Many of the Canadian Fringe Festivals allow companies to set up their own venues. They call them BYOV's (Bring Your Own Venues), and basically any bar or whatever can do it. It allows companies who want to put in the extra effort to participate in the Fringe. We started doing this in 1999, but with two twists: one, we limited our BYOV's to site-specific performances, in other words, shows that you could not do in a regular Fringe venue; and two, we called them a name that francophones could easily understand, OFF. Every festival had its "off", Avignon's Fringe was called "off", everybody got the idea of Off-Fringe. Our first one was a Un Hyène à jeun, a show that essentially set up an outdoor African village by torchlight at McGill. Since then, we've experimented with allowing year-round venues to set themselves up as an Off, but the original, site-specific vision of the Off still works best for me, no matter how much of a pain in the ass they can be administratively.    Liam Dougherty wasn't a theatre artist, wasn't a writer, had never done theatre before. He did, however, have a story: he'd been the Canadian junior ice dance champion, and needed to get figure skating off his chest. The McConnell Arena was the perfect venue. The piece was basically a slideshow and costume parade on rollerblades, narrated with a lifelong accumulation of vituperance, bile, and bitter, bitter wit. I don't know if it was theatre, but it was engaging, honest, vital, and bleakly hilarious. Shows like this are what the Fringe is here for. Ten thousand rhinestones out of ten thousand.