Smoke Drink Sleep

Yesterday was my birthday and as I enter the second act of my life, I thought I would take stock of where I’ve been, where I am and where I want to go for the next 30 odd years. Unfortunately, I don’t have the cash flow to take a trip around the world to figure this out so my backyard in St.Catharines Ontario will have to suffice. As the coffee brews, I ruminate on birthdays of years gone by. Events that were anticipated months ahead and usually involved a week’s worth of pub crawls, brunches, work lunches and a few dinners. Fast forward to 2010 where I sat home, savouring multiple episodes of Millionaire Matchmaker and Flipping Out with 2 complicated poodles by my side and a cheap but earnest bottle of Pinot Grigio. I cast my mind way, way back to my twenties, the “Smoke” years.

After years of confinement at the National Ballet School, I decided to cut loose and embark on a career with ballet’s poorer, black sheep cousin, Modern Dance. Modern dance in the 70’s and 80’s was taking shape covertly in dusty cockroach infested lofts and church basements around the city. Where ballet was an exercise in torturous control, submission and starvation, modern dance was a haven for reckless behaviour and starvation. Modern dance was heavy with importance, angst and ferocity. The first time I walked into Toronto Dance Theatre to take a Martha Graham technique class with Patricia Beatty, I almost puked with fear. This was a fierce crowd; the Graham technique really separates the men from the mice. Ballet is all about the fantasy, swans sleeping with humans, village girls going insane after misguided affection for royalty, Willies, I don’t even know how to start to explain Willies. Tight buns both on the head and in the rear, sparkly short skirts, stop on a dime pirouettes and Cirque de Soleil flexibility. All served up with a saccharine smile that says, “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in the world right now! My feet are bleeding, I threw up my meal before the show and I will have hip replacements before I’m fifty but just try to stop me! I’m here until someone yanks my 36 year old bones off this stage!”

Over at Modern dance headquarters, Ms. Graham was eating you from the inside out. The work was intense, raw, the slight hint of an insincere movement being called out immediately. The dancers wore ripped, threadbare clothes; hair carelessly tossed on top of the head or even better, shaved off to make way for the art. Modern dance was living out loud and if there was an issue it was vigorously debated, combusted, thrown into the ring to fend for itself. It was not for the faint hearted and I admit that every time I walked into a Graham class, I felt as though there was a Vegas style neon sign on my back that read “IMPOSTER!!" I was a cross over from the trite world of ballet and no matter how hard I tried to rein it in, I’d inevitably start to get giddy when a pirouette was introduced or my leg lifted above knee level. Busted! At one of our post show receptions, an embittered, catty drunken male teacher of mine slurred angrily, “You may be classically trained but you have no control over your glute muscles!” (Translation: ass or as ballet discreetly calls it derriere)

Ouch, thems fighting words but I was still in my Smoke phase and I didn’t have the moxie to tell him he was flat- footed and had limited range in his arabesque. I meekly lit another cigarette to stave off the hunger and sipped my el cheapo glass of white absently wondering if I would ever meet a straight man.
I loved gay men and still do though not in a stalker fag haggy kind of way. I had little choice considering I was ensconced in the world of dance since I was seven years old. I fell madly in love with an assortment of gay men. To me, it was a glass half- full situation, maybe I would be that woman that changed it all but of course my optimism has always tended to be wildly misplaced and this pattern was no exception. I learned to live with unrequited love or at best, science experiments that lasted a few days on average.

Modern dancing wasn’t exactly a lucrative career. You really had to love it, I mean really had to love it because this was before the “So You Think You Can Dance” days and the audience for modern dance was typically about 40 other modern dancers who had to hate it on principal. So you rehearsed your butt off for around 3 months pre- show, performed for little or no money and then danced for an audience of peers in a show that opened and closed the same night. I would emerge after the show to a small group of loyal friends that all wore the same puzzled look on their faces or even worse, my parents with my mother fighting back tears of horror and frustration for a career that had gone so horribly off track. To bankroll my sickness, I spent 4 nights a week bartending at the downtown Holiday Inn ,being serenaded by a roster of lounge singers and drunken businessmen. On slow evenings, I would anonymously send up requests for “Puppy Love” by Donny Osmond but they caught on to me around the third week and would roll their eyes and throw the crumpled request to the floor.

By my late twenties, I decided it was time to hang up my dancing togs when I was offered a full-time job at the trendiest address on Queen St… Citytv. No more bartending, no more slogging my way through dance studios, this was a real job with real people making real money. Or so I thought.
Here comes the “Drink” phase. The transition from starving artist to full time employment was fairly painless because I landed in the one job chocked full of renegade ideas, explosive on- air personalities and the ultimate wizard behind the curtain and more often in front of the camera directing it all. Having grown up at the ballet school, I had never been to high school or university and this was as close as I could get to that experience. Best of all, best of all, it was crawling with single men. I was like a kid in a candy shop. The place was dripping with sex and I was making up for lost time. I still loved my gay men but it was novel to spend time with a guy who wasn’t checking other guys out though they weren’t much good at sharing feelings I soon discovered. These were the golden years of Laurie Brown and Daniel Richler’s “New Music”. The city watched as Erica Ehm learnt the ropes live on air. There was a spontaneity that suggested things weren’t in control because often things weren’t in control. Ideas came from every nook and cranny in the joint not a bunch of suits sitting in a boardroom. It was sometimes volatile, competitive, childish, petty and emotional and I was in heaven. We worked together, we drank after work together, we slept together, some married (myself included) co-workers, divorced co-workers, married other co-workers, we told tales out of school. The cleaning man, a middle aged Italian man named Mike, was suddenly catapulted to local fame as a recurring feature in promotions for the station. Our staff parties started at 6pm in the building and often didn’t wrap up until 6am the next morning. Love it or hate it, there wasn’t any other programming like it anywhere and Toronto finally got to see its multi-cultural community reflected on television. Nothing was off limits. Brona Brown and her camera would tour the halls and pounce on unsuspecting employees to give a vignette summation of the job they were performing. You could always tell she was en route by the sudden surge of people diving into hallways, under editing bays and behind pillars to avoid the on camera assault. Brona, walking the deserted halls, pleading for someone to toss her a break and appear in a segment. And it was always on a day you were hung-over, wearing glorified pyjamas and no make-up.

Public meltdowns were commonplace, drinking at lunch was mandatory and the birth of the videographer, a cheap solution to the traditional full crew marked the dawn of a new era. We made shit money and spent most of it on alcohol, cigarettes and taxicabs. We were given a daily hall pass to leave the building with expensive equipment to make TV for god’s sake! To this day, I haven’t quite replaced that level of creativity in a workplace and I wonder if it’s even possible.

A few production companies later, a few trials at living in different cities, marriage, divorce, death, motherhood, we now settle into the “Sleep” phase though by that I don’t mean to infer that I am going to lie down and die. Not yet anyway. I am older and wiser though let’s not bank too much on the wiser part. The good news is I suspect you don’t ever really figure it out. I and many of my peers have honed skills, active minds (if not bodies) and yet are being cast out in droves to make way for the new generation of upstarts. Fair enough, I don’t need to take on the digital revolution; I’m too tired for that. We will always need upstarts, but I still want to kick some proverbial ass. With the exception of HBO, I find television is looking and feeling more and more like the fifties. Safe, mundane, and inoffensive. Me thinks the upstarts, have some upstarting to do. I don’t want to get my information from Barbie and Ken.

So what is a middle aged gal to do? While many, (in fact all those I mocked for having safe employment choices) are now cashing in on the other end with early retirements, I’m still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. Creativity doesn’t fade away; it just goes to bed earlier. I’m still curious, I still give a shit and I know you do too. So to all you old renegades out there, what say you we get together, throw it against a wall and see if it sticks? I’ll watch you if you watch me...