My name is Gabe Heller and this is by way of explanation. I have spent nearly a decade in these twin cities, and it has come to my attention how fragmented and disunited the artistic community here is. In an attempt to encourage all of you Twin Cities artists out there to band together, as you might, say, in the face of some overpowering evil, I have decided to completely change my normal creative process. Sure, you might get together to foil some evil politician or businessman, but given they are rarely competent artists, since when has this been even difficult or remotely interesting? Tearing down a Norm Coleman or Dick Cheney has quite frankly become old hat within the Twin Cities artistic community, leaving us stagnant and unmotivated to truly cooperate artistically. I have determined that to wrench us out of artistic complacency, we must be faced with a truly challenging foe, worthy of the very worst that our collective artistic talents can do: an evil artist. Imagine the drama, the artistic battles of mythic proportion, the pie fights! However, searching high and low in this endemically nice land of Minnesota, I have not yet found such a one so worthy of our scorn. In his or her absence, I have decided to step forward and take the evil mantle: to become that evil artist. Starting now I will dedicate myself to the violent deconstruction of all that is good and nice about the Minnesota art scene. I will use your own sense of openness and fairness against you. Hence my first evil action as an evil artist was to sign up for a show in this year's fringe festival. In the finest evil tradition, I will rely as much as possible on others to do my dirty work for me. Hence, I will neither be writing nor performing this show myself, if I can at all avoid it. I could lure artists into helping me in this evil endeavor with candy, chocolate, or promises of eternal fame, but none of these is quite evil enough, and they also cost money. So, instead, I will resort to a strategy favored by financially strapped evil-doers the world over, a strategy tried and time-tested, namely: blackmail. And in that spirit, I have prepared the following open, but EVIL letter to the denizens of the Minneapolis/St. Paul Arts Scene.