfant, “but I wanted to be true to the stories of the couples. I’ve done a lot of issue-driven programming, but people getting married is a nice thing. Whether you think it’s good or bad is not the issue.” Even Stephen Harper would have to agree.

To me, the most shocking aspect of the show is Scott’s decision not to wear any makeup. Frankly, I’ve never seen so much of his face on television before. “I can’t believe how old I look,” he sighs, “but I take the reality part of reality TV seriously. People are savvy to television now, and most of the couples showed up with makeup already on. In fact, our gurus (wedding planner Fern Cohen, her assistant Gregory White, event designer Eric Arogon, caterer Barbara Stuart-Peterson, and fashion stylist Jim Smith) had to be told to wear less makeup.”

But the most amazing thing you will see is Scott Thompson shedding tears. “I cried my contacts out,” he admits. “I was overcome when they played I Will Survive at one wedding. Regardless of it being a tired anthem, it reminded me of how difficult it was for our generation. We grew up in the era of Anita Bryant and AIDS. I kept thinking about everyone we knew who died and how much it would have meant to see these boys declaring their love for each other in front of their families and friends. In this show, I’m showing things I’ve never shown before publicly – a softer side, if you wish. You can’t be the angry young man when you’re not that young anymore.”

And what’s next for the ever-risk-taking Scott Thompson? “Time to make a zombie movie.”

• Paul Bellini is fab’s Troll columnist.