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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2018-02-15, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2018. PAGE 5. Other Views Showing us what's in front of us The genesis for the upcoming Blyth Festival play Wing Night at The Boot is a rare example in Canada of artists elevating everyday experience into art and thereby making it more than everyday experience. Festival Artistic Director Gil Garratt explained to Citizen Editor Shawn Loughlin, in an interview a couple of weeks back, that the idea for the play came to him after a gift from theatre director Paul Thompson of a print of a poem "The Concessions" by world-renowned novelist and poet Michael Ondaatje. Years ago Ondaatje spent evenings at the Blyth Inn (known colloquially as "The Rubber Boot" or just as "The Boot") while visiting with Thompson. He was so impressed at the sight of local farmers and artists from the Blyth Festival side by side, sharing drinks and watching a band perform, that he created a poem about it. Now the poem is inspiring a play that will magnify the legend of The Boot. To do so, Garratt is now seeking stories from local residents about The Boot for the play which will be created collectively by the play's cast. Like the scene in Ondaatje's poem, The Blyth Inn has a unique story. For decades it served as a local entertainment venue and then with the coming of the Blyth Festival, the flavour of an artistic community has been added, including both Festival company members and artists who come to see the plays. I remember one raucous night in the early years of the Festival sitting at a table in the hotel's old dining room listening to Jim Schaefer, one of the Festival's first actors and playwrights, try to outdo James Reaney, the famous poet/playwright/professor in making the rest of us laugh. There were other very funny people there as well but few had the nerve to try to participate. Keith Roulston From the cluttered desk There's something too timid about Canadians for us to build our own legends. We grew up a colony of Britain, then the world's most powerful and influential country, and live beside the United States, Britain's successor as world leader. Certainly, our history doesn't include legendary creators like William Shakespeare, Jane Austen or Charles Dickens as Britain's does or Ernest Hemingway or Tennessee Williams from the U.S. but then these creators' importance has been magnified by the attention paid to them by movies, television and books. In recent years, for instance, the British have made movies in which Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens have been characters while American cultural creators have an endless fascination with Hemingway. Seen any movies about the lives of Lucy Maude Montgomery or Alice Munro? This is partly because Canada is a relatively small country. But unless something changes in the Canadian national mentality, even if we were to aim to build a population of 100 million, as suggested by Globe and Mail columnist Doug Saunders in a recently published book, I can't see us making more movies and television shows about Canadians. In fact we seem to be going the opposite way with millions excitedly skirting Canadian content rules for music on radio and drama, comedy and news on television by subscribing to uncontrolled American intemet services. Part of our mindset has developed because for years popular cultural outlets from radio and television to movie theatres were mere retailers of imported product. It was cheaper to buy American or British movies, television and music than to produce our own. As an example more relevant to Huron County residents, imagine if American and British food were so cheap to import that our farmers couldn't compete. The one difference is that Canadians would still be nourished by imported food. When we see and hear only imported stories we have an unhealthy lack of national self- esteem because all the interesting things seem to happen elsewhere. There are lots of interesting things happening here. I recently read Reckless Daughter, the biography of iconic Canadian singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell. The book is written by an American so the Canadian connections aren't exactly played up, still I was astounded by the number of Canadian musicians mentioned who made a huge international impact — people like Leonard Cohen, Buffy Sainte -Marie, Neil Young, Robbie Robertson, Bryan Adams and many more. Mitchell got her start in Toronto's Yorkville coffee house scene in the late 1960s. At the time the little folk music clubs were crowded with musicians like Denny Doherty, who would later join the Mamas and the Papas, Zal Yanovsky, later of the Lovin' Spoonful, Gordon Lightfoot and Ian and Sylvia. Anywhere else but Canada, this amazing gathering of talent would be the inspiration for novels, plays and movies. It takes people like Michael Ondaatje, and now the Blyth Festival, to show us the importance of what's happening right in front of us. Objects in the rearview mirror... 0 ver the weekend, while visiting with some of my oldest friends, I realized I've allowed myself to get stuck looking backwards. A couple friends of mine had the wonderful idea, last year, to have what they call a `Dandy Dinner' or a dinner dedicated to giving people a chance to don some of their most formal clothes and have an excellent dinner. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to make the first Dandy Dinner so my first brush with it was over the weekend and it was a magnificent time. From catching up with friends of old to meeting some new faces and making new friends, the evening was very enjoyable. My friends live in a fairly rural part of Cambridge, offering some beautiful vistas, and their old house is full of character, making it the perfect place to host such a dinner. The event was for adults to mingle and catch up, so Mary Jane got to spend the night with her grandfather and I spent a night with friends I hadn't seen in a long time. It was a nice change of pace. I love being a father, and put my everything into it, but I have to stop myself from hovering too much and visiting friends (on my lonesome, as Ashleigh was on the night shift that day) reminded me that I am a person outside of being a father. Part of that was forcing myself to try and not gush over Mary Jane over the course of the night. If people asked, I would be happy to talk about her, but, being one of the few parents there (and many of the rest being teachers) I didn't want to dominate the conversation with talk of children. As a result, I started rehashing the old times with my friends. Maybe it's because I don't see them as much anymore and they can forget the stories I've told before, but I Denny Scott Denny's Den found myself repeating tales that some of them lived. It didn't take me long to realize that I didn't have a heck of a lot of new stories that didn't revolve around Mary Jane. When I was 25, telling stories from school made sense — I was only a few years removed from there. Nowadays, however, I'm more than a decade away from my dorm -room -days. I moved into a house with six other guys 14 years ago. Some days it seems like yesterday but the reality of the situation is it was a very long time ago. My friends, bless their hearts, never tell me to stop rehashing the old times but I came to realize, while telling a story about a pair of squatters that stayed in the frat house for more than six months for what seemed like the 100th time, that it can't be very exciting. Sure, we laugh at how things used to be, but there has to be more interesting stories to tell. I came to realize, on the drive home that night, that I need to stop looking to my teenage years and the years I was at school as the immediate past and file them a little further back. Sure, I'll still occasionally tell a story about using my sick days when I worked at a call centre so I could play road hockey with my roommates or laugh over that one party where we had twice as many people sleeping on the floor in our common room than lived in the entire house, but those tales might be better suited for a less -formal event. Fortunately for me, I've got a lot of great stories to tell. Being a journalist for a small town paper leaves a great number of stories to tell to an interested audience. I'm not trying to plug anything here (or get a bar stool or an entree named after myself, not that I'd say no to that) but one of the few stories I do tell that is a bit more modem are my experiences at Blyth Cowbell Brewing Company. Everyone's interested in the brewing company because, when it first opened, I accidentally became a brand ambassador. That first summer, as I was patiently waiting to become a father, I wouldn't visit a friend without a six pack of Absent Landlord to spread the word of our local brewery. My efforts were clearly appreciated because it looks like my group of school friends may travel to Blyth to tour the brewery this year. It got to the point, last summer, that when I showed up empty-handed to an event, people were surprised, asking why I'd stopped pushing the beer on them. I explained that I had brought growlers and didn't have enough hands to carry them and Mary Jane. As I drove home from the `Dandy Dinner' on Saturday evening, I realized that instead of talking about squatters in my frat house, I could have been sharing stories how quickly my home village of Blyth is developing, the opportunities that are here that weren't when I moved here a half dozen years ago or the development in Brussels with the Four Winds Barn. It's a bit late for a New Year's resolution, but I think I'm going to challenge myself to mature a bit and tell some more engaging stories from my adult life. Maybe it's for the best I don't make this a New Year's resolution anyway, those things seldom seem to stick. / �► Shawn Loughlin Shawn's Sense Get on with the show 11 ast week, before they left for South Korea, Jess and I had dinner with Jeff Jand Janice Peters. Clearly, conversation was dominated by talk of the Olympics in PyeongChang and their son Justin's experience there thus far. One topic of discussion was that Jeff and Janice would be rising very early the next morning so they could watch the opening ceremonies and see their son walk into the grounds of the world's greatest athletic competition representing his country. What a thrill it must have been, not only for Justin, but for his parents as well. However, that's not what I wanted to highlight. What I wanted to talk about was what happened when Jess and I went home that night. I turned on the TV only to see... the Olympics. For those of you who are very into the Olympics, this may not be newsworthy for you, but for me, I thought it was a little odd to see competition that preceded the opening ceremonies. Yes, on Thursday night (our time) there I was, watching some sort of skiing (can you tell that I'm not exactly an Olympics person yet?) and some curling. In fact, there were two full days of competition before the Olympics "opened" including the biathlon, the luge, ski jumping, curling and alpine skiing. In fact, it looks as though a journalist for Slate has made this exact point just a few days ago. Justin Peters (the Slate journalist and author of The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet, not the aforementioned Blyth native, Canadian goaltender and poutine baron, for those of you who have dined at Blyth Cowbell Brewing Company) wrote an article entitled "The Olympics Opening Ceremony is a Lie" on Feb. 7. He goes on to say, essentially what I'm saying, which is that if there are events before the opening ceremonies, then the opening ceremonies must be a lie. Imagine if this principle were applied to the tail end of the Olympics. What if we all sat through a lavish, hours -long closing ceremony, during which the "Olympics" were "passed on" to the next host, Beijing, China, only to find out that two days later was the final mixed doubles curling match, or the final four -man bobsled run? It would be a bit anticlimactic, wouldn't it? That, too, then has to be true for these poor souls forced to compete in the pre -opening - ceremonies events. It's kind of like being someone involved in a blockbuster movie and while Daniel Day - Lewis, Saoirse Ronan and Jennifer Lawrence are shuttled by limousine to the theatre and walk the red carpet, you were forced to arrive six hours earlier. None of the adoring fans were there yet, you had to enter the theatre through some dirty service entrance (after you took a foul-smelling taxi there) and you have to sit around the theatre twiddling your thumbs for six hours while the "real" stars are adored. However, the Olympic games are now in full swing and while it may not matter to most people that we had a full two days of competition before the competition officially opened, it certainly sticks in my craw. Perhaps the organizers of this year's games could apologize to these unfortunate athletes who were forced onto the stage before the curtain went up. Or, maybe they don't care. They're Olympic athletes and just happy to be there, and maybe I'm the only one bothered by this, but I will champion their cause for them.