A Canadian Interlude

I spent about a decade as the Performing Arts Coordinator at Home Campus. It was a pretty big title for a job whose duties essentially boiled down to “make happen what the Performing Arts Committee wants to happen” and it paid very little, but every bit helps and it was an enjoyable job when you get right down to it. I met a lot of very lovely and interesting people, saw some amazing shows, and got paid for doing so. What’s not to love?

The job got phased out shortly before our last system-wide restructuring, and honestly it was the right call. We never could get much in the way of audiences for our acts, no matter how good those acts were. But it was fun while it lasted.

One of the things they used to do while I had that job was send me off to the Midwest Arts Festival whenever it was held in St. Paul. It’s basically a giant “meet and greet” between people who represent venues (i.e. me) and people who would like to be booked to perform in those venues. The showcases, where a bunch of performers would give snippets of their acts, demonstrated conclusively just how much talent there is in this world, and when there weren’t any showcases going on you could wander around the conference floor and check out the performers’ booths.

And this is how I met Josh.

We got to talking at his booth one day and continued to do so afterward, and eventually we worked out deals that allowed me to book him a couple of times (I was flexible with scheduling and he was very flexible with pricing) for some really wonderful performances, and over the course of all of that we got to be pretty good friends. We’ve visited him and Abby in New York several times now, and they’ve come out to Wisconsin to visit us as well.

This year when we still thought we weren’t going to be doing any big trips, they invited us to join them in Niagara-on-the-Lake for the annual Shaw Festival – a months-long extravaganza dedicated in theory to George Bernard Shaw and his plays but which has now expanded into other Shaw-related or just Shaw-ish plays as well, a change for the better as near as I can tell. We looked at our schedules and determined that while we couldn’t fit in the entire week they’d be there, this past weekend would actually work, so on Thursday we loaded up the minivan with, well, not much actually, since we’ve learned how to travel light over the last few years, and headed east.

It's most of a day’s drive to Niagara-on-the-Lake from Our Little Town, and it passed pretty uneventfully. We crossed the Canadian border at Sarnia and that was a good call really since we had a 3-car wait and no particular bureaucratic bother getting through. The line for semis, however, looked like it would take hours.

We arrived at around 7:45pm Eastern time. Josh and Abby had found a really gorgeous house for the week just a block or so from the main street so everything was within walking distance. It had a lot of space, and we enjoyed hanging out there during the evenings and other down times.

There was even a little park next door that I explored on my own the next day. It’s precisely the sort of thoughtful, welcoming space that would be firebombed in the current Fascist climate of the United States so I was glad to see it there, peacefully proclaiming a much greater and more moral message than is popular here at home.

When we arrived Josh, Abby, and their friend Robert were out at a play but John and Julia were there, and that’s another story.

At some point when Josh and I were getting to know each other he invited me to find his personal Facebook page (as opposed to his professional one), so I did. It turned out we had exactly one friend in common. Bear in mind: I grew up in and around Philadelphia. Josh is a New Yorker. I live in Wisconsin. We met in Minnesota. “How do you know John?” he asked me. “I dated his sister for a year,” I told him. “Jenny and I went to my senior prom together.” John, Josh, and Abby had met in college. It’s a small, small world. But while Jenny and I have remained close friends in the forty years since then, I hadn’t seen John since we both graduated high school and I’d never actually met Julia. It was lovely to correct both of those things.

We walked over to a nearby restaurant and had a good dinner full of lively and interesting conversation, and I hope that we won’t let four decades go by before we do that again.

When we got home Abby, Josh, and Robert were waiting and we had a very nice evening together, even as John and Julia headed off for home.

We spent a very busy but enjoyable weekend at the Shaw Festival.

For one thing, we got to see a lot of plays – four of them in two days, which for us is some kind of record but which for Josh, Abby, and Robert is fairly normal. On the way home Kim and I discussed how we’d rank them and other than the bottom one we didn’t really agree on our order, which makes it a fun discussion to have.

My favorite was The Frogs, which was performed in the round in the Spiegeltent, a fairly intimate venue. Some of this is probably because it is a show that I ran a spotlight for in college, though we did it in a swimming pool (nothing like running thousands of watts worth of lighting through a pool, really) and the script has been revised by Nathan Lane since then. But the acting was sharp, the staging was creative and clever, and the scene with Ariadne was genuinely moving.

Also, the actors were really friendly. We ran into them at another show and it was very nice talking with them.

My second favorite was Gnit, which went up in the round in the Maxwell Theater, a small black box theater that was, unlike the Spiegeltent, noticeably air conditioned. Gnit is a retelling of Peer Gynt, which is a play I have never seen or read so that didn’t mean a whole lot to me but if you’re familiar with the original it might give you a hint of the plot. Like all of the plays the acting was incredibly well done and I enjoyed the tech part of this show more than I did for the others. It’s an absurdist retelling – the dialogue can be very deadpan and deeply funny in a Pythonesque kind of way. The main character is kind of an asshole, though, and that colored the rest of the play for me. I know that’s what he’s supposed to be and that’s kind of the message of the play, but I generally have a hard time with a show or book when I actively dislike the POV character.

Next was Tons of Money, a 1920s-era farce staged at the Royal George Theater that was entirely predictable but a whole lot of fun anyway. When you know what’s coming next in the plot you can focus on the acting and the dialogue, and the actors richly rewarded that focus. It had some genuinely funny parts, and it came at you fast.

Bringing up the rear was Major Barbara, also at the Royal George. Kim and I agreed we loved everything about it except the play itself. The acting was superb. The dialogue was fast and furious, and the set was really cleverly done. But like a lot of Shaw it’s rather didactic and after a while you kind of get the point and then the point keeps happening whether you get it or not. One of the odd things about it that I kind of liked, though, was that the cast would give you updates before each act. “Major Barbara,” they’d say in unison. “A play by George Bernard Shaw in three … acts. Act 1, January 6, 1906.” The pause always made me think they were going to perform in waltz time.

We also spent a fair amount of time just walking around the town. The main street is full of the sorts of shops that cater to tourists such as us and it is beautifully kept up, and we could get to it simply by walking out of the back yard of where we stayed.

We found a jam shop, for example, and I was happy to take home a jar of mustard that – having now tried it on a burger – I can truthfully say is really, really good. There were clothing shops, art galleries (one in particular had some gorgeous photography in it), and a pile of other interesting places. I explored the grocery store for a while and discovered ketchup potato chips which were, much to my surprise, very good. There were some strange things on the street as well, though, as you find in all places if you look carefully. I’m not sure this is the selling point that the shop owners think it is, for example, but if you want your retina scanned as a way to tell your fortunes, well, you do you.

One of my favorite parts of the main street was the Niagara Home Bakery, which not only sold all sorts of very good sweet and savory treats but also sold pasteis de nata – a pastry that I discovered in Portugal in June and was happy to find on this side of the Atlantic. If they’d put a little cinnamon in, it would have been able to stand with anything I had in Porto. They were glorious nonetheless, however.

There was also an ice cream shop called Cows which apparently makes really, really good ice cream. I confess I’m not much of an ice cream person – I probably eat about half a pint a year on average – so I was happy to let the others enjoy it and it has to be said that they did so very much indeed.

You’re right up on Lake Ontario in that town, and one afternoon Kim and I just walked the couple of blocks over to take a look at it for a while. It’s a gorgeous place, and you can see across to the US from the little park where we were. The lake is to the left, and the Niagara River runs to the right, eventually going over Niagara Falls.

Canada is a very proud country and especially so in light of the shameful thuggery emanating out of the White House these days. You find flags all over, and there was a bright red maple leaf on the back of the house we stayed at. Even the bakery got into it.

I don’t blame them a bit. Canada has been nothing but a good neighbor to the US and to see the criminal regime of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his Fascist minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves threaten them with annexation and war simply because they’ve decided that it belongs to them and not the people who live there is a travesty of law and morals. Canada is not for sale, and it will not be bullied. This American supports them in their resistance to tyranny.

Elbows up, Canada.

Mostly, though, we just walked around and had a very good time. I got my keychain for this year’s Christmas tree and the cashier was kind enough to exchange some American dollars for Canadian coins, some of which were the new ones with Charles III on them. We all had some lovely meals together as well – there was a Thai place that was really good, for example, and one morning Abby made us all a giant breakfast omelet. And there was the down time – the moments around the kitchen island or in the big room in the front of the house where we just hung out and told stories and jokes and enjoyed our time together. That’s what these trips are for, really.

We left Sunday because our world beckoned us back and you can’t stay on vacation forever no matter how hard you try. We left around 9am and stopped for gas directly across from a Tim Horton’s so Kim could see what a “double double” is – they always order those in the Louise Penny novels. It turns out that it is a coffee with two creams and two sugars which was a bit much, so Kim settled for a “single single” and a couple of maple donuts to share for the road. We stopped later at a big Canadian grocery to scout for interesting snacks to take home, and then ate lunch at another Tim Horton’s, this time at a highway rest stop.

We crossed back into the US at Detroit and thankfully there were no ICE thugs visible so it went smoothly for all concerned, and soon enough we were back home.

It was a lovely trip!