Fun Fact: I once got fired from a job because I was on TV.

I spent more time on St-Laurent Boulevard, the Plateau part, in the past week than I have in the past decade (and change) since I moved from the area. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t skip the Plateau overall. There were quite a few evenings, and even some afternoons, during that time where I headed to the Mountain, went to a party on du Parc, went to a bar on Mont-Royal, and so on.

Jason C. McLean’s FringeMTL 2023 Reviews.

New York City’s air turned orange, obscuring the view of Manhattan from Brooklyn, and causing the photosensitive street lights in Central Park to turn on at 2pm. Ottawa and Toronto residents hunkering down on an otherwise fine summer day to avoid breathing the hazardous atmosphere.

Please Note: The following opinion does not necessarily reflect the views of Forget The Box, its sponsors, affiliates, or even me. At least not my views all of the time. Sometimes stuff like this just gets me mad, as it is intended to. But then, sometimes, I am able to put on my logic hat, look behind the curtain (he said the name of the series in the series!), and enjoy the fact that the absurdity of the situation is on full display.

I was going to start this off by saying that this wasn’t my first Porchfest, and cast myself as some sort of veteran of the annual NDG DIY music festival trying to see it through fresh eyes. But after attending both days of Porchfest NDG this past weekend, I realized that this was my first full Porchfest experience.

Last weekend, as I wandered around NDG covering Porchfest (my report will be up tomorrow), I noticed election signs up. It took me a minute, but then I remembered that there was a Federal byelection in the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce–Westmount riding scheduled for June 19th.

As I arrived at Girouard Park in NDG, I already felt a bit overdressed. It was a beautiful sunny Saturday afternoon in early May, something that doesn’t happen every year. It felt appropriate that I was meeting Aurora Robinson and Sarah Ring, the two founders and current organizers of Porchfest NDG, an event that benefitted from unseasonable warmth like this for its very first edition in 2015. This bit of good fortune was not lost on the pair, though they decided to play it safer with future iterations.

Montreal will soon have a fifth metro line. Construction on the 20-stop Purple Line will begin this June and is expected to be completed by 2028.