It’s 1987, probably April. I’m watching an old woman, bundled up in a great thick overcoat, a huge hat covering her head, a scarf wrapped around her face, her features completely obscured. She’s just a great bumbling elderly lump of a human being, and she’s standing still, being berated by her daughter (or possibly grand-daughter) for wandering off. The dust of potato chips coats the scarf and occasionally bits fall to the floor as the possibly-grand daughter speaks to her, almost in tears, asking her how she could just run off like that, how could she, why? Why? And the old woman just stands there, silent, unable or unwilling to speak.
And I’m sitting there, and I’m watching it unfold, and I’m thinking, Oh, wow, this is fantastic, because I know the old woman, and she’s actually seventeen years old.
“Oh, shit, it’s snowing.”
I remember saying that, although I’m not quite sure I remember saying it out loud, as we — certain members of the Rothwell-Osnabruck Drama Club — stepped out of Tagwi high school in early April 1990, heading back to the car after setting up our upcoming production for the Sears Seaway Drama Festival. I remember saying that because it was freaking April, and that’s too late for snow.
We were originally going to do a weird-ass one-act drama called The Saliva Milkshake, but the students ganged up on our club director, Clive Marin, until he gave in and allowed us to adapt an episode of Fawlty Towers instead. Only the names were changed to protect the innocent (us, from copyright lawyers). The festival was held at Tagwi that year and I remember that it was April because I was freaked out when it started to snow.
We rocked, of course. Unfortunately, we didn’t win; the adjudicator acknowledged the excellent ensemble acting and timing and quality of our production, but gave the award to the play that made her cry. Nevertheless.
It was the third year I’d been in the R-O drama club. In 1986, when I was in Grade 9, one of my friends had been in the club’s play; all he’d had to do was sit there motionless while drama occurred around him. Which was cool, but not quite so cool as what happened next year, in 1987, when I was in Grade 10 and when I’d made more friends. I don’t know exactly what month it was, but I do know that the festival was in April in 1990, so let’s say it was in April in 1987. That’s probably true.
I can’t remember the name of the play any more, but my friend Sally Dewey played an elderly woman who was pretty much being patronised into catatonia by her overbearing daughter (or possibly grand-daughter). As I recall the story, the possibly-grand daughter refused to let the old woman eat crisps because they were bad for her, and freaked out when the old woman vanished from a crowded public concourse; and, just as she was on the verge of a complete emotional breakdown, the old woman turned up again, having slipped away just for a while in order to buy and eat a bag of crisps.
The play won that year, and went on to the next level of the festival. I was so excited, even though the production hadn’t involved me in any way whatsoever; Sally had done a great job, becoming completely invisible in the character of the old woman. I asked my parents if we could go see the next performance, and they quite rightly told me that no, we couldn’t drive halfway across the province to see a one-night performance of a high-school play. If I wanted to see the plays go to the next level of the festival, they told me, then I could join the drama club myself next year and go on with them.
So I did.
In 1988, the drama club performed Tom Stoppard’s play A Separate Peace, about a man who checks himself into a hospital just because he needs the rest. I had a relatively small part, as a doctor trying to figure out exactly what’s wrong with this patient who insists that there’s really nothing wrong with him. The play didn’t win, and when we subsequently performed it in front of our own school, we tore it up, improvising our own lines, indulging ourselves, just generally screwing around and completely bewildering the assembled student body.
Nevertheless, I got accepted back in 1989, when we put on a four-handed play called Foreshore, about a guy and a girl who go to the beach and are given conflicting and not entirely helpful advice by their consciences. This play did go on to the next level of the festival, where it performed against plays by schools who had actual resources for their drama departments. All the same, it was a field trip that we’d actually earned.
Then 1990, and The Hotel Inspectors, at Tagwi, in April. And when I went to Queen’s University that September for my B.A. — in English, not in any science or maths-related field — it didn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out that I should sign up for the first-year drama course as well. And it didn’t take a brain scientist to work out that I should change my major to an English/Drama medial before second year rolled around.
In my second-year acting class, we learned the basics of body movement. One day we lay down on the floor and concentrated on rolling from our right sides to our left, very, very slowly, moving as slowly as possible while still moving. One day we pretended to be animals; I remembered my aunt’s dog and pretended to be a whippet. In other words, we did weird shit. And then, just as I’m starting to think What the hell am I doing?, we were paired up and given blindfolds. My partner took the blindfold first, and I led him around the department and out into the streets outside, as he relied on me to guide him safely around; and then we switched sides, and he guided me, blind, through the world. Complete trust, from both ends. I can’t put this experience into words. If you’ve done it, you’ll know. I never missed a class after that, it never even occurred to me to miss a class.
It took me a while to build up my confidence and start auditioning for things around the department. But by 1993, I’d started auditioning for the department’s major productions; I didn’t get in, not this year at any rate, but I’d started to try. In the summer of 1993, I auditioned for a role in King Lear as staged by the Renaissance Stage Company, artistic director Aaron Taylor Miedema, and found myself playing the Duke of Albany. Some of the people I met that summer remained friends for years afterwards. When we signed a congratulations card for him at the end of the production, I signed it, “Thou art a strange fellow! A Taylor make a play?” which is fall-down funny if you’re actually familiar with one of the lines in King Lear, trust me on this.
In early 1994, some of us drove to Toronto to watch Aaron’s production of The Duchess of Malfi at York University, and afterwards everybody except the designated driver went out drinking with him. At one point, I explained to him that I wasn’t drunk and that I could prove it by falling down to the floor and standing up again immediately of my own free will, and I did so, and he very carefully pointed out that I’d just deliberately fallen to the floor and stood up again just to prove that I could, and I thought about this for a moment and realised He’s right, I am drunk. Ever since then, I’ve been able to tell.
I played Polonius in Queen’s 1993 production of Hamlet, which Aaron rather bitingly referred to as Hamlet: Men in Tights. Hamlet was played by Greg Bryk, who’d quit the Queens football team in order to concentrate on the drama department; I cast him as the Actor when I directed a scene from The Woman in Black for my directing class, and he’s gone on to forge quite a career for himself (appearing in Men With Brooms, The Gospel of John, ReGenesis, and A History of Violence, just to name a few.)
I played two roles in our 1994 production of The Good Woman of Szechuan. At one point a song breaks out, as they are wont to do when stage is involved, and my character sang a bit in the chorus. As the story ticks along behind the singing, my character starts to get the crap kicked out of him. One of the other actors, Suresh John, suggested that both my character and the one beating him up should stop fighting just long enough to sing our bits of the chorus, and then resume our business. It got probably the biggest laugh of the performance. Down in the green room, I was learning how to play the theme to Hill Street Blues on the piano, and Suresh eventually threatened to plant me upside-down somewhere if I didn’t stop going over the same chords over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.
In the summer of 1994, the RSC staged a double-bill of The Spanish Tragedy and Much Ado About Nothing. I have stories from that summer. Oh, do I have stories. Stories of driving down the 401 at 1:30 in the morning in order to wake up at 6:00 to go to work; of lying drunk in my friend’s apartment while he experienced a significantly biological rite of passage on the other side of the room; of taking black forest cake to the wrap party, and leaving the room while they divvied it up, and everybody who was there can tell you exactly what happened next.
I’d graduated in the spring of 1994, and wasn’t sure what I was going to be doing with, well, the rest of my life; however, as I’d been in with the RSC from the beginning, and had even bought shares in it, Aaron offered to give me a fake credit in the next productions’ programmes if I wasn’t able to participate directly in them. I’d been playing the Psygnosis game Lemmings for a while, and I recalled the Monty Python skit about the camel-spotter and suggested that I be entitled “Lemming Spotter.” For some reason he thought that sounded obscene and decided to list me as “Lemming Wrangler.” As it turned out, I did stay in Kingston after all, and participated in at least two more productions while the RSC as it could have been folded up and self-destructed around us. Then, while wandering the streets one night, I remembered that the Walt Disney Company had once filmed a “nature” “documentary” about Scandinavia, in the course of which they’d discovered that lemmings didn’t actually make suicidal rushes off cliffs. In need of exciting rushes, as it were, they’d built their own fake cliff in Alberta, sent men up to the top, tightened the shots, let the cameras roll, and pushed the lemmings over the edge. Lemming wrangler? Like fuck. I know whose side I’m not on. It’s been part of my Internet personality ever since, in one way or another, for about 11 years now.
When I moved to Toronto, I didn’t have any contacts, and all the confidence I’d built up in the small pond that was Kingston fooshed out into translucency like an ink stain on the water. It’s not about what you can do, it’s about what you can make them believe you can do; and selling myself to strangers has never been my strongest talent. Also, I’d been unemployed for a year and weighed about 120 pounds, so I had pressing reasons to take any job I could lay my hands on, even if it meant I had to work at night.
So I’ve not made a living in the field of theatre or film or acting. But it’s still been a huge part of my life. All of my best memories come from being on stage or in front of a camera. Even in Toronto, I’ve participated in a few of my friends’ short films or demo reels, I’ve done voice work for flash animation, I’ve played a Romulan in a Citytv promo. They’ve been the happy moments of my life, the good memories.
And it all goes back to seeing my friend on stage, and wanting to see the play again, and being told to do it myself, and deciding that yes, I would. I have happy memories from before that, of course, but the formative memories of my life, the treasured moments that I pull out and look at when I feel happy, they all spool forward from that moment in April 1987.
I would have been Jane Creba’s age in March.
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