Unfortunately I have been really really sick these last few weeks with pneumonia, and as a result the mixer has been off, the cookbooks closed, and I have mostly been watching SpongeBob on the sofa with a near endless supply of gingerale. (A special thanks to all the folks on twitter who have sent me well wishes! Warms my heart, it does.)

Sickness aside, the fires of hell themselves could not have kept me from Tussle n’ Flow on Saturday to fundraise for my good friend Karol’s upcoming film on vivisection. The film (which I have mentioned before) is called “Maximum Tolerated Dose” (which is a lab term used for the dosage amount of any drug or substance that an animal can withstand before it becomes lethal, has an irreversible adverse effect, or the point at which the animal dies of a side effect.) This kind of testing is incredibly cruel and hard on the animals as they often spend a lot of time near the limit, suffering from the drug overdose, but still administered more to see where the boundaries for fatality are. Karol has also explained that they do both long and short term toxicity tests, which can sometimes see the animal taking a high dose for 2-3 years to project long-term side effects and fatality rates.

The film name is a reference to that but as Karol has also pointed out it references the point many AR activists and Veg*n’s alike have come to.. that moment where the other shoe drops and you decide definitively you just can’t put that milk on your cereal again. You can’t buy that leather. You’ve hit the point at which there is no return. So I like that a lot too. (And from my experiences talking to people, some of the coolest stories you’ll hear are the ones where people tell you what that final straw was, the day that the switch in their mind flipped the other way.)

To hear more about the film you can read this interview over at the WONDERFUL  Our Hen House site which can be found here: Maximum Tolerated Dose: Q&A with Filmmaker Karol Orzechowski by Nick in Art of the Animal

(You should also be reading Our Hen House regularly if you are into animal rights news and/or general awesomeness. I LOVE Our Hen House. You’ll LOVE Our Hen House. Everyone will LOVE Our Hen House.)

The fundraiser also coincided with the closing of another great space in this city for progressive thinking as well as art and general awesomeness: Project 165. So it was a big one. The place was packed and I bundled up to go through the blizzard and deliver 50 vegan butter tarts to help fundraise. As well, there were 3 MCs and a DJ throughout the evening and lot and lots of dancing. I also got challenged to a bake-off, which I will accept as soon as my lungs are back in full operational order.

At any rate, here are some pictures from the evening! The time to Tussle n’ flow has passed. Time to take it to the next step, hustle and grow friends. Hustle and grow.