The patron saint of duct tape

Steve Smith surprised and grateful for the success of his alter ego, the iconic Red Green, who performs Tuesday

“Are people surprised when they find out you’re not actually Red Green?” I ask Steve Smith.

“They are,” says the man behind the plaid. “Particularly in America, because this is the first exposure they’ve had to me. Sometimes I sign my name ‘Steve Smith’ and they wonder, ‘What does that say?’ I sign my name more as Red Green than I do as Steve Smith, and he had a 45-year head start.”

“Do people say your catchphrases to you a lot?”

“Oh yeah,” he sighs. “‘Keep your stick on the ice,’ I get it all the time. ‘If the women don’t find you handsome, they should at least find you handy,’ and we have the Man’s Prayer now, which is a pretty popular one, so they’ll say that one to me …”

“So what do you do? Do you smile? Do you nod? Do you run?”

“Y’know, if you’re not trying to connect with people, I don’t recommend show business,” Smith says. “So I don’t run at all. I can’t remember a negative comment; I can’t remember a person coming across the street to tell me they really don’t appreciate what I do. It’s always just positive feedback – who doesn’t like that?”

Through a 15-season run on CBC, Red Green became one of Canada’s most ubiquitous characters, his brand extending to books, videos, T-shirts, a theatrical movie, and heaven knows how many goofy uncles’ duct-tape jokes.

Though Smith says he can walk down the street without being recognized (“…but if I’ve got the hat on, forget it”), he’s coming beard-to-beard with his biggest fans for the “How to do Everything Tour,” his eighth one-man-show. It’s the latest from the Possum Lodge cottage industry that started in 1979, when the character debuted on the Hamilton-based sketch show Smith & Smith.

“I never thought it was going anywhere,” Smith says. “In fact, when I launched it as a TV series in 1990-1991 season, it was supposed to be a summer job and that would be the end of it. I never saw the thing as moving forward. It was the audience that moved it forward, not me.”

Thanks to popular demand, The Red Green Show even became one of the only Canadian shows to make an impact south of the border on PBS, the channel of Masterpiece Theater and Charlie Rose.

“I very much got steered by the audience,” he says. “When the show got cancelled, and that’s when good things started to happen, because the Canadian audience responded strongly to me personally, saying all kinds of things – ‘You’ve got to keep this show on the air,’ ‘We love the show.’

“First of all, that gave me a constituency – I’m not just representing myself, I’m trying to keep the show going on behalf of these people, which I was able to do. I went into the States with a hockey bag full of their fan mail, which got me a deal with America. That was a real wake-up call, and from that moment forward, I made the audience the boss, and I made the broadcaster the middleman.”

“Is there any difference between how Americans and Canadians perceive the character?” I ask.

“No. To be honest with you, I go everywhere, all over North America, from Tampa, Florida to Fairbanks, Alaska, and I just keep meeting the same guy.”

“How would you describe that guy?”

“Well, he’s a well-intentioned guy. The world overwhelms him a bit, but what he does is, he pulls back into a little world that he defines, where he’s comfortable. He’s not allowed to stay in it all the time, but he stays in it as much as he can. Those people tend to be at least suburban, if not rural, because it’s awfully hard to sustain your own world in an urban environment.”

Red Green and his Possum Lodgemates have resonated so strongly for so many of these guys that Smith is now a member of the Order of Canada. With his one-man shows, Smith has been able to reposition his character from Canada’s Tim Allen to a Will Rogers-in-flannel. “He’s been a great friend to me,” says Smith of his alter ego.

“He’s given me a platform and he’s allowed me to say things I probably couldn’t say as Steve Smith. It gives me access to people; people seem more open to Red Green than they do me.”

Red Green will hit Centre in the Square on October 8 at 7 p.m. Tickets are $58.50, available from the box office by calling 578-1570 or online at www.centre-square.com.