Legs (OFFICIAL "Herschel" marketing photo)

Photo by Scott Pakudaitis and Mike Moore

Amy Behind Tree (OFFICIAL "Herschel" marketing photo)

Photo by Scott Pakudaitis

"Herschel" at the Cincinnati Fringe Festival 2006

Photo by Rosetta Stone Studios

"Herschel" in performance at the MN Fringe, 2005

Photo by Scott Pakudaitis

'Herschel" in performance at the MN Fringe, August 2005.

Photo by Scott Pakudaitis

"Herschel" in performance at the Cincinnati Fringe Festival, 2006

Photo by Rosetta Stone Studios

Vancouver Fringe tech rehearsal, Sept. 2007, taken by Dan Fairchild.

SKMAHG "fill in the blanks" postcard front (for presenters)

SKMAHG "fill in the blanks" postcard back (for presenters)

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Amy Salloway, creator of the hit solo shows, "Does This Monologue Make Me Look Fat?" and "Circumference", revisits the world of adolescence, angst and Jewish summer camp with...."So Kiss Me Already, Herschel Gertz!"
Milwaukee, 1986. Amy has a plan for her 15th summer: Transform from total dorkwad to Material Girl. Build This City on rock and roll. And pine for Ross Buckman until he sees her True Colors shining through. Instead, her parents ship her off to “freakishly Jewish” Camp L’Chaim, where “even the mosquitoes wear yarmulkes!” How do you survive when you’re the pork chop in an all-Kosher world?
“A MUST SEE. … both kick-ass funny and achingly poignant, often at the same time.” – Cincinnati CityBeat
“An endearingly funny coming of age story…sharply witty and packed with teen spirit from start to finish."
 -- The Vancouver Globe and Mail

“★★★★ …energetic and hilarious…you’ll relate regardless of summer camp experience or religious persuasion. Salloway’s story is universal and charming enough to win anyone over.” -- CBC Manitoba
“Utterly brilliant!” – The Halifax Herald

For CLIPS of "So Kiss Me Already, Herschel Gertz!", visit:
Amy's YouTube Page!
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Where can you see "So Kiss Me Already, Herschel Gertz!"?


The Swift Current Chautaqua!

Lyric Theatre, Swift Current, SK

Saturday, July 11th 9:00 pm (double-bill with Sound and Fury)

Sunday July 12th, 2:00 pm

Check back for more info soon!


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Past "Herschel" performances include:
* The 2005 Atlantic Fringe, Halifax, Nova Scotia
* The 2006 Rogue Performance Festival, Fresno, CA
* Augustana College, Sioux Falls, SD
* The Loring Playhouse, Minneapolis, MN
* UMN Hillel, Minneapolis, MN
* Temple Bet Shalom, Minnetonka, MN
* Stage North Theatre, Washburn, WI
* The Oh Solo Mio Festival of Solo Performance, London, ON
* The 2006 Cincinnati Fringe, Cincinnati, OH
* The 2006 Ottawa Fringe, Ottawa, ON
* The 2006 Winnipeg Fringe, Winnipeg, MB, (Best of the Fest)
* The Columbus JCC, Cincinnati, OH
* The Baltimore Creative Alliance
* The Jewish Museum of Maryland
* UNH Hillel, Durham, NH
* UU Congregation of Nashua, Nashua, NH
* Temple Torat Yisrael, Cranston, RI
* Camp Massad, Winnipeg, MB
* The 2007 Orlando Fringe, Orlando, FL
* The Ottawa JCC, Ottawa, ON
* The 2007 Berkshire Fringe, Great Barrington, MA
* The 2007 Victoria Fringe, Victoria BC
* The 2007 Vancouver Fringe, Vancouver BC (Pick of the Fringe).
* The 2008 International TeatroNetto Festival of Solo Performance, Jaffa, Israel
* Beth Jacob Congregation, Regina, SK
* Temple Shaare Zedek, Montreal QC
* The Manhattan JCC, NYC
* The Park Theatre, Hayward, WI

* Congregation B'nai Emet, St. Louis Park, MN

* UMass-Dartmouth, Dartmouth, MA

The Georgia Straight, Vancouver BC
September 13, 2007
Link is here
SO KISS ME ALREADY, HERSCHEL GERTZ! Fifteen-year-old Amy's summer plans (learning drill-squad routines and pining over a male friend) are disrupted when her parents announce that they're sending her to Camp L'Chaim, where "every activity has to do with Judaism, Israel, or both." Worse, every girl there seems to need a boyfriend ("so that you can crochet him a yarmulke"), and Amy doesn't have one. Writer-performer Amy Salloway delivers great comic characterizations, vivid images, and hilarious one-liners ("I thought only Catholics had accidents," she says, on learning that a friend's mother is expecting an unplanned child). Behind the comedy, Salloway poignantly captures the innocence and confusion of first love. At Venue 5, Playwrights Theatre Centre, on September 13 (8:30 p.m.), 14 (11:15 p.m.), and 16 (6:45 p.m.) ?-- Kathleen Oliver
The Globe and Mail Review -- WHAT'S ON AT FRINGE
Link is here
By JENNIFER VAN EVRA
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Just five days left of the Vancouver International Fringe Festival, and here are this year's best bets.
So Kiss Me Already, Herschel Gertz!
***½
Amy - an awkward, pudgy, Jewish teen - thinks she's about to spend the summer hanging out with her best friend. Instead, her parents inform her that she's bound for Camp L'chaim. "Amy, be a mensch," says her father. "It's not Auschwitz." Written and performed by Minneapolis artist Amy Salloway, Hershel Gertz is a sweet and endearingly funny coming of age story that deftly avoids the overly sentimental trappings of sweet and endearingly funny coming of age stories. Based on Salloway's own camp experience, the writing is sharply witty packed with teen spirit from start to finish. Sept. 13, 14 and 16, various times. $10. Playwrights Theatre, 1398 Cartwright St., 604-981-3764.
The Victoria Times-Colonist,
August 26, 2007
By Leah Collins
SO KISS ME ALREADY, HERSCHEL GERTZ!
Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)
Amy Salloway opens her one-woman show as shiny and sweet as her sparkly lip gloss. She's her 15-year-old self -- which bears an uncanny likeness to Hairspray's Tracy Turnblatt -- pogoing around her bedroom to the Go Gos' We Got the Beat. She's got big plans for summer vacation: practise her dance moves so she can make the high school drill team, write a young adult novel about "a child of divorce with ESP" and, most importantly, pine over too-dreamy drama pal Ross Buckman. The trouble is, mom and dad have signed her up for summer camp. "Freakily Jewish" Camp L'Chaim. And the only dancing she'll do is at their "hasidic hoedown," which she grapevines through with stomping feet and petulant frowns.
A drama nerd-gifted kid who thinks she's too fat to ever make the drill team, Amy doesn't usually have much luck fitting in. At camp, it's worse. Her roommates are Barbie-doll pretty with names like Shoshanna. Worse yet, they're "experienced." And no girl at camp can be without a boyfriend. Amy's is Herschel Gertz, a skinny, perpetually congested putz.
Salloway channels her inner teenager, zits and all. She can be innocent and imaginative as easily as she can be shrill and self-absorbed. She's also keenly observant. And in the case of real-life Amy, those powers of observation serve the comedic script well. Salloway's got a knack for detail that goes right down to minutiae like the piece of dried snot that wafts in and out of Herschel's nose. Ultimately, though, she's a poignantly vulnerable character whose story works through her struggle to find acceptance and spirituality.
CBC Review for the Winnipeg Fringe --
By Joff Schmidt
*Reviewed at the 2006 Ottawa Fringe (June 15-25, 2006)
If your summer camp included activities like “A Nature Walk With Moses” and “The Ancient Biblical Art of Macrame,” you’ll relate to Amy Salloway’s tender and very funny coming-of-age comedy. Heck, you’ll relate regardless of summer camp experience or religious persuasion - Salloway’s story is universal and charming enough to win anyone over. The premise is simple - 15-year-old Amy is shipped off to Camp L’Chaim, a Conservative Jewish (or “freakishly Jewish,” as Amy says) summer camp. In the process, she learns lessons about loneliness, love, smooching, and misplaced affection. Sure, it’s nothing you haven’t seen before, and it’s all pretty sweet - probably a bit too much for some. But it’s sold by Salloway’s energetic and hilarious performance. She’s the type of performer who can draw a laugh with a simple roll of her eyes... and draw an audience in with her honesty, good nature, and spot-on take on the trials of teen angst. Her writing is very sharp as well. At times, it’s quite poetic - although at 70 minutes, the script could stand a bit of a trim. However, So Kiss Me Already... is almost sure to bring a smile to any but the grumpiest Fringer’s face. L’Chaim indeed.
4 out of 5 Sheriff Stars
The Winnipeg Sun – Lunatic Fringe:
Published July 21, 2006
So Kiss Me Already, Herschel Gertz!
Venue 7 Wisconsin-reared Amy Salloway’s evocative one-woman comedy romp about a 14-year-old frump’s summer vacation takes us back — ah, yes, crippling alienation, mortifying mysteries of puberty, that first toothsome kiss. Busting with youthful energy, Amy’s plans of spending summer vacation pining for an unattainable boy and reaching for an unattainable drill-team dream are foiled when her parents send her to Hebrew hell — Camp L’Chaim, where rock ’n’ roll fantasies give way to “Hassidic hoedowns” and “experienced” girls have better hair, better bodies and better boyfriends. Enter a knight in sweaty sneakers and, eventually, a life lesson about acceptance — and mediocrity. Sweet, funny and easy listening.
3.5 out of 5 stars
-- PAT ST. GERMAIN
From The Ottawa Citizen, Tuesday, June 20, 2006:
By Catherine Lawson
Do we really need another one-person show about Jewish adolescent angst? If it's performed by Amy Salloway of Minneapolis, we certainly do. Salloway has a mobile face, an expressive body and a knack for words. Salloway's character is an awkward, chunky 15-year-old sent for eight weeks to Camp L'Chaim, where the children of conservative Jews can learn Israeli folkdancing and the ancient Jewish art of macrame.
Whether she's describing a fresh container of margarine as looking like "an unexplored canola planet," dancing divinely to the Go-Gos, or winning the heart of Herschel Gertz, Amy could well be the funniest, most appealing character you'll meet at this year's Fringe. Salloway performs through Wednesday at Arts Court Library.
CINCINNATI CITYBEAT FRINGE 2006 REVIEW: So Kiss Me Already, Herschel Gertz
June 1, 2006
BY TOM MCELFRESH
Amy Salloway belongs to a rare and crafty class of clowns: She writes comedy as deftly and as perceptively as she performs it. To see her astonishing new, 70-minute entertainment in the Cincinnati Fringe Festival — So Kiss Me Already, Herschel Gertz — is to wonder which to admire more, her original ideas or her warm, winning revelation of them. To see it is to appreciate her mastery of a form of personal solo theater that falls somewhere between standup and drama, one that is at its best when, it seamlessly blends the first-person and third-person elements of character and chorus.
To see the show is also to recognize yet again how the heartiest laughter can emerge from heartfelt pain. Which is to say that Herschel Gertz is both kickass funny and achingly poignant, often at the same time. And that’s when it is most revealing and most moving.
Gertz lacks some of the edginess and audacity of Does This Monologue Make Me Look Fat?, the show Salloway brought to the 2005 Cincinnati Fringe Festival. However, it has more depth, a finer focus and a greater ability to add resonance to the laughter.
The teenage “Amy” is sent off, much against her wishes, for summer camp immersion in conservative Jewish values. She shares a wide-bodied commonality with her creator — quicksilver personality, runaway angst, excess poundage and, seemingly, an absolute determination to wear her tender heart high on her sleeve — right below the chip that life keeps knocking off her fleshy shoulder. Amy painfully observes and reluctantly envies the “perfect” physicality of her Barbie-esque cabin-mates. She yearns for the sort of hot-breath attention they instantly attract from boys.
But she’s dismayed when she attracts the notice of Herschel Gertz, this gawky putz who keeps a notebook in which he jots down “good ideas” for things he plans to invent, things like toast in a jar — a substance that one can spread on bread when one wants the taste of toast but doesn’t have a toaster handy. That’s the product of an original mind — Salloway’s, not Herschel’s. Likewise original and delicious is the way playwright Amy has Herschel carry quarters around in his sneaker so that performer Amy can be both repulsed and charmed when he offers them to her to buy stamps and drops the sticky, smelly coins into her hand. Then playwright Amy has character Amy and Herschel decide to go to a costume party dressed as a carton of milk and a hot dog, a notion as comic as it is non-kosher.
All of Salloway’s appearances are scheduled early in the Fringe Festival, so don’t dally if you want to see a performer who took one of the Best of the Fest honors last summer — and might again. Grade: A+
From the Fresno Bee, March 4, 2006:
by Donald Munro
So Kiss Me Already, Herschel Gertz!
Another out-of-town Rogue highlight only here for the first weekend is Amy Salloway's polished one-woman show "So Kiss Me Already, Herschel Gertz!" She recounts her traumatic summer as a 15-year-old Jewish girl sent by her parents to Camp L'Chaim, where "even the mosquitos wear yarmulkes." Salloway, who has a charming stage presence as she strides about in a Speed Racer T-shirt (the whole show is an'80s time warp) cracking jokes about "Hasidic hoedowns," relates the tale of her first boyfriend: a guy named Herschel who's pretty much as socially ostracized as she is.
What's so touching about this 60-minute solo show is that along with the humor, there's a tug of heartfelt emotion: Should our heroine "settle" for her imperfect boyfriend or continue to pine away for the unattainable guy who obviously isn't waiting for her back home? Salloway has a knack for painting potent word pictures; her description of a panicked Herschel leaving a brush in her teased-out hair -- she calls the brush a "Tarzan" in an Afro jungle -- is a scream. You only have a couple of more chances to catch this hit of the Minnesota Fringe Festival.
Excerpts from MN Fringe Festival audience reviews:
"Don't Miss This One!"
David Sedaris has met his female match! What makes Amy's show successful are two things: (1) her ability to write a well-crafted story; and (2) her ability to tell that story with such an engaging and interesting voice. Throw in perfect stage presence and brilliant facial expressions, and you have one helluva a good show! This is truly the best show I've seen in the Fringe in a long, long time. Ever.
“Wear Your Depends!”
Amy Salloway has quickly risen to the top of the local Fringe elite… What you get here is 70 minutes of continuous bent-over, belly-aching, pant-wetting laughter performed flawlessly without a single stumble... This is the only show I've seen at this year's Fringe where the performer received an extended standing ovation from the entire audience. See her now while you can, because between her two shows, Amy Salloway has what it takes to make it in the big leagues.
"Positively Sublime!"
…hilarious and heartfelt and heartwrenching all at once.
"Oy, such a show"
Absolutely fabulous. The story of a 15 year-old girl at a boy/girl camp is always fodder for humor but in the hands and mind of Amy Salloway it is a masterpiece. A must-see, or you'll feel like such a putz.
"So Kiss Me…" couches the painful themes of angst and alienation in a warm, humorous and discerning story. This performance was masterful at alchemizing the raw pain of being an outsider into a work of art that will help us understand ourselves (oh...and it was hilarious, too). What a talent! Can't wait to see it continue!
"This one is wonderful!"
I'm not sure why Amy Salloway isn't a known name all over this country yet, but she should be! Her story-telling is such a wonderful mixture of belly-laughs and pull-at-your-heartstrings (even those of us who never went to camp have "been there" when they hear her rendition of the experience). We are so lucky to have her return each year to The Fringe, and hopefully she will continue to do so long after her name is in neon on Broadway.
"Amazing Show"
One of Amy's talents is turning personal pain and embarrassment into art. Loved last year's show; this one demonstrates an even higher level of honesty.
"So Be Famous Already, Amy Salloway!"
Once again, Salloway delivers a piece of heart-warming emotion peppered with pain and angst, this time, the kosher variety. There are no words to describe the particular flair that Amy has for telling stories. Seeing one of her shows is a unique and uplifting experience... You'll want to catch a performance of hers before she's all famous and constantly selling out shows...oops, too late.
"Terrific!"
…literate, funny, and extremely well told.
"A sublime ending to a great 2005 Fringe."
Salloway presents a tender and painfully honest look into a 15-year old's summer, complete with real and perceived marginalization; sexual desire and rejection; and the painful/liberating recognition of both limitations and strengths. Much, much more than a summer camp memoir.
"Is this a face? Is this a face?"
What an amazing, unique talent. Amy is not only a performer, she is a truly gifted writer. She was my 14th show of this year's Fringe - a Fringe that has been truly spectacular, and hers was the first full, standing ovation.
"Amy rocks!"
My long-time (male) companion at Amy's show said it best: "Maybe I'll just skip everything else and come back to all of Amy's performances." This one is a winner for anyone who ever felt like an outsider (especially a smart outsider). Relive those thrilling days of yesteryear, when being a smart, overweight young woman was simply not socially acceptable. Amy's skills as both a writer and performer make this experience one that we can all share.
Not just for Jewish people…for anyone who hated camp or loved it and anyone who remembers their first kiss or is still trying to block it out.
"A Fringe Treasure"
See this show. No, really. See it. Amy Salloway's tale of love, humiliation and summer camp is a treat not to be missed. Her writing is terrific and her performance is hilarious and touching.

Actor, Playwright, Literary

http://www.youtube.com/user/IlaughedIcried 

Some Stuff About Me.
Circumference
So Kiss Me Already, Herschel Gertz!
Heebs and Dweebs
Does This Monologue Make Me Look Fat?
The Advice People
Teaching and Workshops