Designing Dollars

Designing Dollars

I’m a Boomer, and I’m old enough to remember when the mud-brown two dollar bill with a view of Richmond, Quebec on the back was common currency. In fact, I have a framed twenty from the year of my birth, dated 1954. It’s a pale shade of green and looks like an American bill. The Queen on the front is obviously new at her job. On the back are pine trees shrouded in snow. Apparently, the first notes issued in the 1954 series are known as the “Devil’s Head” notes because of some perceived arrangement of the Queen’s hair, but I can’t find anything sinister on mine.

My Twitter™ profile says I’m a “pollster, actor and sailor” in that order. I’ve talked quite a bit about the acting in these pages, and about the sailing, but not much about the polling. Some of it is confidential, and most of the rest is boring unless you are obsessed and consumed by politics. Occasionally, though, there are interesting assignments.

In the late 90s, I worked on a project researching the design for the next generation of banknotes to succeed the Birds of Canada series (my favourite was the Snowy Owl, or Harfang de Neige, on the $50). They were due to be released in 2001, We were to go and talk to all the communities in Canada, and my job was, as usual, to go talk to the hardest to reach. My itinerary included First Nations reserves, communities north of the Arctic Circle and new Canadians in the cities where they land.

I put in a lot of travel that year. The new series of notes was to be called Canadian Journeys, and had to highlight Canadian arts and heritage. We were testing people and images to put on the bills, but we were also testing the new materials for the next series of bills, due to be released in 2011, and the ones you use today. Yes, we were testing that plastic back in the last century, because the Royal Canadian Mint doesn’t do anything quickly. That’s why we don’t have a Steve Fonyo bill. In any event, I was carrying a couple of hundred dollars in Australian currency with me, because they had just made the switch to plastic the year before, and it was all we had to show people.

I traveled west, I traveled north, I traveled by air and rental car (mostly rental car). I stayed in motels where they don’t get CNN. Here are a couple of the key things we learned:

- People expect the Queen to be on the money, but can’t quite remember what bills she is on. She’s never mentioned first as choice to put on a bill, though

- The first choice is always Terry Fox. Eager young First Nations teenagers at a boarding school in Northern Saskatchewan, a hotel meeting room full of Punjabis, Pilipinas, Kenyans and Grenadians, a group of HIV-positive patients in a hospice rec room, first class passengers in a Maple Leaf lounge, they all wanted Terry Fox on a bill. I’m puzzled, with this unanimity of response, and the fact he’s been dead for three decades, that he isn’t on the currency yet.

- The second choice is almost always Wayne Gretzky.  Even when it is explained the person being memorialized generally has to be dead (except the Queen), people think the Great One deserves a bill. I think any number of more iconic hockey players would precede Gretzky, even alive. Howe, Richard, Kennedy, etc.

- The most interesting idea we got was from several First Nations respondents. A series of bills commemorating great First Nations leaders, like Poundmaker, Tecumseth, Joseph Brant; even Louis Riel (which would be a fitting apology for his hanging).

The Mint was determined to put the Famous Five, Nellie McClung and her fellow campaigners on a bill. The $5 was an obvious choice, but that’s not how it worked out. They ended up on the $50 (at least a multiple of 5). This sounds well and good, the Famous Five were responsible for the “Persons” case that established women were persons and could vote.

I did some reading into Nellie McClung and the others. It turns out, by their own writing, they were all enthusiastic racists and bigots, and all believed in eugenics, the “science” of racial breeding. Nellie McClung herself called for the forced sterilization of the “mentally feeble”, criminals and even, on some occasions, immigrants of the less desirable sort. They all believed in restricting immigration to the white races, particularly the northern Europeans. Reading a little further, I found this interest in eugenics and racial cleansing was popular throughout the prairie populist movements. JS Woodsworth, founder of the CCF, was a believer. Tommy Douglas, sainted father of the NDP, wrote his thesis on forced sterilization. It appears the left wing appetite for social engineering runs deep.

In any event, a memo was passed up the chain to the Mint and was ignored. Despite this, they proceeded with the Famous Five. It lasted from 2004 until 2012, but not that many were printed after people started raising a fuss. If they’d asked me, I would have said let’s go back to the 1986 Birds of Canada series. No one can complain a Snow Owl is politically incorrect.

Smooth Sailing, Part 3

Smooth Sailing, Part 3

I’m a Boomer and a sailor, and I’m old enough to remember when America’s Cup yachts were made of wood. I’ve been talking about my adventures in boats in these pages, and I want to finish up here before I completely alienate the non-nautical readers.

In the last installment, I had bought a 38 foot Finnish motorsailer, all teak inside and out (though with a fibreglass hull, of course). My crew and I had discovered that the Passat, while a fine sea boat, was sluggish and unresponsive at slow speeds, heavy and overpowered when docking. We were trapped in our slip because of our fear of damaging other boats when landing (taking off was easy, always getting back in is hard).

Passat has a single screw, a full keel, weighs 8 tonnes, has a minimum speed of 3 knots and no brakes. Try driving that around a crowded parking lot. So, in season two, I begged, pleaded and bribed the Dock Committee chairman and got the perfect dock, an open side, not a slip, right near the entrance to the basin, that required no turning to land at. The chairman said he gave it to us because Passat is the prettiest boat at the club (she is), and he wanted visitors to see her first.

Our new mooring made a tremendous difference. We felt confident in going out, knowing we would be able to land without damage to our vessel or others. And we started taking trips. One of the first was to Port Dalhousie, across the lake. We set out on a beautiful sunny day with a snapping 10 knot breeze. Despite my fear of wind (I know I know, I’m a sailor and I’m scared of wind?), we hoisted sail for one of the first times and idled the engine. The next four hours were bliss, just us and a navy frigate (which my ship identification software said was a “private yacht”) for company. We paused at the deepest spot in the lake just to listen.

Seeing the south shore of the lake rise on the horizon had the feel of homecoming. The entrance to Port Dalhousie is between two long piers, the Old Welland Canal. We moored at the local yacht club, plugged in and walked into town for dinner. After that, we stayed up late watching movies on the iPad, and I stayed up even later listening to AM stations coming in from the southern US, gospel and talk and nuttiness.

The crew was up before dawn the next morning in a drizzle, casting off lines before I’d even made coffee. I motored out in my pyjamas, crew on deck doing all the wet work, and me warm and dry in the wheelhouse, As we emerged between the piers, the drizzle stopped and the mist loomed. About 3 miles out, the sun rose over the mist and outlined a lake freighter waiting for the canal. Soon we were surrounded by fog on all sides, only the sky and the sun visible, and it stayed that way all the way back to Toronto, until we saw the spire of the CN tower poking above the layer of mist.

We do oyster and champagne cruises on the side. $250 gets you and 3 friends a 2 hour cruise of the harbour, 3 dozen oysters and a couple of bottles of champagne. I can hold a small dinner party for 4. I can sleep 7 (with some crowding). I can sail with 12 legally. I can spend 3 or 4 days on the boat and have all the comforts of home.

Passat has made me very popular at the yacht club, she’s generally thought to be the prettiest boat we have, with her broad quarterdeck, fit for dancing a hornpipe, her teak decks and her clipper bow. I work on her, I live on her, and, now I have an easy dock to land on, I go out in her. Excuse me, I have to go now, sailing season is here…

Smooth Sailing, Part 2

Smooth Sailing, Part 2

I’m a Boomer and a sailor. If you’re my age, the first image you have of sailing is Jack Kennedy and a bunch of tow-headed kids on a big cutter, in winds I’d never go out in. I’m what’s known as a wind pussy, scared of anything over 8 knots, 10 knots max. I wrote earlier about my first boat, the Katherine Rose, a modest 22 footer I bought for $5000 on my 50th birthday. I sailed her happily for seven years as a “rubber band” sailor (out and back again). I started to get bored with the regular two hour day sailing.

Then something happened. My wife wanted to get me out of the house more. She suggested renting an office. I said, why not a floating office? We somehow convinced ourselves it made economic sense to buy a really big boat to use as my office, and as our cottage. I knew by now what I wanted. A motorsailer, with both substantial engine power, as well as vestigial sail power. A wheelhouse. A ketch. Lots of wood (not the hull, inside). Solid construction.

Much research led me to a Finnish motorsailer, the Nauticat 33, built from the 80s until today, very handmade, very crafty, 38 feet long overall. There were two available, one in Chicago and one in Texas. They were in high demand, and these two needed work. Still, it was going to be worth my while to put one of them on a flatbed and get it to Toronto.

Then fate intervened. Just up the lake, 40 miles in the other direction from where my first boat had come from, a clean 1986 model of this boat came on the market. It was more than I wanted to spend, but it was beautiful and well-kept; a previous owner, a German, had obsessively labeled every valve, through-hull, switch and connector in the boat. Every spare part he had ever replaced was still aboard. It was called Passat, or trade wind in German.

I had to sell the Katherine Rose, not so much for the money (after 7 years, she was pretty used up) but to get her off my mooring and out of the club. It’s very hard to dispose of a boat in Toronto, and you’re not allowed to sink it. After lowering the price to $2000 all in, motor, cradle, sails, and getting a couple of nibbles, Manny called me. Manny had long oiled hair,  tattoos of tattoos on his tattoos, and a tattoo of a cross on a chain to go with his cross on a chain. Manny has a set of gold teeth he occasionally wears. Manny is not what you’d call yacht club material, and I think he makes his money in sublegal ways, because he paid me for the Katherine Rose with twenty crisp sequential $100 bills.

I did sea trials with Passat on a day with a 20 knot offshore wind, so I never even touched the sails. The next day, delivery day, the wind was just as blustery, and it was right on our stern going back to Toronto. And once again, we set out in a strange boat with a motor we knew nothing about to travel 40 nautical miles to Toronto. I forgot, but this was something I had done with the Katherine Rose and swore I would never do again.  It turned out later, the alternator didn't work and we were running on the last of our battery power. Passat has an autohelm, which keeps her on a set compass course by hydraulically adjusting the rudder. With 20 knots of wind and 4 foot swell on our bum, we were being swung all over the place, and the autohelm was working overtime to keep up.

The trip ended up uneventfully, and we made a perfect landing at our mooring buoy in the yacht club basin. Several weeks were spent modernizing the conveniences and sanding the decks. Air conditioning, heat exchanger, new stereo system, wifi, water heater, BBQ, new shower, TVs, iPad, all the things needed to survive a Toronto summer. I started spending nights on the boat. Other days, I would get down to the yacht club at 10 AM, work through lunch (BBQ!), and sleep in the afternoon in the aftercabin on the double berth, rocking gently and watching the reflection off the water shining on the cabin roof. Home by 6 PM in time for cocktail hour and dinner. Just like an office.

Funny thing, though. My sailing buddy and I didn’t go out that much.  A bigger boat, harder to handle, more comfortable to stay moored, and we were sucked in. We were well on our way to becoming one of those big yachts in the basin that never went out. One of our problems is maneuverability - Passat has a single screw and a full keel, which is the worst combination for turning ability. She weighs 8 tonnes and has no brakes. She can’t go any slower than 3 knots. The only thing she has in her favour mooring wise is a reverse gear that will snap your neck.

We fouled our mooring buoy once, wrapping the line around the screw. That required extensive diving, stress and fuss, and led to me getting a dock instead. The dock was inside the basin, though, nestled among other docks and harder even than the mooring to get into. We made complete fools of ourselves several times the first season trying to land, but fortunately, we didn’t bump any other boats.

So far, one season into owning Passat, the office thing was working out fine. It was the boat part that wasn’t really happening. More on this later

Smooth Sailing, Part 1

Smooth Sailing, Part 1

I’m a Boomer, and the first movie I remember seeing (in 1959) was the Cine-Miracle documentary Windjammer, which I saw at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. It made an impression that lasted all my life, that of ships and the sea. I bought a sailboat for my 50th birthday. It was actually a fit of pique that led to it.

My wife and a friend announced they were going to an open house at a local yacht club, because the friend’s boyfriend was a member. I bristled. I had learned to sail at school, fancied myself the old salt, not my wife. While she and her friend were gone, I went online and found a 22 foot mini-cruiser with a drop-keel for $5000. I’d bought it before they came home.

I joined the yacht club they had visited, and went down the lake 30 miles to pick up my new purchase. I had learned to sail on a relatively small lake, and Lake Ontario is rather a large lake, but that didn’t stop me. Youngest brother and I drove down the coast with two five gallon containers of gas, and picked up the boat. We then proceeded to motor off to Toronto, 30 miles as the crow flies, at about 4 knots, with a 9 horsepower motor we were completely unfamiliar with, in a 30 year old boat we didn’t know. Years later, I thought I’d never do that again if I know what I know now about what can go wrong on the water. A few years after that, I did it again, only on a much grander scale.

I kept that boat, the Katherine Rose, for 7 years. It slept 4, but that meant one adult and 3 kids.  I slept on it occasionally, but it was mostly used for day-sailing, and I did that a lot. In season, I’d go out about three times a week, far more often than the big expensive yachts that surrounded me in the anchorage. I had a succession of crew. Cameron used to come after his afternoon shift as a restaurant manager, then he got too busy. I met a wonderful man on Facebook called Patrick, the most polite person I’ve ever encountered. We sailed for two years. He was the perfect crew. He was mostly unemployed, all he wanted to do was sail, and I could turn the tiller over to him with confidence, because he was a much better sailor than I. He let me do what I liked best, which was to let someone else do the sailing while I enjoyed the view.

Patrick died after two years, of stomach cancer. We had his memorial at the yacht club, and a few weeks later, in the early spring, we sailed out and sprinkled his ashes on the lake he loved so much. He had done a very fancy ropework handle for the ship’s bell, and I had that to remember him by, but his wife gave me a small portion of his ashes to bury in the keel of the Katherine Rose, so he’d always be with the boat.

My friend Jamie started to ride his motorcycle in from Niagara to crew with me. He loves two things, riding his motorcycle on the highway and sailing, so the combination was perfect for him. We sailed two or three times a week and had some adventures. We got caught out in a line squall that laid her over on her beam ends then rocketed her to 6.3 knots by the GPS, the highest speed she ever achieved. We got squeezed coming into harbour by a big steel schooner, which was on our weather beam and kept pushing us to leeward into the seawall. The skipper sat on top of the wheelhouse laughing at us. We played dodge’em with the ferries in the Inner Harbour.

Jamie and I settled into a routine that lasted several years. Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Sail off the mooring (never using the motor unless absolutely necessary), sail out into the wind on a close reach, turn around after an hour and a half, sail back with the wind on a broad reach, and sail to the mooring, no motor. “Rubber band” sailors, out and back. We had, improbably, turned a passion into a routine and a routine into a rut. Time for a change….

Acting Out

 Acting Out

I’m a Boomer, and on the day I was born, Song of Saskatchewan, starring Allan Ladd and Shelly Winters, was playing at Loew’s Cinema in Toronto. That night,  tenor Jussi Bjorling missed his concert at Massey Hall (probably, in fact almost certainly, because he was too drunk to sing). These were the Canadian theatrical highlights in Toronto when Boomers were being born.

Among the many jobs and careers I’ve pursued, acting is the one that has lasted the longest. I got my union card in 1982, more than 30 years ago, and I’ve kept it up ever since, even during the 90s and 00s, when I was far away from the biz in corporate purgatory.

I was a spotlight hog at high school and won drama awards. I went to a college with a good drama program and a state-of-the-art theatre, modeled on Stratford’s (they all were in the 70s). I played some good roles there including Tom in Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, a role just designed for a pompous post-teen. I did a better job as MacDuff in the Scots play, learning how to be still and silent on stage.

I left school without a degree, because I was working at acting jobs in the city, and didn’t see the need to study in the abstract what I was doing in the here-and-now. I did a small part in a terrible Canadian tax shelter film starring Kirk Douglas when he was at a low point in his career. This was (although I didn’t know it at the time) my first round of Six Degrees of Stanley Kubrick (who of course had directed Douglas in Spartacus and Paths of Glory).

I did an episode of an old chestnut, Family Court. It was live improv TV. They gave you the first line of the scene and the last line and you had to improv the middle. The day it was broadcast, I brought home a girl I fancied for tea. I casually turned on the TV, and the timing proved to be propitious, because I got lucky. I was sold on acting from that day on. It was also the easiest money I had ever made.

A few years later, I found myself in Mexico, out of money and almost out of ideas. I ended up in Cuernavaca, a beautiful holiday town in the hills with a substantial expatriate population, most of them either retired CIA field officers or superannuated socialist veterans of the Spanish Civil War. They used to drink together in the Zocalo. This was fertile ground for an actor on the make.

I got a job with the local Canadian/US expat arts centre. We rented a church hall and made our own stage lights. We had casting calls. We produced about a dozen plays in two years, all starring and put on by the expatriate residents. I put together a one-man Shakespearean show with a girl I knew, a guitarist. I did the spoken bits, about a dozen of them, men and women, funny and dramatic, and she sang Shakespearean songs to her own tunes. Very refined, and actually pretty good. We toured that all over Mexico, playing Universities and getting honourary degrees in return.

By the time I was back in Canada, I had decided to be a struggling actor in Toronto. It turned out I didn’t have to struggle much. Five months in a long-running play, then auditioning for lots of commercials, many of which I got. It got to the point where casting agents were asking for my “type”, but not asking for me.

I worked on that icon of Canadian TV, a rite of passage for every actor, The Littlest Hobo, playing second banana to a German shepherd. I worked with Keenan Wynn, another degree from Kubrick (Dr Strangelove). I got one US commercial that ran nationally for a year. That’s a BIG payout and I lived off the residuals for that year. When that came to an end, I turned to camera crew stand-in work, a little-known job in movie-making that can earn you a CEO’s salary for just standing around. A recurring role as a policeman in a cop thriller rounded out the fat years.

After a corporate hiatus (when we got married, my wife and I flipped a coin to see who would give up show business and get a real job, and I lost) which lasted 20 years, it became clear to me that I would be a better older white male than most of the older white male actors I was seeing on TV. I dusted off my union card, got an agent and started auditioning again.

Work came quickly. A worldwide Mcdonald’s commercial that kept playing and playing and paying and paying. I’d get cheques for runs in Australia, Thailand, England. My commercial traveled more than I ever did, and I traveled a lot. There is a definite niche for male actors in their 50s and 60s - erectile dysfunction aids, walk-in baths, reverse mortgages, no-medical life insurance, you’ve seen them all.

When I was working 30 years ago, I was described as brash. Now I’m 60 I get creepy roles. A motel manager nastier than Norman Bates, a syphilitic murderer, a shapeshifter in an alternate universe, a sketchy horse trainer, a mad presidential advisor.

The work isn’t steady, a few times a year. But it’s always fun, and I enjoy doing something I know how to do well, like remembering my lines and hitting my marks. I wish life were more like that.

Good Eats

 Good Eats

I’m a Boomer, and when I was growing up, brown bread was exotic. My mother was a child of the depression and cooked everything she made from the basic ingredients. They weren’t always premium ingredients, either. We kept guinea pigs, and they lived in a big cage in the kitchen where they happily whistled all day. Mum talked the grocer into giving her the lettuce leaves they stripped off the outside of the heads of lettuce when they arrived at the store. For the guinea pigs, she said. Soon, she was taking home boxes of it, because she was feeding it to her family, too. Not because of need, you understand, we were quite comfortable, just because she was, well, cheap. Good food, just not fine food.

My dad would bring home Brie and Boursin and Stilton, and he actually dined in restaurants (which my mother rarely did) because he traveled, but he drank plonk, proudly. He kept the jug (always a jug, that kind of wine) at his feet, and dispensed it to the table from there. Dinners at our house were always loud, happy, raucous and full of disputation, and always delicious (although you might find a twig in your stew). One evening, at Christmas, my dad and a couple of us met a school bus full of long haired kids in the city, and he asked them all out for dinner at our farmhouse in the countryside. He gave my mum about 2 hours warning. She made a huge chili, warmed crusty bread in the oven, and I don’t think she even thought it strange.

I had to develop my own taste for fine food after I left home. I couldn’t afford to eat fine food, but I always ate good food. Homemade chili with lots of veg, lots of Bolognese sauce and fresh pasta, wokked veg in soy sauce, health food store bulk peanut butter, fresh rye bread from the Jewish bakery (boy, was that a revelation for a goy from the country like me).

When I lived in Mexico, I ate on the street as most city folk do, because the food is so good and fresh, and cheap. Liver and potato tacos with a glass of tamarind juice, fire-roasted onions from a grill in the Zocalo, rice and beans with fried fish and lime, refried beans and scrambled eggs, all of it healthy and fresh.

When I started making money, I started buying asparagus, steak, and going out to restaurants. I started to learn about Japanese food (not sushi, even the Japanese don’t eat much sushi, they know it can be toxic), Greek food and, especially, French food. Not Cuisine Minceur, either; fully sauced Escoffier cuisine. It's remarkable when I think about it how recently it was impossible to get a real French meal in Toronto.

I moved into steak in a big way in my 30s and moved out of it in my 50s. I’m not a vegetarian, ethical or nutritional, but the prospect of a big ol’ slab o’ meat doesn’t tickle my tastebuds anymore. I like the way meat is used in Mexico, as a dressing on the main meal, rather than the main meal itself.

The best thing in the world, I’ve decided, though I’ve never eaten Ortolans, is foie gras. It’s basically a cross between chocolate and filet mignon and utterly decadent. I like its self-sufficiency, it comes in its own fat, and cooks by itself, nothing else is needed. Other things I like are oysters, steak tartare and snails. None of this will my wife eat, and she barely eats chicken.

One thing I believe strongly in is Michael Pollan’s abjuration to “Eat food, not too much, mostly green”. I don’t use nutritional supplements or vitamins (and my long suspicion that they’re useless is just now being confirmed by researchers). I don’t believe in breaking food down to its constituent parts. If you want Beta-Carotene, don’t take a pill, eat carrots.

The other thing that’s changed is the amount I eat. I used to pack it in hoping to stave off future want. Now I like my dinner airplane-sized. In fact, I always liked airline food (at least in business class). The tiny steak, the petite potatoes, the little brownie, loved it. But back then, I was drinking cognac with dinner and smoking after. It’s been a while since I flew business class.

On my 60th birthday, I took a few friends to a French bistro which serves both foie gras and steak tartare. The foie gras was cold, and too small, and the steak tartare was middling, but dinner was fine, because of good company. Next time, I’ll sear my own foie gras and chop my own sirloin and have company over to my house, where we’ll be raucous. Maybe I’ll buy a jug of wine, not for me, just to keep at my feet.

Flying High

Flying High

I’m a Boomer, born long enough ago that the first time I flew was on a TWA Superconstellation, a sleek propeller plane with triple tails. I wore a jacket and tie, so did everyone else. The Superconstellation has been gone for half a century, so has TWA and no one wears a tie to fly nowadays except the pilots. That was the first adventure in a lifetime of flying.

I have exactly one item on my bucket list (a package actually); I want to fly First Class on an Airbus A380 to Paris, take the Chunnel to Southampton and return on the Queen Mary 2. Some A380s have separate individual cabins in first class, each with a living room, a bedroom and a bathroom with a shower.

I always thought the A380 would make the ideal flying cruise ship; big enough to accommodate about 100 passengers in luxurious comfort. With its 2 decks, dining rooms and lounges could be upstairs and bedrooms below. The plane would travel at night and park on the tarmac at exotic locales by day. There must be enough people with enough money in the world to make at least one of these flying cruise ships possible.

This harks back to the real golden age of air travel, the late 30s. This was the era of the Zeppelin Hindenburg, with it’s first class dining room, ranks of private cabins, catwalks inside the envelope, an observation deck on top and a smoking room - yes, on an airship filled with flammable hydrogen gas, they had a smoking room. It had an ashtray on a table in the middle of the room with a vacuum in it, designed to pull all sparks out of the airship. The Hindenburg came to its explosive end in 1937.

Around that time, Pan Am was flying the Pan Am Clippers on the pacific route to Manila and China, and to Rio in the south. The original Clippers, built by Martin, later by Boeing, were commodious seaplanes filled with luxurious comforts. A dining room, a galley, private sleeping cabins and, once again, a smoking room.

If there is a through line here, it is that I like two things while flying; smoking and sleeping, neither of which are really possible anymore. I’m a champion sleeper, I can sleep anywhere, even the dentist’s chair, so sleeping on a cramped airplane isn’t a problem. Staying awake for 7 hours without smoking, though, isn't fun.

Here’s the deal. Apart from the dreadful fire on the tarmac in Cincinnati in 1983, when Air Canada flight 797 burned, killing Canadian folksinger Stan Rogers, smoking on airplanes has not caused any fatal incidents. In the 70s and 80s, air was circulated about 20 times more frequently than it is now in aircraft; it’s expensive to do. That’s why you get headaches now, and didn’t used when flying 20 years ago. Smoking wasn’t a problem when air was circulated that much. Another factor that led to the end of smoking was the time it took to empty the ashtrays between flights - a definite money loser.

I can’t complain; I did a lot of flying in business class in the 80s when it was still a premium service and smoking was allowed. My usual routine was a Bloody Caesar as soon as the drinks cart rolled, red wine with what was usually an exquisite little dinner, then lots of cognacs and cigarettes until we landed. I still have a complete Air Canada dinner service I occasionally set out for meals I eat alone. This libidinous approach to business class has its dangers though; I once arrived at Edmonton (Nisku International Airport, it's called) to find I was drunk, had a large rental car waiting and a 30 km drive into the city ahead of me. I took a cab.

One of my other early flying adventures was my first trip to Europe, in 1966 when I was 12. I went with my best friend, an older girl, and we flew Icelandic Airways, at $170, the cheapest transatlantic ticket before or since. They flew Bristol Britannias, lumbering old four engine turboprops, and they had to stop in Iceland to refuel. The plane was deafening, and it was full of recent immigrants returning home, babies, goats for all I know. Because of the noise and discomfort, the brandy was free and plentiful, even for me. Thanks to this trip, I can cross Iceland off my bucket list, having deplaned and eaten breakfast there.

I don’t fly anymore. The whole exercise has become cattle-transport, demeaning and dehumanizing. I’ve been most of the places I wanted to go, I'm happy at home, and the cooking's better these days.

On The Beach

 On The Beach

I’m a Boomer, old enough to remember when Lyndon Johnson sent the Marines to the Dominican Republic to openly overthrow a leftist leader, the last time the US pulled a stunt like that until Iraq. I don’t know how the history of the Dominican Republic might have changed if that hadn’t happened, but it was a nice, stable, well-governed country when I visited with my whole family, and my girlfriend, and everybody else’s girlfriends and wives one Christmas in the 80s.

It was going to be an experiment; to see if we could get our fractious and argumentative family to co-exist for two weeks by the expedient of holding the event on neutral territory, ie: in the Caribbean. We rented a big villa with a maid on the north coast, in what was then the sleepy seaside village of Sosua (yes, I know, condos and hotels now). We rented two miniature Japanese vans, Daihatsus, the kind that are too small and flimsy to sell in North America. We also had 5 motor scoters, one for each couple.

The oranges came in $10 bags of fifty pounds. The rum in $5 quarts. Rum and orange juice was the order of the day, every day. No one was ever really sober. Cigars were $10 a box, and as I was the only cigar smoker, I got everyone to take their duty-free allotment when we flew out. I had cigars for months.

Christmas passed with little notice. I think we went to the cockfights that night. I bet profusely and won substantially, pissing off the Dominicans I was sitting with. The night we were waiting for was New Year’s Eve. We had a big dinner planned, and I had a special surprise.

I had asked my mother to bring along her mother-in-law’s engagement ring, an intricate filigree with three pre-South African diamonds from India. It was inscribed inside the band with the date of her engagement, three months before the Titanic sank. I was going to ask my girlfriend to marry me. Everybody in the family knew except my girlfriend, which was tactically rather unwise in that, had she said no, I wouldn’t have been able to go back to the villa.

My plan was to take her out for dinner on the scooter, then go to a cove near the house where the surf crashed in to watch the town fireworks. I’d pop the question at midnight.

We had dinner at the only hotel in town (not very good, and definitely not as good as the café we ate breakfast at every morning). I asked at the bar for some Champagne or sparkling wine, a bottle to go. Sorry, Senor, we’re all sold out. It’s the Ano Nuevo, after all. We got on the bike and scooted to most of the restaurants in town. We finally found a bottle of sparking apple cider.

We cruised down to the cove, which was, as we expected, deserted. As midnight neared, we waited for the fireworks. I fingered the ring in its box in my pocket. In the middle of the fireworks, I got down on one knee in the sand, presented the open ring box, and asked “will you marry me?”. My girlfriend was shocked (and a bit appalled), and totally unprepared. She said “Yes, well, I suppose yes, do I have to answer now?”. I was about to untangle that when we realized we were being watched.

There had been a scare from over the border in Haiti. More migrants arriving on boats, trying to land on the beaches at night. The beaches were guarded some nights, and here was this beach’s guard - a nineteen year old Dominican conscript in an ill-fitting uniform, carrying an M-16 and blind, staggering drunk.

We waved the gun at both of us and told us to stand up and come into the moonlight. I explained that this was my novia, my fiancée, that we had just gotten casada, engaged. This didn’t brighten his demeanor at all, in fact it seemed to drive him deeper into his drunken funk. He was waving the automatic erratically in our direction and I was really wishing he wouldn’t. The inevitable end to the standoff occurred with the transfer of a ten dollar bill. He stumbled off, satisfied he’d guarded his beach. We breathed a sigh of relief and headed back to the villa on the motor scooter.

When we got there, at about half past midnight in the New Year, the entire family, with girlfriends and wives was there, of course, all up, drinking rum and waiting to hear the outcome of the proposal. It’s a good thing it was successful, or that would have been a very embarrassing evening, instead of just a mildly embarrassing one. That was 30 years ago and I’m still married, so maybe the drunken soldier was our good luck charm.

Polls Apart

Polls Apart

I’m a Boomer, old enough that when I started working in the market research business, we used punch cards for the computer. If you spilled a tray, you had a massive data error which could only be rectified by counting and sorting them by hand. My first fax machine was the size of a refrigerator. I had a big hotel ashtray on my desk, and I used it. How long ago was this? Well the Blue Jays won their first divisional pennant that fall, you do the math.

I’m a pollster now, and I cut my teeth at Gallup. What we did was so widely published and so well known, we were the Kleenex of the industry, a brand name which had come to be generic. We had very high response rates because many people actually thought we were a government agency, like the census.

When I worked there, we were still doing the Poll door-to-door, in person. As a junior analyst, I was expected to do one pack of surveys, by walking in a prescribed direction around the block, knocking at doors at a prescribed interval. When we found someone in, as often as not, we’d be offered tea while we did the survey. The Poll was up to 45 minutes long in those days, and conducted in person, both of which are unthinkable today.

We polled two Quebec referendums, both hair-raising experiences, as we were basically doing the trial-runs for the break-up of a nation. There was the occasion we polled more people who thought Elvis was alive, or didn’t know one way or another, than approved of the Conservative Prime Minister. Back in the 40s and 50s, Canada was convulsed by coloured and uncoloured margarine, and which was preferred was the most polled question of the day.

It wasn’t all door-to-door political polling. In 1990, I did a huge tourism survey for a mountain province. It was a cordon survey, which means we threw a cordon of interviewers around the province, at every exit, airport, bus station and train station, and you didn’t get out until you’d been interviewed. This survey went on for a full year, summer and winter. We had 100 people working on it, 8 crews with Chevy Suburbans packed with traffic cones and highway diversion signs. I trained them on how to cruise down the highway in one direction and back the other, dropping cones and signs out the tailgate while two crew walked along and lined them up. I taught them how to make smooth easy curves with their cones which would naturally guide the driver to the interview site at the side of the road.

There was a point when, leading up to the project, I was so interested in buying used Suburbans, that I would approach people in parking lots and try to but their trucks from them. “Gee, that a fine truck. How much do you want for it?”. The Suburban is the perfect vehicle for highway work. It has a capacious interior cargo compartment for all your signs and cones, and also seating in comfort for about 7. They also last forever, one of the last truly well-built Detroit tanks.

The province in question has a reputation for prickly self-sufficiency, and not everyone was happy at being diverted to the side of the road and interviewed. Sometimes, we would see the car approaching pull over, and something would be thrown out the window. In several cases, we saw drivers turn around after being interviewed to go back and pick up whatever it was they had disposed of upon seeing our signs.

We set up our sites at lonely highway crossings all around the borders of the province, in winter and summer, fair weather and foul. At one winter shift, high in the mountains at the divide, a late model sedan cruised into the diversion site and stopped. The driver was slumped over the wheel, dead. He had apparently stroked out just as he was pulling in. At another site further north in the mountains, an inquisitive black bear kept cruising the site, chasing the crew into the Suburban behind locked doors. At the airport shifts, we ran into the NATO foreign ministers, the New Kids on the Block and Reveen the Magician. We interviewed them all, including the Honourable Joe Clark.

Midway through the project, in July, I cleared the schedule and invited all the crews from all over the province to bring their Suburbans to a rented house on a golf resort in the middle of the province for a three day party. Boy oh boy, was that a shindig. We had steak for three days, the beer was laid on and didn’t run out and there was room for everyone who wanted to to sleep (some didn’t). One couple, a crew chief and his wife, brought their 8 year old daughter, Destiny. Destiny had drowned her baby brother in a swimming pool when she was 5, and didn’t look like she had forgotten about it.

I made one mistake at the midsummer party. I had my field coordinator order the steaks (this being a steak producing province of note) and gave him a serious budget. He got a great deal on about 60 boxes of steak, and we got more than we really needed. It wasn’t until we got to the party site that we realized the boxes all said “Product of Australia”. We had bought 60 boxes of Australian steaks for people from a province that thought of itself as the best steak producer in North America. It was liking bringing coals to Newcastle, only with national pride mixed in. We unpacked the steaks and burned the boxes as soon as we realized, and before the crews arrived. I didn't party as hard as my crews, but I only slept one night out of the three, and I didn't put myself to bed.

Throughout the project, I’d go out west every month or so to pay a surprise visit to a couple of crews, to keep them on their toes. I’d rent the biggest land yacht I could find at the airport, rent a Motorola Brick phone (remember those?) and head off for the border. It got so the crews began to suspect any big sedan with one person in it arriving at sunset (I liked to arrive at the end of a shift when their guard was down, and help with tearing down the site and packing the truck). I learned to love country music, insane talk radio drifting over the border from the US late at night and bottles of cheap cognac. The kind of motels I was staying at (the only ones available) didn’t have CNN, so there was nothing to do at night but drink and go to the bar and watch the boot-scooting locals, so graceful in their cowboy hats and tight jeans.

That was the year Ian Tyson’s album “Cowboyography” dropped, and everything that was magic about that experience in the mountains is in the songs on that album:

“Bald eagle’s back in the cottonwood tree; old brown hills are just about bare.

Springtime’s sighing all along the creek, magpies ganging up everywhere

Sun shines warm on the Eastern Slope, March came in like a lamb for a change.

Gary’s pulling calves up the Old Stampede, we made it through another on the Northern Range,

Lonnie’s pulling calves at the Top of the World, we made it through another on the Northern Range”.

Filling The Bucket

Filling The Bucket

I’m a Boomer, and I just chalked up the three score I’m allotted, but I expect a lot more than ten more. I figure I have the genes, temperament and persistence to live to about 95. That means I have 35 years or so to do everything on my bucket list.

It’s not very long, I’ve been filling it in like a birder’s life list since forever. I’ve been hang gliding, the closes thing to bird flight there is, and felt the lift of the wind in the silence above the pines. I’ve been scuba diving on the Barrier Reef off Belize, sitting on the pure white sand bottom, watching Hammerheads swim over me. I’ve flown over the Great Divide at dawn in a helicopter, listening to Bach and watching the rising sun glint off the high snowfields.

I’ve power-hiked through cathedrals of trees as old as history, uplifted by the dense, deafening silence. I’ve hiked out on the gunwale in 30 knots of wind, racing for harbour before the sheets of rain come. I’ve slept in the snow, snug in my sleeping bag beneath a recent fall, waking to shake the flakes out of my eyes. I’ve hitched a locomotive ride on a freight train across the valleys of New England in the full flame of fall.

I’ve had a small but important influence in national affairs, I’ve seen the temples of Palenque under the moonlight when no one else was there. I’ve woken up every May 10th for 15 years to see the False Pear tree in the backyard as white with blossoms as a huge ice cream cone.

There are a few things I’d like to do, mostly because they weren’t available previously. I’d like to fly First Class on an Airbus A380 to London, with the separate cabin with living room, bedroom and bathroom with a shower. I’d return from this trip in a balcony cabin on the Queen Mary 2. I’d like to see the Drakensberg Mountains in South Africa, as battlemented as a gigantic castle. I’d like to work on an archaeological dig on Norse remains in North America.

A constant theme in my bucket list is sleeping while traveling. I took the Via Rail Canadian across the country to Banff with my wife, in a suite, and sleeping to the clickety-click of the rails is as romantic as they say it is. It isn’t generally known, but the transcontinental service has one super suite on each train, which sleeps 5 and has the only shower aboard. It’s located under the observation dome on the tail end car

That trip across Canada by train bears special remembering. It was one of the very last departures to take the southern route, through Calgary and Banff. The country was gripped in a brutal cold spell, and half the trains leaving Toronto weren’t making it (ours did). The sun had set when we left Toronto, and Sudbury came about midnight. Our beds were warm and they rocked with the motion of the train. We woke the next morning in Wawa, the train sheathed in ice, and we watched as they loaded crates of still-flapping trout for our breakfast. All afternoon the train was filled with the smell of the roast cooking for dinner that night, with mashed potatoes and fresh-baked hot rolls, all made from scratch on board.

Another magic night’s sleep in our warm cabin, watching the Boreal Forest click by. Midnight in Winnipeg, so cold spit froze before it hit the ground. We bundled up and walked the platform for air, amazed that a train so sheathed in ice (from escaping steam) could function. The rest of the night into the prairies, then breakfast in Saskatchewan. Teatime in Calgary and bed-time in Banff and the trip was over.

Although the Canadian travels the northern route through Edmonton and Jasper now, and crosses the Rockies at night, it is still a bucket list item that every Canadian should try once. The stainless steel 1960s running stock was built for the ages and has recently been refurbished - the dome cars and the sleeping cars will still be there for a while. It’s a trip never to be forgotten, and the lullaby of the rails is magic.

Everyday Hero

Everyday Hero

I’m a Boomer, born long enough ago that I remember the Gringo Trail when it was a trail, lined with forgotten beach hideaways, not a superhighway lined with all-inclusive resorts.

I was stuck in Puerto Arista, a nasty little beach town in southern Mexico on the Pacific side. It was late 1978, and I was broke, out of ideas, out of places to go, and I had amoebic dysentery, or “los bichos”. Puerto Arista was a terrible place to be broke and sick. One main drag, unpaved, lined with tin-roofed cabanas and a stony beach. No shade, no palm trees and a couple of thatched bars. That’s it. The beach was rocky, and there was a wicked undertow a few feet off shore, where the bottom dropped out. I almost drowned the first time I tried swimming there. The short lethal waves would break over your head before you could draw a breath, and leave you tumbling in a vortex of bubbles and sand.

I’d come with a friend, and he’d had the good sense (and the money) to leave. I couldn’t afford to. My salvation came in an unlikely form. I met him in one of the bars one morning.

Capt. John Yancey, USMC (Ret.) was a retired liquor store owner, and Arkansas’ most decorated war hero. He had earned his first Navy Cross in WWII, along with a battlefield commission to Lieutenant, and then joined up again for Korea at the age of 32. He and his company of 270 men attacked up Hill 1282 during the Battle of Choisin Reservoir. He took three Chinese bullets to his face, and ended up leading just 23 men back down the hill after taking it and being reinforced. He walked 10 miles to the medic tent. He won his second Navy Cross for that, plus 3 Purple Hearts. Many think he should have gotten the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Come Vietnam, at the age of 45, he tried to enlist again, to lead a company of marines. They unfortunately wouldn’t take a man so riddled with holes. It was around this time he got involved in state politics in Arkansas, supporting integration. He ran for Senator on this platform against the noted racist and later Governor, Orval Faubus, and lost. He knew he would, but he had to do it. He’d served with too many good black soldiers.

Several years later, there he was, driving his 1963 Pontiac from Guatemala to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he had an apartment and some friends. He stopped in Puerto Arista on the way, and needed someone to help him with the driving. Thanks be, he asked me. He’d pay the room and board for the trip. I tried, I really tried to drive that car, but it was a three-on-the-tree, and I just couldn’t make it work. Poor John ended up doing all the driving. John always wore a one piece overall with short sleeves and short pants that he had designed for himself. It looked silly, but it was very practical and comfortable, and had lots of pockets. In the shirt pocket, along with his currency, John kept a tiny loaded automatic.

We got to Cuernavaca, John turned in to his apartment and I booked the cheapest hotel in the center of town I could find. John spent the next few days introducing me to all his friends. They were a motley crew to be sure. There was Margaret, a dear middle-aged lady who loved square-dancing. Her ex-husband had been the CIA station chief in Chile in 1973, just 4 years before, when Allende was overthrown. She used to say “The colonels and the generals, they were so dashing, they danced so well. Especially General Leigh”. Air General Gustavo Leigh was the man who invented air-dropping dissidents out of helicopters over the ocean.

Then there was Bill, the ex-CIA spook, who seemed to have forgotten the “ex” part. He was always armed, and would often, late at night and drunk, accost innocent drivers in their cars and force them to drive him home from the Zocalo.

The Zocalo, that’s where everyone met in the evening for café and drinks. The CIA spooks would share tables with the veterans of the Spanish Civil War, the former members of the Lincoln-Washington Brigade and its Canadian equivalent, the MacKenzie-Papineau Brigade. Blacklisted New York intellectuals would sip café express with crypto-Fascists and old OSS men, dedicated still to the downfall of Communism.

Once, sitting in the Zocalo, I saw a big black Mercedes drive through. In the back seat, clearly recognizable, were Henry Kissinger and the newly former Shah of Iran. Henry was gently taking him to his first exile, a mansion outside town. By the way, this Zocalo, unlike many more modern town squares, still had a classic Paseo every weekend evening. The boys in their finery would walk arm-in-arm clockwise around the Zocalo, while the girls, in their finery, would walk arm-in-arm counterclockwise. Everybody was on display, and many brides were courted. In the soft Mexican twilight, it’s the most romantic thing imaginable.

Eventually I met Ruth, an indomitable octogenarian from New York City. She and her husband had left the US during the McCarthy years and never returned. She was very active in the local expat cultural centre, where they had book groups, poetry readings and pottery classes. That’s another story, but I ended up building Ruth a theatre for her cultural centre and running it for her. We put on two dozen plays in two years, some in Spanish, some in English, some in both tongues. Our masterwork was a production of Peter Weiss’ Marat-Sade, with a cast of dozens. The church which was our landlord, took umbrage at the explicitly anti-clerical tone of the play and kicked us out. I left shortly after.

But I’ll never forget John Yancey, and I owe him a debt of gratitude. He literally rescued me at my lowest point, and gave me a new purpose. He died in 1986, and has a statue in Fayetteville and a Marine Reserve company in Texas named after him. He didn’t look like a hero, with his white cotton short-short onesies and his collapsed face and the tiny automatic pistol in his shirt pocket, but he was. A real life everyday hero. Semper fi, John.

Bush League

Bush League

I’m a Boomer and when I was born, I first lived at Heart Lake in Brampton, deep in the bush outside of Toronto, at the end of a long rutted road. Of course, Brampton is a jam-packed urban community now, with a big city mayor and big city scandals, but the bush is never far away in this country, where we snuggle up to the southern border and leave most of the land to the moose.

I’ve had a lot of interesting jobs, but among the most awe-inspiring and scenic ones were in the bush; as a prospector, a timber cruiser and a surveyor. I’ve crossed the Divide at dawn in a helicopter, seen the sun rise over the snowfields to the strains of Bach on the earphones, I’ve walked forest floor that none but wildlife have walked, not even First Nations people. I’ve snowshoed through the trackless northern forest, talking to the Whisky Jacks and eating lunch on a deadfall in the snow.

I did that rite of passage for every Canadian Boomer during the 70s, driving across the country to BC with friends in a van. In my case, my younger sister and a buddy. We had a great trip, we’d tricked out the van with cabinets and beds and speakers and a stove, we spurned campgrounds for pull outs on the highways, fireroads and rutted lanes. We woke up with cows peering in the windows..

When we got to Vancouver, we camped out on city streets and friends’ driveways in the van and took jobs, all three of us, selling Texas desert lots in the uninhabited Victoria Mountains, $1000 for 5 acres. We did it from a phone room on Marine Drive, for a dodgy American guy with an Alfa Romeo 1750 GTV and the hots for younger sister. If I knew then what I do now, I’d have bought one of those lots, that was beautiful country, and totally isolated.

I wangled a job with a very respectable timber survey firm. Timber surveying is a big business in BC, and requires good legs and a head for math. We worked in crews of four, lived out of motels, had our lunches made and ready for us by the motel restaurant in the first hours before dawn, and we spent all day in the bush.

Timber cruising involves doing a series of random “plots”, where you count the cubic footage of the timber inside a specified circle. If a tree is very large, but far away, it can still be in the plot. The smaller the tree, the closer to the centre of the plot it has to be to be included in the count. Then the diameter at breast height (DBH) of each tree is measured, and the height (with an inclinometer and a surveyor’s chain. And some trigonometry). A simple formula yielded the cubic footage of lumber in the plot.

Occasionally I’d encounter giants of the forest, unimaginably large cedars or Giant Firs, as big around as a circus tent, and I’d subtly alter my trajectory to make sure they stayed out of my plots. In theory, I wasn’t a very honest timber cruiser, kind of missing the point of the exercise.

Giant Fir, or Abies Grandis, is a prized silviculture tree, but hard to find. If you find a Giant Fir, and can get some live pine cones from it, each ‘petal’ contains a seed, and back then, a seed was worth a dollar. So lots of timber cruisers carried .22 rifles to shoot down pine cones from 300 feet up. It was a lucrative side-business I never benefited from because I didn’t have a rifle.

There was the winter job, where we crossed the Divide on the way to work in our chopper at dawn each day. There were jobs on Vancouver Island, where the forest floor is so thick it’s jungle, and the trees are so big you can’t see their tops in the fog.

Later I worked for an old prospector. His nephew and I were his crew, and we traveled in a clapped-out old Land Rover. We did a job in the Omineca Range, staking claims. Our camp was a one hour chopper flight in from the end of a 140 mile dirt road. It was isolated beyond belief. It was early spring, and there was still snow on the ground when we arrived for a 6 week stay. We had provisions for that long, and no more, space in the chopper was limited.

While we were working, surveying and cutting lines through the bush and staking claims, I cut myself quite seriously on the knee with my chainsaw. Typical camp accident. But there was no way out, and no doctor and not much of a medical kit. I was several klicks away from camp, so I bound my leg with plastic flagging tape and toilet paper, and using a claim stake as a cane, hobbled back. One day off, letting it knit, and I was out again. I still have the scar, one of many.

At the end of our stay, the food started running out. Towards the end, all we had were canned kippers and saltine crackers. A bear attacked the camp one morning early, and our boss shot him with his Winchester. We ate bear for the next two days and bear tastes terrible. We were so glad to see that chopper come.

When we landed back at base camp , we found the couple who owned the big log cabin at the end of the 140 mile dirt road we’d started from were throwing us a bush party to celebrate our return, along with two other crews. That party was like nothing I’d ever seen, bearded prospectors out of the woods for the first time in months, dogs seeing other dogs for the first time, 4-by-4s full of beer and whisky, miners and loggers and prospectors’ sisters and daughters dressed in their best, looking for husbands. I fell asleep that night in an outhouse and no one woke me, they just let me sleep and used the hole beside me.

We set out on that long road the next morning. It was slow going. The Land Rover was loaded with all our camp gear plus the samples we had collected, and us. It was missing a leaf spring in the rear and had a distinct slant. There was very little room inside, and there was a huge canvas covered bundle on the roof, with an enormous moose skull I had picked up strapped on the front. That moose skull went on to live over the fireplace at my house in the city. After about 100 miles, we were running low on gas. The next stop was still 40 miles down the dirt road, so we first used up all the spare chainsaw gas (mixed with two-stroke oil), then we switched to naptha fuel for the camp stoves. By this time the Rover (which is famous for being able to run on an alcoholic’s pee, if necessary) was farting and belching blue smoke. We were adding used chain oil by the time we grunted into the gas station in Fort St John.

Camping isn’t romantic for me. It’s what you have to do, if you work in the bush. I have seen improbably romantic things, though, like wolves across a frozen river howling at a mountain moon, mounds of lupins surrounding unknown lakes and vista from a mountaintop that included miles of forests and wildflowers and no human traces.

There’s a lot of bush in Canada, more than enough for all of us. More of us should get to know at least a little bit of it.

Star Gazer

Star Gazer

I’m a boomer, born the year On The Waterfont won the Oscar™ for Best Picture (and Best Actor for Marlon Brando, Best Director for Elia Kazan, Best Supporting Actress for Eva Marie Saint and Best Screenplay for Budd Schulberg). These are all artists I admire (worship?), mostly for their integrity. OK, Elia Kazan. It must have been a good year for film, and I hope some of it rubbed off on me.

I’ve been an actor most of my adult life (along with all the other jobs I’ve done), and I’ve had my share of run-ins with other artists of the stage, screen and TV.

In the early 80s, I got my Equity card and worked on a production of Tennessee Williams’ Night of the Iguana. In the next theatre over, Len Cariou was doing the Scots Play. Now he plays a grandfather on Bluebloods, but he was a strapping young man then. He specialized in curtain calls. Intricately choreographed, they were often the high point of his performances. For this play, he had devised an ingenious one. After the last scene, he’d rush off stage and dunk his head in a bucket of water. When he came on for his bows, the lights behind him would come up, and the ones in front would go down. He’d stretch his arms out to either side like a man crucified, and  throw himself forward from the waist. This would create a halo of water drops that would explode in the lights and drench the first few rows. Very dramatic stuff.

I’d seen him a year or two earlier at Stratford giving his Coriolanus. His bow for that play was more complex. He’d come on slowly, wearing his long Legionnaire’s cloak, then, thrusting one leg forward, sink back on his other knee and hide his head under his cloak, as if apologizing for an unspeakable act. If you know the play, it was apt.

I was camera stand-in for, among others, Ian McShane, who later became so foul-mouthed as storekeeper Al Swearingen in Deadwood. He called me his “doublier”, a euro-affectation I found charming. He taught me an vital lesson. Shoes are important. “You can be well-dressed in rags if you’re wearing a well-built pair of shoes”. He favoured heavy-duty ventilated wing-tips. I’ve followed his advice ever since, always making sure I’m wearing good footwear for auditions.

During this period, I was also a camera stand-in for Rip Torn, before his Larry Sanders and Men In Black days. Now, in those days, Rip didn’t work after 5 PM, when he had a standing date with Mr. Jack Daniels. I was notorious on set for my mimicry, including my perfect take on Rip’s guttural growls. Rip was doing John Huston, and I was doing Rip doing John Huston, so it was all very meta. “I lit Bogie with a slash of light, I can do the same with a god damned bottle of beer!” was my favourite line. As it turns out, I got to do Rip for camera. I’m the same size (somewhat younger). Near the end of the shoot, they had to pick up some lines including a couple of reverses of Rip (shots taken from behind the actor). It was past 5 PM on one of the last days of the shoot and Mr. Torn wasn’t available. I was put into his costume, shot from the back, and did the lines in my best Rip voice. They’re there in the finished movie, but I dare you to tell which ones.

I starred on Littlest Hobo with Keenan Wynn, who had played Col. “Bat” Guano in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. He told amazing stories of the shoot. “I was staying at the Dorchester in London when Stanley gets on the elevator. “Keenan” he says “are you in town for a few days? Come and be in my picture”. I went up to Pinewood the next day for costumes, and the day after that I was on the set. There was no script, you know, Terry Southern and Stanley were writing it as they went along, an hour or two ahead of the cameras. I got to improv most of my lines, including when I say “You think I go into battle with pocket change?” and “You’ll have to answer to the Coca Cola company for that””. So much for the image of Kubrick as the master puppeteer, obsessing over every shot.

Other tidbits: Robert Mitchum did an MOW (Movie of the Week) in Toronto on which I was an extra. I saw his script. Whole pages were stroked out - “NAR”, for “no acting required”.

I met Edward James Olmos back in 1980, when he was Ed Olmos and hadn’t done Bladerunner yet. He was making his living mostly playing poker.

I was camera stand-in in a mini-series starring Lesley Ann Warren. She was supposed to age from 20 to 80 in the picture, but as it went on (it was being shot chronologically) she refused to go grey. Her hair just got blonder and blonder as the years passed. One day she came out of her trailer, impeccably costumed and made up, sneezed daintily and deposited about a gram of coke on her upper lip. The good ol’ days.

 I met Saul Rubinek on a plane and told him I liked his work in Unforgiven with Clint Eastwood (he was the reporter who pees his pants). He wasn’t that happy with my admiration, and I realized Ned Beatty probably felt the same way when people congratulated him on Deliverance.

I was in a show with Shirley Douglas (the aforementioned Night of the Iguana), and opening night, her father Tommy came. I was starstruck. The father of Medicare! I wanted to talk to him about the doctors’ strike in Saskatchewan, but all he, a former bantamweight boxer, wanted to talk about was the Ali-Holmes fight that night. As it turned out, Ali lost, and only fought once more. Shirley’s kid was there too, gangly boy named Kiefer Sutherland, about 12 or 13 years old.

I auditioned for an NDP TV ad (a rare bird) three days before their leadership convention, at which Tom Mulcair was elected. The script  included a little speech from Olivia Chow, in which she mentioned that the new leader was experienced as an MP, an MPP and a cabinet minister. Well, only one of the candidates (Mulcair) fit that description, so  it was clear the whole convention was a sham; the votes that counted had already been counted and everyone in the central office knew he was the winner. But no one bothered to tell Brian Topp, Nathan Cullen or Nikki Ashton. This is the result of internet voting. No genuine public drama.

I was on a flight from LAX back to YYZ, in the front of the plane, and Joni Mitchell was two rows back. The flight attendants were agog, and I imagine they met a lot of celebrities on that run. I wrote "I could drink a case of you and I would still be on my feet" on my menu card, and asked one of the flight attendants to take it to her. Joni in turn asked me to sit beside her, which she insisted I do for the entire flight, and talked about...me. I asked her to autograph the menu card I had sent and she said no, she wanted to keep that one, so she signed her own.

One last story; Tom Selleck was blackmailed in Toronto by a jealous hairdresser who bugged his trailer. Tom told the craft union “I don’t really care, but he should get help”. Classiest guy in show business, Tom Selleck, who happens to play Len Cariou’s son in Bluebloods. And so we come back to where we started. I wonder if Tom’s picked up any good curtain calls from Len?

The Eye of the Needle

The Eye of the Needle

I’m a boomer, old enough to remember hearing a roomful of adults congratulate another adult for getting a raise to $100 a week. “Geez, that’s a lot of money for a young man. What are you going to do with it all”. It wasn’t huge wealth, but it was a solid living wage. During my corporate career, in my mid-forties, I somehow had six figures in the bank one Christmas. Little did I know that was the high point of my peak earning years, and I’d never see it again. I haven’t.

But I’ve met some wealthy and some fabulously wealthy people along the way. I know a hedge fund manager (I roomed with him at boarding school) who built a two storey climate controlled library on his Connecticut farm to contain his Gutenberg Bible. Wolf had places in Sun Valley, San Diego, Connecticut and on Park Avenue, plus a little pied-a-terre in Toronto, where I occasionally saw him over the years.

Wolf’s the first really rich person I noticed driving a mid-90s Toyota Landcruiser, made in Japan, with leather seats and right hand drive. These seem to be the favoured cars of the extremely wealthy, and it gives me a frisson to know younger sister, who’s married to a rich rancher in the mountain west, used to drive two of them. High mileage goes with the terrain, and I think one died and the other (“Mogadishu”) is working on half a million miles on the odometer.

Wolf worked in the Reagan White House in the early 80s, and he loved Reagan, believed in him implicitly. Then he became chairman of a group called Republicans for Kerry. Then an outfit called Republicans for Obama. I guess you’d say he isn’t really a republican anymore. He’s too smart to hang with the tinfoil hat crowd that runs the party nowadays, but too rich to be a democrat.

Then there was Luke. He had been head of the energy trading department of a Wall Street investment bank, and had left to set up his own company. He had more money than God, and he enjoyed it. When my wife and I were visiting her in the mountain west, younger sister took us over to see him and his wife for lunch at one of their ranches. We traveled in Mogadishu, the surviving Landcruiser, through breathtakingly astonishing mountain scenery in the middle of nowhere. After crossing the aptly named Sunlight Basin, we followed the course of a deep canyon-bound mountain river high into the Continental Divide.

There was a wire gate, unmarked, at the side of the highway. We opened it, passed through and closed it (opening and closing gates is what the person in the shotgun seat does in the mountain west, and heaven help you if you forget to close a gate). After passing through a small meadow at the lip of the canyon, the track disappeared over the edge. We inched down it, younger sister at the wheel, Mogadishu in 1st and in low range. The gradient was easily 30 degrees, and intended only for four-wheel drive vehicles. This was what’s known as a “Jeep ranch”.  After a bit, the track took a hairpin bend in the other direction. There being no room to turn, we simply reversed down the next leg of the track. This is how you got down into the canyon, zig-zagging back and forth, forward, reverse, forward, reverse, always in the lowest gear. I asked younger sister how one did this in winter, when I knew the snows were ten feet deep and more. “This is a summer ranch” she said.

At the bottom of the canyon finally, we crossed the river, a raging torrent at this time of year, on a homemade iron bridge. The first thing we saw was Luke’s plane, a Pilatus Porter. It’s a short-take-off-and-landing (STOL) craft, and the only plane that could land in that canyon. Built like a bulldozer, with fat grippy tires and an enormous engine, it could take off in its own length and land in a hundred  feet. Not pretty, not fancy, but perfectly designed to get into this one ranch.

Beyond the plane was the main ranch house (with a Landcruiser parked beside it). Luke collected wooden cabins from all over the mountain west, transported them to his ranches (usually this one) and rebuilt them, but this ranch house was different. In front, in all its white Orthodox glory was a perfect replica of the Polish Pavilion from the 1904 World Exposition in St Louis, with its onion domes and hipped roof. This contained the ranch kitchen, the whole building. The rest of the ranch house was a collection of pristinely restored log cabins joined together and stretching back to the river bank, where there was a porch from which you could engage in fly fishing in the mountain stream.

We had lunch, us visitors, he and his wife and the new baby, the nanny, the ranch manager and his wife and the pilot (who longed to be back in Switzerland). Luke told us of offering to loan BP the only ship in the world large enough to store the oil they had pumped up from the leak in the Gulf, a ship he happened to own. BP turned down his offer. Later he stole BP’s chairman to run his own company, and ended up leasing the ship to BP anyway for a fortune.

After lunch, we took off to see his newest cabin. We (my wife and I) traveled pillion on Luke’s two electric ATVs. Most of his ranch was inside the National Forest, where motorized vehicles weren’t allowed, so this was a barely legal wheeze to get around this restriction. The new cabin was, like all the others, rugged, rustic and pristine, and it sat on the edge of the river. It had iron bars on the windows and a thick wooden door from an antique beer fridge. “Grizzlies” said Luke. Inside, Persian carpet on the rough wood floor, piles of art books, handmade furniture from ranch buildings and a huge four poster with a thick down mattress, comforter and Navajo blanket. Roughing it in the mountain west.

For all his wealth and influence, I had something Luke didn’t have. Cuban cigars. Montecristos. The best. I gave him a pack, and his gratitude was genuine and enormous. It was nice to know I could do something for a guy who had more money than God.