by Kurt Fitzpatrick

The Rogue Festival hits Fresno again from February 28 – March 9, and you can expect a lot of coverage before & during Rogue from KRL this year–maybe even some videos this time! Here is another article about one of this year’s festival performers. You can learn more on the Festival website! You can find all our other Rogue articles in our A & E section.

I am happy to back at Rogue Festival for my fifth time, and this year I am emceeing burlesque shows, teaching improv at Severance, co-hosting the morning coffee salon at the home of Marcel Nunis, and performing my new show Cathedral City at Tower Lounge. I’m not surprised that I’ve become such a fixture at Rogue. I love it, and every year I look forward to returning to the Tower District.

Last year Rogue was great to me when I performed my show Hooray for Speech Therapy. I performed despite having a herniated disc. I was less than a month away from having surgery, and my adventure traveling with an injury was an arduous one, but luckily I had the support of the Rogue staff, fans, and performers.

Kurt Fitzpatrick

My show Cathedral City stems from my experiences of living with a severe injury for six months. It’s a comedy with lots of original characters and even a song and dance number, but it comes from the isolation and uncertainty that an injury can bring. I deal with a lot of things in life through comedy and laughter, and my injury and subsequent surgery were the most difficult things I had to deal with in the last couple years of my life.

Cathedral City itself is not that far from Fresno. Years ago I did a Google search on myself and I found a website that had information on me, including the place where I would die. Cathedral City! I know the Internet isn’t always right, but I don’t think I want to take the chance and actually go there. The idea I put forth in my show is that Cathedral City is not a physical place, but rather a place in our minds that we go to to escape. We escape through being engrossed in a movie or song or being on a drug trip or through sex or other things. It is the idea of being in a state of mind outside of where we usually function. Cathedral City.

For me, when I was being operated on, and more heavily sedated than I had ever been before, I imagine that I went into that other world. At that point in time, it wasn’t a place that I voluntarily escaped to, but it was still Cathedral City. I was existing outside of the life I normally lived in for that brief period of time. Trippy, eh? And what if the different characters I play in my comedy shows were living their own stories, and those stories were also in Cathedral City? We would all come together and form a show. Cathedral City!