Recognising that “Government Town” might be one of the adjectives that come to mind when thinking about Ottawa, we recruited public-servant-blogger-renaissance-man Nick Charney for an occasional series on the culture of the public service. He will be highlighting the interesting personalities running our national government and the cool stuff they get up to in the nation’s capital. You can read more from Nick on his blog CPSRenewal.

Boring. Unimaginative. Cubicles. Red tape.

All words at the tips of our tongues whenever anyone mentions the bureaucracy. I’ve been told that serving the public used to be a noble profession, but somewhere along the way reverence for the work turned to mockery, and the archetypes of what it meant to be a public servant shifted.  As a public servant myself, I find it incredibly frustrating that negative stereotypes dominate our mental models of public servants.  And this raises the question: is there more to this sleepy government town than meets the eye, or is it really as drab as the cubicle farms that fill its core?  In order to find out, I booked a series of interviews with public servants.

The first public servant I sat down with also happened to have an interesting night-time hobby: she is a burlesque dancer and fire-breather who goes by the name of Rhapsody Blue.  I met Blue for lunch at the Cock and Lion on Sparks Street.  It’s a familiar place that I had spent a lot of time in during my youth; and it was a place the two of us had been before.  It was comfortable and quiet enough to carry on a conversation.  The conversation was one I was looking forward to, given the steady rise in popularity of burlesque and the fact that I was completely ignorant to the Ottawa burlesque scene.  I had no idea that Ottawa boasted 7 burlesque troupes (Blue is a member of the Rockalily Burlesque Troupe), and that, according to Blue, each has had at least one public servant on the roster at one time or another. 

Internet site reference: http://www.apt613.ca/