Cape Breton duo’s mockumentary opens ALFF
Lately, while walking my dog, I’ve been listening to the podcast Shootin’ the Shit, with Tracy and Martina, and literally laughin’ out loud the entire time. Conceived of and performed by Justine Williamson and Greg Vardy, Tracy and Martina are fun-loving best friends from Cape Breton. The hilarious comedic duo is a hit on social media, beloved in Atlantic Canada and is now appearing in a feature mockumentary called Tracy and Martina: Goin’ Out West. Luckily for Yukoners, the Available Light Film Festival (ALFF) is hosting its western premiere.
Williamson and Vardy first introduced Tracy and Martina on YouTube over 10 years ago. Williamson plays Tracy, who has a long bouffant hairdo, big eyebrows and a penchant for miniskirts and thigh-high boots. Vardy plays Martina, a divorced mom with bleach-blond hair who often wears ripped acid-wash jeans and tucks a cigarette behind her ear. Throughout their friendship, they’ve stayed true to their motto, “Savin’ money, savin’ time, for getting loaded.”
“The magic of Tracy and Martina is they’re down-home girls,” says Vardy. “We talk about the same people, the same places and it’s just sort of, caught on.”
It didn’t take long for people to become “obsessed with the characters and to want to see them IRL [in real life],” says Williamson. They created a live show in 2014, centred on Martina’s son’s grad party (grad parties are a big deal in Cape Breton culture).They later performed live on Facebook and Instagram during the pandemic, telling funny stories about what things were like during lockdown. They later adopted the same storytelling format for their podcast and live shows. While they’ve created one scripted series featuring Tracy and Martina, Williamson and Varga prefer the spontaneity of improvisation.
“Once we have our plot points, we just sit in front of the camera and—just like in our first YouTube videos—we try to make each other laugh,” says Varga. “We know our characters so well at this point that we can just slip into them, shoot the shit, tell each other stories; and we know that if we make each other laugh, it’s going to be good.”
While there have been conversations around catering to a broader audience, by being less regional, Williamson and Varga have remained true to their cultural roots, and it’s paid off. Tracy and Martina now have fans far beyond Cape Breton and Atlantic Canada, thanks to Shootin’ the Shit now being more widely accessible on the Trailer Park Boys Plus network.
“We trusted our gut and stuck to our guns,” Varga says. “The magic is that it is so regional, and then we were proven right when we started working with the Trailer Park Boys on their network, because all of a sudden we went from just Nova Scotia audiences, to people in Mississippi, like, people all over the world. It really resonated with them.”
Having already won over online audiences, touring the live show outside of Atlantic Canada seemed like an obvious next step for Tracy and Martina. So why, of all the provinces in Canada, did they choose Alberta?
“Oil fields,” says Williamson. “That is where Tracy and Martina would want to find a man … He’s got a rotation job, he’s got good money.”
Many of those men are Maritimers working in Alberta, and Tracy and Martina already had a following there—due, in part, to a video they made in 2015 called Camp Connection, which was about an adult hotline for lonely men in the oil fields to connect with women back home. The video went viral—even Williamson’s dad saw it while working in Fort McMurray. “Oh my god, that’s my daughter!” she recalls him exclaiming.
“We knew we had some traction [in Alberta] because people from home who worked in camps, were like, ‘Oh my god, you guys are celebrities out here.’”
Once they’d planned their Alberta tour, Williamson and Varga found their initial excitement faded when their itinerary seemed to include some pretty sketchy hotels. So, on a whim, just a few days before they were leaving for Alberta, they decided to film their tour, originally to make content but ending up with a mockumentary.
They recruited their friend and frequent collaborator, Brendan Langelle Lyle, who goes by “Moose,” to direct the film. This meant that every day, for four days, Williamson and Vardy would get into character, spend the entire day that way, perform their show in the evening, return to the hotel and continue filming for a few hours.
“We were fully method,” says Williamson wryly.
“[The filming] was very last minute but I’m so glad we did [that] because what we captured was so spontaneous, kinda like lightning in a bottle.”
Varga describes it as a marathon, “nothing planned, completely improvised. It was magic, what we came up with.” He says the film is something like a cross between Peewee’s Big Adventure and The Simple Life, Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie’s fish-out-of-water reality show from the 2000s.
As if having Tracy and Martina: Goin’ Out West opening ALFF isn’t enough, there will also be a live performance. Williamson and Vardy say that the first half will consist of “story time” with Tracy and Martina, followed by improvised crowd interaction. Audience members are invited onstage to share what they’re “wondrin’ ’bout,” or what their “flippin’ about,” so people interested in participating are encouraged to come prepared.
In the meantime, if you haven’t yet listened to their podcast, you can start binging on Shootin’ the Shit by following the social-media links on their website (tracyandmartina.com). Williamson and Varga can be found here: @itstracyhun and @yourgirlmartina on Instagram:
Tracy and Martina: Goin’ Out West is screening on Friday, Feb. 6 at 6 p.m. at the Yukon Arts Centre. Visit yukonfilmsociety.com/alff/program/tracy-and-martina-goin-out-west for tickets. The date and venue for the live podcast will be announced at yukonfilmsociety.com/alff/program in the ALFF program.
