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Author and playwright Dan Needles presents 'Farmer Thinking'

Former Leacock Medal of Humour winner and 'Mayor of Mariposa' will take a hilarious look at rural farm life
2091-10-08 Dan Needles
Dan Needles. Photo provided

NEWS RELEASE
DAN NEEDLES
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Join us for a hilarious look at rural farm life with local Canadian author, playwright and actor, Dan Needles, as he presents Farmer Thinking at the Tec-We-Gwill (Newton Robinson) Hall, Oct. 22, 2019, 4380 10th Line, Bradford West Gwillimbury, 7:30 p.m. A reception and meet and greet with Dan Needles will follow, brought to you by the Tec-We-Gwill Women’s Institute. 

Dan Needles, CM, is best known as the playwright behind the popular Wingfield Series which has played across Canada for many years. It was performed at the Stratford Festival of Canada and was aired, in part, on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the Bravo Channel.

In Orillia, he's well-known as the Mayor of Mariposa, the ceremonial function he played often for the Stephen Leacock Associates - the group behind the awarding of the Leacock Medal of Humour, which Needles won in 2003.

Although Dan was born in Toronto, he was raised partly in the city and partly in the country. Every spring, his mother would move the family from the city to a hobby farm near Rosemont, Ont. where he and his brothers and sisters tended to a herd of Jersey cows and worked on the neighbouring farms of the 7th line.

Before writing plays, Dan worked as a journalist, speechwriter and insurance executive. He spent a lot of time exploring the world, as well. From a year spent milking cows and chasing sheep in the backcountry of Australia, to piling lumber in a northern British Columbia sawmill, to cycling around England and France exploring battlefields, serving beer in a pub and picking agricultural crops, he completed a degree in economics from the University of Toronto.

Dan has had an eclectic career to draw his hilarious insights from. In 1974 he became editor of the Free Press and Economist, a small-town weekly newspaper near the family farm, and created a column called the Letter from Wingfield Farm which eventually became the basis for later stage plays.

He was a speechwriter and legislative assistance to a Member of Provincial Parliament for four years, then ran the Public Affairs department for Canada Life. In 1988, he and his wife, Heath, made their home at Larkspur Farm, Simcoe County.

Dan has written a number of books and plays and he will have books available for sale and signing at the event. See his website here for more details. 

According to the Globe and Mail, “Dan Needles stands squarely in the tradition of other comic chroniclers of the human condition such as T.C. Haliburton and Mark Twain…Persephone Township may not be on the map, but it is somewhere near the Canadian psyche.”

Tickets are available through Bonnie, 705-458-4555, Diana, 705-435-6427, or [email protected] at $15 each or $10 for Tec-We-Gwill members. To ensure presentations such as author, Dan Needles, are accessible to the whole community, Tec-We-Gwill Women’s Institute is supporting this event as part of our community outreach.

Tec-We-Gwill Women’s Institute is a branch of the Federated Women’s Institutes of Ontario (FWIO), a not-for-profit charitable organization with affiliations around the world, working with and for women in Ontario. Through the network of Branches, FWIO offers educational programming and community support; advocates for social, environmental and economic change, and works towards the personal growth of all women, for home and country. We envision an Ontario where women work together for safe, healthy communities and pursue an enriched and balanced lifestyle.

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