You know, the fringe queen (Goddess, Britchick) with the Limey accent?

Instead, Wonderbar! patrons find Winnipeg's Celeste Sansregret on stage. She knows where her good friend Dallas is but is not keen to see her.

"She just quit over the phone the day before I was to arrive in Toronto for the final week of rehearsals," says Sansregret, who wrote and produced Wonderbar! but wasn't expecting to perform it, too. "I couldn't find anyone who could learn a play in nine days and tour it all summer. I just said f--- it, I'll have to go and do it myself."

The 50-year-old University of Winnipeg graduate was forced to go on stage at the first fringe circuit stop in Montreal last month reading her script. As a lottery winner of admission to any five Canadian fringe festivals, she couldn't pull out of Montreal without forfeiting all the others. Her act amounted to a 90-minute stage reading.

Now that Sansregret is off-book, she hopes to recoup her losses in Winnipeg and Edmonton. The unscheduled stage appearance in her hometown is her first in 25 years.

While she is an unknown quantity to most Winnipeg theatre-goers, there was a time when she was a busy young actress here. Before she was 25, Sansregret had performed in 30 plays, including the legendary 1974 Manitoba Theatre Centre production of The Dybbuk, directed by MTC co-founder John Hirsch.

"He was an education," says Sansregret. "I learned more from John in three weeks than I learned in four years at university."

Wonderbar! is a monologue about a middle-aged, divorced shop clerk who meets a man who seems to be a prince. He whisks her away on a dream trip to Europe, which takes her places she never thought she would see.

"When women get in a certain kind of trouble, they play the victim card," she says. "It has to be some guy's fault and they don't take ownership of their complicity. It's not something we talk about. Look at Julie Couillard and Karla Homolka. It's always, 'Some man that did this to me.'"

The man in Sansregret's life is popular fringe performer John Huston, who will be appearing in Wooster Sauce at this year's festival. She caught his act here at a fringe performers' midnight cabaret two years ago and asked Dallas about him.

"She said, 'Oh, that's John Huston,'" says Sansregret, in her best British accent. "'He's read a book. You should go out with John Huston. I should introduce you.'"

Dallas did and within the month they were going out. Soon after, Huston moved to Winnipeg to be with her and now they're engaged.

"For me, the friendship is over for now," says Sansregret.