June 3, 2011

June is here and with it an increased schedule of things for your to-do list in Ottawa. It’s a month that starts with a children’s festival, ends with a jazz festival of sorts and finds room in between for everything from two theatre festivals (the flashy Magnetic North and the plucky Fringe) to Doors Open to a relatively new art festival cleverly dubbed The New Art Festival.

And we’d like to say The Wig will be there throughout, to offer the city’s most complete listings to aid with or complicate your choices.

That is, we’d like to say that. Alas, our listings have instead been forced into something akin to sleep mode. Blame it on a bit of upheaval in the organization ― i.e., the good people at Hill Times Publishing, who helped us get this fab site off the ground some seven months ago, have  opted to leave us behind. Evidently, they, like many of us, anticipated the end of the world May 21, and therefore did not budget beyond that date.

That leaves us here at The Wig in a state of transition. New management. New goals. New challenges. A new day. Arriving at those things, however, takes time. As a result, while things pick up this summer, they will necessarily slow down on this website. We encourage you to continue to follow @thewigottawa on Twitter, for updates on our progress as well as interviews, reviews, previews and other cool stuff. Ditto, Facebook. And there will be mailouts. As of this afternoon, we are less than 10 friends away from having 1,000 Twitter followers, a number we dared covet since this dang site went live Nov. 1, 2010. We appreciate your support and encourage you to stay tuned.

It’s been a wild seven months, and a quick glance at the site confirms that Ottawa has given us many reasons to get out and enjoy, but alas, circumstances have forced The Wig to gear down. We could call it restructuring, and we are determined to get back up to speed sooner than later, but the time has come to take a step back and reassess the situation. You know how it is.

Thank you to Holly Gordon, Mike Beard, Hao Guo and all behind the scenes at a website we’ve grown rather fond of. Thanks also to hard-working interns Allison, Danika, Yvonne, Drea, Maria and Faye, to Tasted man Jon Lomow and to our valued freelance contributors. We could not have done it without you. You’ll still see familiar names among our contributors; while, new voices ― like new supporters ― are always welcome. Let’s see where we can take this thing, eh?

For now, think of it as a well earned rest. And keep watching the skies.

Cheers,

Wig