Who Needs International Women’s Day?

Who needs International Women’s Day? Didn’t Mary Wollstonecraft and Sojourner Truth take care of all that two centuries ago? “Women can vote. What more do they want?” Hmm…

Malala Yousafzai, 14-year-old girl shot for speaking out about her right to education, in 2012. She can’t be stopped; but she can be supported.

If you are unaware of the continuing practices of female genital mutilation, the forbidding of education for females, acid attacks and ironically-named “honour killings”, your ignorance must be blissful.

And if you think these are all problems of faraway places, not here in safe and civilized Canada, you must be avoiding mainstream news even more vigorously than I do.

Perhaps you are unmoved by the frequency with which Canadian Aboriginal women are murdered or go missing, but don’t imagine such crimes are limited to one group or community.

Statistics Canada declares, “violence against women in Canada continues to be a persistent and ongoing problem.”

Who needs International Women’s Day? We all do. Learn the facts, and let women have their day.

Solitude and Scribbling in My Writing Cave

A Writing Cave in Winter

Weeks have piled up into months since I escaped the necessary evil that is Toronto. Here in New Brunswick, looking down from the window of my second-story writing cave onto the snows and thaws of the tree-walled lawn where I learned to ride a bicycle, indeed where I first learned to mumble, chatter, yell and sing in my mother tongue, I consider that the number of hours I spend each day in writing, reading, corresponding and editing is greater than the number of people I have spoken with in person more than once since I arrived here in mid-December. I have crossed paths with more deer and rodents than bipeds.

My Writing Cave: A Room of One’s Own With a View

This semi-exile is a boon to my productivity (and piano playing), but the menu of stimuli to which I am exposed—though excellent—is sparse. In the neighbourhood I left in Toronto, I could walk in less than 10 minutes to my choice of half a dozen live music venues (including, importantly, first-rate jazz on an almost daily basis); a dozen Japanese or Korean restaurants, three each of Indian, Lebanese, Thai and Vietnamese; three new and used bookstores and a library to which I can have delivered any of a million books, DVDs and CDs; as well as swim in a public pool, go to my favourite repertory cinema, visit the dentist, do all banking, grocery shopping and other errands; and, most significant for me, meet with groups of native speakers of French, Spanish, Portuguese, American Sign Language, Korean or Japanese; or step onto the subway for access to ten times as many possibilities. Taking my New Brunswick writing cave as a point of departure, a 10 hour drive would scarcely bring the majority of such options within reach.

Fortunately, this is an era which enables me to make do with online substitutions for a number of these amenities, such as certain manifestations of language practice and films. However, such substitutions are not the same thing as being there, in that place where there is every day too much to do, where to partake of one golden opportunity causes you to miss out on several others.

All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy. All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy. All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy. (I did split this sucker!)

And yet, my writing cave lets me work with loud music on at 03h00; it lets me leap out of bed before dawn or crawl out at noon, depending on what the muse whispers to me in the morning or demanded of me the night before. The writing cave leaves me space — indoors and out (and psychologically as well as physically) — to start every day by doing my thumpy, jumpy, kicky taekwondo forms, or to contend with insomnia by pounding it out on the heavy bag in the garage below. It shows me the moon and the sun through its skylight; its windows like big-screen TVs show me snowfall, windstorms or chirping birds and meandering deer over a sun-glazed acre of land which is mine to neglect, maintain, or run and roll around on. Below my window, I can chop wood from a wind-felled tree, soak off the wholesome grime in my claw-foot bathtub, and then sit with my father by his fire discussing how the Romans could have saved their empire if only they had listened to us, or learn how to speak toddler-ese when my niece drops by, until a bottle of the world’s finest wine has breathed long enough and we gather to feast on local, organic, fair trade, free-run moose.

The Writer at Work

The world-famous city I was born in vs. the agreeably overlooked town I grew up in. Like moving and resting, waking and sleeping, getting dirty and bathing, an excess of one makes you wish for the other. Plainly, (unless I find a home* some other where), I must divide my months between the polis and the outpost.

*Home is where I hang my hat. Home is where I hang around. Home is where I hang out. Home is where I let it all hang out. Home is where I hang my head. Home is where I hang myself. Home is where I feel that I am myself, and that is not a place, it is a state of mind that comes more frequently and stays longer in some places than in others. “Wherever you go, there you are.”

My Snowy Acre

What Has Happened?

I see F hastily cutting something with scissors and I say, “Be careful you don’t do what D did.”

What did D do?

“Didn’t he mention it? A few weeks ago I saw he had a bandage covering the tip of his index finger and I asked what happened. He said,

It was the stupidest thing. I was cutting open the top of a plastic milk bag, like this, and I just wasn’t paying attention. Snipped the very tip of my finger off. Couldn’t believe I did it.”

Not long after this memorable chat with F, I was back at D’s place and saw the bandage was gone. “All healed up, then?”

What do you mean?

“The tip of your finger.”

Which finger?

“Your index finger.”

He showed me his right hand. Undamaged. “Must have been your other hand.” Nothing. “Man, you made it sound like you had actually cut the tip of your finger off.”

What are you talking about?

So, knowing that D tends not to retain memories of small significance (and some of larger significance), I repeat to D the conversation I had with him several weeks before in front of his kitchen sink.

Not only does D not remember such a conversation, neither do any of his supposedly amputated fingertips. And D doesn’t reuse milk bags; I do. And the bandage was on his right hand; being right-handed, it would have been a left-hand injury.

At this point I concede, against the protestations of my mind, that the incident could only have occurred in a dream, not in lived experience outside of my imagination. “But,” I say, “I told F about that. And I know I’ve told other people. That was a moment in my life; but it never happened.”

What is this, a Philip K. Dick story? Am I a replicant, or am I struggling to achieve Total Recall?

Believe me, I’m happy for D that he isn’t short a fingerprint; but now this mind of mine has me in a quandary. Next time I’m approached amorously by Daryl Hannah, or Sharon Stone, or Kate Beckinsale , I’ll be hornswoggled: should I take it lying down, or jump out the window and wait for Jessica Biel to show up?

My Hometown and the Ballad of Johnny Montes

New Brunswick

On Thursday, I came from cosmopolitan Toronto—where I have lived restlessly for the past decade—back to my quiet east coast hometown, Rothesay, east of Saint John, New Brunswick, which I fled in the 90s in search of adventure. Now, as we flip the great Mayan calendar to the next 5,000+ years, is this the place I want to live?

I have lived, for brief and extended periods, in Asia, Latin America, and even on a fly-in reserve in Manitoba. And all over the world, when you ask someone, “What makes you like this place so much?” the cliché response is always, “Mostly, it’s the people.” But, as I recall, that was part of why I left New Brunswick. Old-fashioned, conservative attitudes, something about this place always made me feel like I had to hold my oddball self back so as not to agitate everyone around me. But isn’t that what I just said about Toronto?

OK, so maybe it’s me. But, for a change, I don’t want to talk about me. I want to talk about the people of my hometown. Not the ones I know and love; I’m talking about the ones I’ve never met. A strange concept, for a place where it always seems everyone knows everyone, but I’ve been away a long time.

Saturday morning was the first time I’d heard the name Johnny Montes. I was asked to fill in at the last minute to work the door at KV Billiards which was holding a fundraiser that night for Johnny and his family. Last month, Johnny’s car hit some ice and he went off the road. Over recent years, I have been involved in the slow, costly, nerve-wracking process of recuperation of a family member who suffered similar injuries in a similar accident. It is, to say the least, not easy.

#65 Johnny Montes from
Bigwave’s “Riverglade National” Photo Report http://www.vitalmx.com/forums/Moto-Related,20/Bigwaves-Riverglade-National-Photo-Report,578804

I soon found out Johnny’s a bit of a celebrity in the motocross world, and a very popular guy around here. A few years younger than I am, he grew up in the trailer park near my high school, where he was likely a neighbour to some of my childhood friends. Who knows; I may even have seen him as a toddler when I was visiting friends there three decades ago.

Just before 7:00pm, I met the owner and she sat me down at the door with the donations jar and a stack of pamphlets which explained what the event was about. Some people picked up a pamphlet, but it was obvious that pretty much every one of the hundreds of people who came in that door from 7:00pm to 1:00am knew Johnny. And they don’t just know him; they really care about him. People were stuffing big bills into that jar, more than a few people surely put in more than they earn in a day, a few pausing to confirm, “This is for Johnny?”

It was assumed I knew Johnny and everyone connected with him. “Is Juan here yet?” That’s Johnny’s father. No one made me feel like I was out of the loop. Johnny’s mother introduced herself to me—why? Because she didn’t know me. One stranger after another was quick to fill me in on who everyone was—“That’s his sister”—and it often turned out I did have connections with people. And people with whom I had no connection fell into easy conversation with me. Doesn’t take much to make a connection around here.

Three damn fine local bands donated their time and talents: Bigg Medicine, Chasing Dragons, and Penalty Box, with a DJ in between acts. The song that summed it up for me was a satisfying cover of “I Love Rock’n’Roll”. The place was packed but no one was pushy. Some people came back again and again to drop more money into the donations jar (which had to be emptied frequently to make room for more) or just to see how the doorman was doing. People from ages 19 to 69, a few guys in suits, a lot of guys in baseball caps, several wearing number “Montes” jerseys, and lots of attractive women but none looked like they had gone out of their way to get their outfit and makeup just right. It was, without a doubt, the most human bunch of people I have been around for a long time.

But the most New Brunswick moment I’ve ever had was just before 1:00am when a 30ish guy in a baseball cap came over and offered me a beer. I thanked him but said no. I was still working, after all. “C’mon. You’ve been standin’ at the door here for like five hours. You should have a beer.” He wasn’t on his first, and why would he be. What he said next proved him to be a true New Brunswick gentleman. “Look, I’m not gay or nothin’; I’m not hittin’ on ya. I just figure you could really use a beer.”

You’ll just have to take my word for it; there was not a drop of homophobia in that remark. His tone said, ‘Not that there’s anything wrong with that’, more sincerely than Seinfeld. This guy was just clarifying the parameters of the offer. They say Canadians are ‘nice’. Well you can’t get much nicer than New Brunswick. And I had to drink to that.

I don’t know Johnny Montes but, the way everyone speaks of him, I want to know him. In the New Year, there is to be an auction in support of Johnny. In the meantime, donations are still being accepted.

Now, someone sing us The Ballad of Johnny Montes. What, nobody’s written it yet? He deserves a song. Someone’s gotta write it. Come on, I’ll race ya!

Unanswerable: “Did You Write That Play?”

Typical review of Eat Poo Love

GOOD EVANING

Did you write the play Eat, Poo, Love, which received nothing but four-star reviews at the Toronto Fringe Festival last week?

EVAN ANDREW MACKAY

Asking me, [of Eat, Poo, Love] “Did you write that play?” is like asking a woman who has miscarried, “Did you have your baby?”

It was based on Paul’s blog, and conceptualized as theatre by my brother Dan. I wrote an incomplete first draft which I suggested we work on together to make a fully functioning first draft. But that fragmentary first draft was taken out of my hands and I didn’t see a script again until a few weeks before opening night. My input was no longer wanted. The moment I became aware that I was out of the writing loop, I knew I did not want to be involved in the show.

GOOD EVANING

Why didn’t you quit then?

EVAN ANDREW MACKAY

I knew it would be hard on me to remain in the show, but I thought it would be harder on Dan for me to make the hurtful move of “abandoning” him. He needed support from everywhere he could get it. Especially one of his brothers. The three of us are close. Just about anything any one of us does could be seen as a collective achievement.

But it was risky for me to stay in it. From the time I was excommunicated until about the fourth show, I was doing the Smeagol/Gollum routine: “Support the show”—“Sabotage it!” The acting challenge for me was showing up at rehearsals without speaking my mind. One performance, I screwed up my lines twice because as I waited for my cue I had been imaging addressing the audience with “This isn’t the way the script was supposed to go.”

GOOD EVANING

How was it hard for you to be in the show?

EVAN ANDREW MACKAY

Just about every rehearsal, I was reminded to know my place—an actor. Physical and social pains that Paul and I suffered were clowned and directed, and I was made to watch without comment. Lines I had written remained senselessly in scenes that someone else had reshaped, and I was given no opportunity to amend things.

GOOD EVANING

Why were you “dumped” from the writing team?

EVAN ANDREW MACKAY

My enthusiasm can be unsettling. I’m a loose canon. Imagine writing a play with Robin Williams back in his cocaine days.

GOOD EVANING

Did you like the final script?

EVAN ANDREW MACKAY

In my view, it was not ready for the stage. It was not ready to be shown to a director, for that matter. It has significant flaws structurally and thematically. (There is one line near the end that, as a patient, makes me shudder.) But it was put on stage for seven enthusiastic audiences. Can’t complain about that. Daniel accomplished what he wanted to do; that is a success. And I want my brother to have success in whatever way he seeks it.

GOOD EVANING

Has this done permanent harm to your relationship with your brother?

EVAN ANDREW MACKAY

No.

GOOD EVANING

Would you work with him again artistically?

EVAN ANDREW MACKAY

Probably.

GOOD EVANING

Aren’t you causing trouble by saying these things in this somewhat public way?

EVAN ANDREW MACKAY

If I can’t talk about my writing, I can’t be a writer. I have to be free to answer questions like, “What have you written lately?” Could I have left my brother out of this discussion? Not if he was my writing partner. (This blog post is probably a good example of why he hesitates to work with me.)

I have to say these words in this place at this moment so that I can stop repeating them in my head and to strangers at bus stops. After two months of not writing anything, this is what I need to do to I feel I have my writing back.

I’d say, “The last thing I want to do is hurt my brother.” But that shit ain’t the truth. The last thing I want to do is have a false peace with my brother.

A line from the beginning of the play—a line Dan wrote—says you can’t have perfection; the best you can hope for is harmony.

GOOD EVANING

So, do you love your brother?

EVAN ANDREW MACKAY

Oh, fuck off.

Evan as Dino Carcinoma; Dan as Patient Q

Dreaming on Your Feet

I had a dream that my girlfriend and I went to the chocolatier and bought some Fair Trade chocolates for Easter. We got in the car and, as I was steering us onto the highway, she had both her feet pressed on top of mine. I couldn’t step on the breaks or the gas and could hardly see around her, cars rushing all around us.

My girlfriend had a dream that she was driving a getaway car, but my feet were in her way as she was trying to stomp on the gas.

We woke up, holding each other. Her feet were pressing down on mine. My feet were pushing up against hers.

Have we been stepping on each other’s dreams?

If we wake up, can I get safely home with my Fair Trade chocolate? And what is she going to get away with?

Please tell me your weird “when I woke up from my dream” moments.

What Is Theatre?

World Theatre Day  was on March 27. (See Stratford Festival message.) In fact, it was the 50^th World Theatre Day (although John Malkovich’s brief message at UNESCO was trifling compared with Jessica A. Kaahwa’s 2011 message, A Case for Theatre in Service of Humanity).

Wait a minute, World Theatre Day? No one could challenge the validity of World Water Day, because water is a precious resource we all need and which is in a state of crisis and neglect. Who needs theatre. Wait, that is a question, and not a rhetorical one.

Who needs theatre?

I’ve heard it argued that the invention of photography made the art of painting obsolete. “Adios, Picasso; no use for you!” And some would say movies have made theatre obsolete. “Look at the size of that screen! So much bigger than life!” That is what theatre has that movies never will: life.

What is theatre?

Theatre is not just entertainment. Theatre is communication. A movie doesn’t respond to you, but a stage presentation does. Theatre responds to an audience and develops according to that response, over the course of an evening and over the course of the show’s run, and throughout the lifetime of the theatre company. Theatre is immediate and theatre changes. Theatre is change. A movie can get remade, but it will never be a living thing; its changes are static. Change in theatre is organic and interactive.

What I just saw.

I don’t go to see theatre often because, being an unknown playwright, I can’t afford to leave the apartment (in fact, I can’t afford the apartment). But at Word On The Street book festival last year, after agreeing to an exhibitor’s unexpected request that I read with her a scene from a script—out loud to passersby, who passed us by—I was rewarded with tickets to Tarragon Theatre, any show this season. I wanted to see their first show, Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room or ‘the vibrator play’, which sounded good, and was nominated in 2010 for a Pulitzer and a Tony Award—but it was a busy month and I couldn’t make the dates.

Nicole Underhay and Rick Roberts in "The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs"
photo by Cylla von Tiedemann

Now a show is on which is expected to win awards (for whatever that’s worth). The English premiere of The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs, by Quebec playwright Carole Fréchette, inspired by the tale of Bluebeard, deserves any award it can get, as far as I’m concerned. Not that it was my favourite play, not that I was moved to tears, not that I would recommend it to everyone; but it “worked”, it entertained, and it made sense.

But what did it mean?

The full 200 seat audience was not stingy with applause, but there was no standing ovation or curtain call. Some gave each other puzzled looks as they put on their coats. On the way out I heard one person ask another “Not to your liking?”

It is easy to dismiss anything that is unfamiliar. And what was unfamiliar about this play was that it didn’t spell things out Hollywood-style. It was like a good poem. It said things in a way that requires a bit of cogitation. It might mean different things to different people, but it should not have been meaningless to a native English speaker. To me, the characters were not the disturbed oddballs that they seemed to be on the surface; they were entirely ordinary people and alarmingly familiar, like some specific people close to me. It helped me reflect on how I, my friends, my family members, may often seem to one another like disturbed oddballs. But that is just on the surface (in many cases).

“Who has time for that?”

Lots of people don’t have time for lots of things that are important. Most people don’t sleep enough, don’t chew their food enough, don’t communicate enough. Yawn, chew, “No time to talk,” chew, yawn. If I don’t make time to make sense of Shakespeare or my parents or siblings, that will be my loss. Theatre is communication. Like understanding family, it is not always easy, but making an effort to understand is time well spent.

Father’s Day Thoughts

“There are no born heroes,” the trainer of soldiers said in a psychology documentary. “The guy who put himself in harm’s way to protect his fellow men one week is hiding around the corner shaking in his boots another week.”

The hero is the one who does what needs to be done. Anyone who takes care of a child is a hero; in raising a child, there is much that needs to be done.

To be a father is to cease being one man and to become another man, almost like a king abdicating in order to become the tutor and protector of the heir to the throne.

When presented with a helpless infant, who wouldn’t do all that needs to be done? But why a man would choose that role, to decide to forsake his pristine autonomy and go and make his own helpless infant, beats the hell out of me.

One of my earliest memories is being pulled away from my father in the midst of a fun play fighting session. I asked in toddler talk, “What’s wrong?” I thought the way he was clutching his eye was all part of the game. Apparently my fist at that age was sized precisely to fit deep within an adult male’s eye-socket.

A middle memory of mine is of saying to Dad, “Wow, you spent a quarter of a million dollars to raise me, and then you paid for a degree that I don’t even appreciate. Pretty crappy investment, if you ask me.”

A more recent memory is of answering Dad’s question about a book he had turned his house upside down looking for. “That one I gave you for your birthday? I took it last time I was home.”

That all falls within the easy, harmless, inevitable part of fatherhood. The kind of thing that leads to balding and chest pains is like when I was seventeen, went out with the car in the afternoon and didn’t come back, or call, because I was out having fun. Dad got called, for professional reasons, at 3:30am and had to go out. I was nowhere to be found. This was before the age of cell phones. The police wanted him to come investigate a scene on the far side of town, very near our summer home, where they had found the body of an unidentified 17-year-old boy. That he wanted to kill me when I drove home at sunrise made sense to me even then.

It takes guts to be a father. Nerves of steel, patience of a saint, resourcefulness of a Scout leader, wisdom of a sage, indomitable determination, every penny you’ve got. Basically, a father has to have all the best qualities of James Bond, Gandhi, Gandalf, Buddha, King Solomon and King Midas.

What takes more guts than being a father? Go ask your mother.