Behind The Curtain (21 July, 2023)
Accessible Audio for this week’s Behind The Curtain will be available soon!
This song was the best song of 1996, and one of my all time favourites.
The Domino Effect
Fun Fact: You wouldn’t be reading this now if Laurence Tenenbaum hadn’t invited me to a party in the summer of 1996.
I was 19, and had just performed what can generously be described as a spoken-word set at Café Beanz on du Parc. This place, which is currently the home of Alto’s Restaurant, right next to the “25 hour” depanneur (which was still there back in the day) was once a café with open mics every Friday. I had been a few weeks in a row, always performing the same original song, without music. The staff would later ask me to do a different song, or more specifically, not the same one for the same people week after week, and I obliged. But that week, after more of the same, Laurence, who had met me at Dawson College, from which I had graduated a few months prior, invited me to a loft party in Griffintown. (Editor’s Note: OooooOOOooooOOooHHHhhhhhh!!!)
I left with a group of people I had never met before, made up of performers and audience members at the open mic, and we headed out in search of this party. This was when Griffintown was still replete with lofts. It was still a full decade before the first condos would arrive, and change the character of the neighbourhood into what it is today. After meandering through the still kinda sketchy streets, we found the loft, but the party had already been shut down by the police. Laurence wasn’t there anymore, but I would catch up with him a few days later.
I spent the next three mostly sleepless days with people I had only just met. This would lead to meeting more people, spending most nights hanging out at an apartment around the corner from St-Viateur Bagel. A 24-hour bagel and juice store is much better than a 24-hour dep when you got the munchies, if you know what I mean. This also led to a bit of a hung over start to Concordia Journalism in the fall. (Editor’s Note: OooooOOOooooOOooHHHhhhhhh!!!) No worries, I had just started a band called Lipbomb (I like band names you have to spell out for people), and would surely be a rockstar soon enough. It’s not like the principles and techniques of journalism would ever be important for me to know at some point down the road.
This would eventually lead me (and some of the new group) to another now-closed coffee shop, Café Cirque on Crescent, then to Madhatter’s, which has moved locations too many times to count, but I started at the original on Metcalfe. Then Ciné Express on Ste-Catherine next to the Cock n’ Bull Pub, became the spot. Today it’s a closed Korean BBQ. In the late 90s, and up until at least a decade ago, it was a 24-hour resto-cafe with a liquor license and a giant screen in the back. I once got into an argument with a waiter who kicked our group out of the back section because we had only ordered coffee, apparently not enough to watch X-Files “live” at midnight with the packed room. If reaction videos were a thing back then, this place would have made a killing.
Ciné is also where I met the people I launched not one, but two failed attempts at making a modernized movie version of Hamlet (different people for each project). The first turned into a short few-act stage play, which wasn’t all that bad, TBH (Editor’s Note: How interesting, an adaptation of Hamlet… as a stage play!!!), and the second, the cyberpunk one, fell apart, just before Ethan Frickin’ Hawke released his version which seemed to, uhm, borrow a lot of ideas from us, but kinda sucked. Sure, they were probably in post-production when we started having meetings, but c’mon Ethan, do better! (Editor’s Note: This insinuates that copying you would be doing worse… or, rather, bad. Is this what you mean?) I may elaborate on those stories here some day, as they are interesting.
But to move along, through these projects I wound up in Dead Dolls Cabaret, a vaudeville-infused precursor to today’s Candyass Cabaret, and on the cover of the Montreal Mirror. Through that group, I got involved with Car Stories and then the Infringement Festival. And that’s when I got the idea for what became the original ForgetTheBox.net, which I founded with people I had met through the journey I just described, that all started with Laurence inviting me to that party in 1996. Even the current re-launched version can be traced the same way, as I met current Editor-in-Chief Dawn McSweeney along this road, during the Hatter’s days. I nicknamed her Scully, probably because I was drunk. Yes, X-Files was that big culturally in the late 90s.
So the moral of the story is…when someone you sort of recognize invites you to a party in a sketchy part of town, and suggests you get there with a bunch of strangers, you should go! (Editor’s Note: This is where you should have ended the piece, Jason. This is appropriate advice. Honestly, I think everyone should “just say yes” a lot more. It always leads to the best fucking plots, do you know?). Okay, take two: You’re lucky that you got to read this story at your leisure, rather than have to hear me go through it in minute detail in the middle of driving for six hours to New York City and I’m the only passenger in the car (sorry, Chris). Seriously, though, one small, seemingly insignificant event could change the course of not only your life, but that of your community, or even the whole world. Call it the Domino Effect, or the Butterfly Effect, it’s something that has always fascinated me. I do enjoy tracing things back. I can also link myself to Kevin Bacon in six steps (using a high school play I was in), but that’s another story. One of my favourite Domino Effect stories has to be how Star Trek: Voyager’s slumping Season 3 ratings are responsible for the Obama Presidency:
Back to this story, could the same or similar things have happened without this one event? Of course. Would they have happened? No way to tell. The one thing I can be sure of is that Laurence inviting me to a party in 1996 led to you reading this article, on this site, today. (Founder’s Note: Hi, mom!)
NOTES THIS WEEK
Tremblant Tragedy
On Sunday, we got the news that there was an accident at Mont Tremblant. Two people fell out of a gondola, one died, and the other was in critical condition. Turns out that drilling equipment smashed into the gondola, as well as an empty one, ripping it in half. This horrible event led, understandably, to shutting down the rest of the Mont Tremblant Blues Fest scheduled for Sunday. Throughout the weekend, I had seen both friends and acquaintances of mine share stories and pictures of their performances at the event prior to Sunday. These are artists who play in Montreal on a regular basis, and by all accounts, were really enjoying their out-of-town gig. While the priority is clearly finding out what went wrong, and mourning the loss of life, it must also totally suck to have your good memories of an event overshadowed by an event out of your control that happened nearby.
REM in the Pointe
Last week I shared my thoughts on the new REM light rail network, and how it doesn’t serve Montreal’s transit woes as much as it should. Yesterday, Craig Sauvé, City Councillor for Saint-Henri-Est-Petite-Bourgogne-Pointe-Saint-Charles-Griffintown co-authored an Open Letter published in Le Devoir with Guillaume Cliche-Rivard, newly elected MNA for Saint-Henri-Saint-Anne calling for the train to also stop in Pointe-Saint-Charles. The pair cite the fact that the neighbourhood has already been burdened with noise from the trains, without being able to benefit from them to get downtown, or elsewhere, quickly. If this happens, it would make the REM a little more useful for Montrealers who live on the island.
More for the Kids
I appeared in another one of my brother Joe’s classic kids songs videos on his Family Fun Songs YouTube channel. Joe plays original tunes and kids classics, and when I appear in his videos, I usually just do facial reactions and a bit of pantomime. This time, though, I contribute vocally, by adding funny (Joe said they were funny) rhymes to Down By The Bay. Check it out, and if you have young kids, check out Joe’s channel (like, subscribe, and all that stuff) for videos that can entertain them for hours (because you know they’ll want to watch them over and over again):
That’s it for this week. A friend invited me to see Oppenheimer next week, but I haven’t seen The Barbie Movie yet, so I think I might be lost. There! Got some Barbenheimer clickbait into…the concluding paragraph. Oh well, see you next week!
FTB Founder Jason C. McLean returns every Friday for another installment in his series, Behind The Curtain.
