"Go home to your families!"

In mid-February, before I was felled by the flu and locked up inside for a week, I battled the mean streets of Hades -- well, mean sidewalks, actually. Oceans of colourless slush hemmed in by the berms which the city had failed to scrape away. Exhausted, damp, and chilled, I found myself on a twilight bus, checking my phone, like the other grey citizens of Ottawa. I saw bad news, and reacted in my early twenty-first century manner: I reposted it to Facebook, texted the Resident Fan Boy, and read the details at various news links on social media.

The lady next to me indicated that she'd like to get up.
"Oh, I'm getting out too," I assured her. "I'll just shut down my phone."
"I'm sorry, but I couldn't help noticing -- has Stuart McLean died?"

And we pulled our things together, sidling toward the exit, while talking of the Vinyl Café concerts we'd been to, and our favourite Dave and Morley stories. She said her parents would be especially upset; I told her the Resident Fan Boy had been a Stuart McLean fan since Morningside. She was probably a little too young to remember that far back.

I guess scenes like this were playing out across Canada on the evening of February 15th. By dinnertime, my expatriate friends were chiming in from the other sides of the globe.

I started listening to the tales about Dave and Morley when our daughters were tiny, and we couldn't get out much. The RFB and I attended our first Vinyl Café Christmas concert about twelve years ago. We spent that evening tucked up in the highest reaches of the upper balcony of the National Arts Centre, wrapped in the warm waves of laughter. After three or four years, we started taking our daughters along. Elder daughter love the stories; younger daughter loved the music. Since Ottawa was almost always the last stop of the tour, between 2003 and 2014, the Christmas show was our signal that the holiday was prepared for and truly beginning.

Stuart McLean was midway through the concert tour in 2015 when he learned he had melanoma. There was no Vinyl Café Christmas in Ottawa that year. In December 2016, the CBC stopped transmitting the Vinyl Café repeats. My heart sank a little then, but that mid-February phone flash still came as a shock. He was only 68. We had hoped for more Christmases, and more stories throughout the year.

One of the year-round features of the Vinyl Café programme on the radio was The Vinyl Café Story Exchange. The rules were simple. It had to be short, and it had to be true. Here's a story I'd always meant to share:

The week before the Christmas of 2005, the Resident Fan Boy and I attended the final Sunday matinée of the Vinyl Café season at the National Arts Centre. We were in Southam Hall, which is the largest of the four theatres that make up the complex. Before the Hall was renovated last summer, the rows in the orchestra section were lo-o-o-o-ong and curved, with no centre aisle. To add to the confusion, odd-numbered seats were all on the left, and even-numbers all on the right. The RFB and I attend several events at Southam Hall each year, so we took our seats by entering from the left aisle. Lots of people coming to the Vinyl Café, however, were from out-of-town, and/or rarely had a reason to come to the NAC.

Shortly before the show, a roly-poly lady entered our row from the left, and laboriously picked her way towards the centre, necessitating every one in her path to stand up and let her by.

A few seats beyond us, she stopped, quizzed a couple of people about their seats, and only then double-checked her ticket. It became clear from her body language that she was in the wrong row, marooned smack dab in the centre of the huge theatre.

By now, those of us who had risen to let her by were commenting on her predicament.

"Well," I remarked, "at least she's keeping going! Better than turning back and irritating the same people twice!"

"This is like a Bob and Morley story," declared the fellow sitting in front of us. He launched into an pitch-perfect Stuart McLean impression, complete with the trademark Stuart-stutter: "She was in the wrong row, so she-she-she just kept going! She-she didn't want to irritate the same people twice!"

We were all breaking up. The lady got to the very end of the row, way, way over on the right side of the concert hall, then had to circle back to the left side of the correct row, and get all those people to stand up to let her by.

The fellow in front kept up the monologue: "She-she-she finally made it to her seat. Ev-everybody applauded. She had no idea why!"

We all promptly broke into applause. The lady looked about her in bewilderment, as we dissolved into conspiratorial giggles.

That's what you could call a Canadian mean streak, I guess. It was about as mean as Stuart McLean ever got.

If you were there in person at a Vinyl Café Concert, Christmas or not, you got to hear the final line that never made it on the radio broadcast. The applause would just go on and on, until Stuart called out in mock-exasperation: "Go home to your families!"

That's just what I did, that frozen February evening.

In the warm darkness of the solstice

As I've mentioned in this blog before, we have an annual tradition of attending the Vinyl Cafe Christmas Concert. Some of the concerts stay with me for days, even weeks afterward; others are pleasant, but forgettable.  This year's show will probably be one I won't remember, except that I suspect that this was our tenth concert.

About ten years ago, the Resident Fan Boy and I decided to splurge on Vinyl Cafe tickets and wound up in the last row of the upper balcony where we heard the story "Christmas at the Turlingtons" for the very first time.  If it was 2004, that would be about right, because Stuart McLean published the story in a compilation the following year.  I remember rocking with laughter in the warm dark balcony.  After that, I don't think we missed a year.  Ottawa is usually one of the final stops for the tour before the musicians and crew return to their homes in Toronto, so there's an atmosphere of "almost ready for Christmas" about the whole thing.

Stuart told an abbreviated version of the story this afternoon; he often picks an old classic as a warm-up before introducing the new stories.  One of the new ones was funny, and other was longer and very sentimental.  McLean is leaning more and more towards sentimental tales, it seems.  He's getting older and they seem to be crowd-pleasers.  I nodded off.  I'm getting older too.

Here's a sampling of the original version of "Christmas at the Turlingtons".  Whoever posted it has it in three parts and you can find them all at YouTube.


However (and I've said this before too), my very favourite Vinyl Cafe Christmas story is not the classic "Dave Cooks the Turkey".  It's a fine story, but it's not my favourite.  This one is, and if you can spare 23 minutes, I don't think you'll be sorry.

Soup and Stuart

Up in our favourite loge at the National Arts Centre, I peered over the edge with my trusty bird binoculars as the seats filled for this year's Vinyl Cafe Christmas Concert. The Resident Fan Boy and I have been going every year for the past seven or eight years, and for this is the fourth one to which we've taken the girls. Elder daughter usually likes the stories; younger daughter loves the music.

The focus of these concerts is the "Dave and Morley" story; the Christmas concert usually offers two or three. At that time it's just Stuart McLean who created the Vinyl Cafe radio show about twenty years ago, a lectern with notes, and a microphone. He sort of dances as he tells the stories, sometimes his left foot kicks back, and his long fingers roll through the air before he draws them to his chest like a rabbit.

Younger daughter particularly enjoyed the jazz stylings of Christmas songs by the so-called "Vinylettes", three young women who have just completed the Jazz Performance Certificate at Humber College, a performing arts college in Toronto. Elder daughter was very pleased that the guest performer this year was Hawksley Workman. (Yes, that is his stage name; he was born Ryan Corrigan in Huntsville, Ontario.) I was pleased too; anyone who spends much time listening to CBC Radio Two will have heard him at one point or another. I'm always delighted to listen to the beautiful back-up of Dennis Pendrith and John Sheard who have to be amongst the ablest session musicians in Canada.

After the concert, we swam through the crowd (these concerts nearly always sell out) and the Resident Fan Boy bought Hawksley Workman's Christmas CD for elder daughter. Here's a sample of how he sounds. This YouTube film of a performance in Toronto a few years back joins him as he's beginning the second verse:


Let's make some soup 'cause the weather is turning cold
Let's stir it together 'til we are both grey and old
Let's stir it together 'til it tells the story of its own
Let's make some soup cause the weather is turning cold

Pumpkin and parsnip, carrots and turkey bones
Bay leaf and pepper, potato and garlic cloves
You stir a moment while I put more wood in the stove
Let's make some soup 'cause the weather is turning cold

Moon's almost full and the candles are burning low
It's almost midnight you wouldn't even know
The light gets reflected on freshly fallen snow
Let's make some soup cause the weather is turning cold

We'll make enough to feed everyone we know
We'll make enough to feed everyone we don't
No one is different and everyone's alone
Let's make some soup cause the weather is turning cold

Let's make some soup because everyone feels the cold
Let's make some soup cause the weather is turning cold

Almost a full moon
almost a full moon
almost a full moon
almost a full moon

In "havenly" peace

I've always seen Christmas as a dark but brightly lit harbour, and the old year as a stately ship (or at least a ferry boat), slowly drawing in to the quay. This past week, I've felt the engines change, and despite the Christmas flurry around us, a drifting sensation as we close on the safety of land, if only for a brief time before we get shoved back out to sea in January.

Christmas in Hades has much of the same comforting familiarity as anywhere else, I suppose, providing you do, in fact, take comfort in Christmas. Last Sunday, we were enveloped in the warmth and laughter of the annual Vinyl Café Christmas concert. I looked down from our loge upon a theatre jam-packed with pullover-wearing university types of all ages, and once again felt myself swept away by the performance of Matt Andersen who sang "People Get Ready" and "Silent Night" (and I'm not even that enamoured of "Silent Night"). John Sheard played "The Rocking Carol" and "O Little Town of Bethlehem" (the English version) and I was assailed by memories of Sunday School at the Unitarian Church of Edmonton. Actually, we sang another song to the tune of the latter:
The children of far-distant lands
With joyful song we greet
Hold out to us your friendly hands
Our circle to complete.
Around the world, so very wide,
Our circle it shall be
Goodwill and friendship need no tide
Nor ships to cross the sea.

As the week has passed, I saw the same sort of things you probably see as you have walked out these last days before Christmas: a family with one young blond girl in flowered snow boots carrying the potted poinsettia; two women sitting in a cafeteria, talking intently with the gift bags they've exchanged resting by their feet; a large blond dog trotting in and out of the traffic jam on Beechwood Avenue.

Wait -- you don't usually see that last item? Yes, I thought it was odd, too. I was on my way to the post office when I saw the dog and heard the frantic woman in pursuit: "Puppy! Here, puppy!" He gave her a "You talkin' to me?" look and continued to wend his way between the cars, some of which were impatiently trying to move. She followed, increasingly frantic: "Puppy! Puppy!"

Hmmn, I thought. She doesn't know his name. He trotted up the opposite sidewalk, very quickly, without actually running (he was very large), and the woman called ahead to a man waiting at the walk signal. I saw him duck, but the dog reappeared, now smack in the middle of the intersection of St Patrick and the Vanier Parkway which has a record of being one of the five most dangerous intersections in Ottawa. Another man appeared, clutching a red leash, and after some heart-stopping circling the dog managed to get to the traffic island on the far side, next to the Saint Patrick bridge, then loped toward the cycling path that follows the Rideau River, where he could theoretically proceed relatively unimpeded along the edge of Vanier, clear to Riverside. There was a car parked near the traffic light, bearing a sign reading "Pet Care Cab". I had the sinking feeling that this dog was being kenneled for the holiday and had escaped his caregivers. Yikes. It's one thing to lose your own dog, but someone else's dog...

May you never lose your dog. Or someone else's dog. May young children bring you love offerings and may you share a meal with an old friend. Most of all, may you find yourself in the warm and comforting dark of this holiday harbour, in the company of those who love you.

Merry Christmas.

O Holy Night, Batman!

We made our annual pilgrimage to the Stuart McLean Vinyl Cafe Christmas concert. After last year's trek through the blizzard without buses, it was rather a relief to take elder daughter, younger daughter, and this year, Demeter on the bus through the frigid Ottawa streets where we had a loge to ourselves. I felt confident that it would be a pretty good show when Stuart McLean opened with a slightly abbreviated version of my all-time favourite Dave-and-Morley Christmas story "Polly Anderson's Christmas Party", but I didn't see what was coming when a young man named Matt Andersen walked onto the stage.

Okay. He looks like a young Meatloaf. Sounds a bit like him too, but just imagine Meatloaf with less melodrama, more soul, a healthy dollop of folks and blues, and a Maritimer sensibility. He started singing, and I thought: He's good. As the song continued, I thought: Actually, he's amazing. And then, I don't know how to describe this, I drifted away on his voice, his performance, the marvelous support of bassist Dennis Pendrith and pianist John Sheard, both remarkable musicians in their own right and regulars on the Vinyl Cafe. The audience burst into applause mid-song and swept to their feet when he finally finished. Now, it's true that Ottawa audiences will give standing ovations to practically anybody; I'm not sure whether they want to be seen as discerning or warm (they are neither), but this time, they had a point. If you have seven minutes to spare please watch this; it will give you some idea of what we experienced. If you have two minutes, listen anyway; that's about how long it took for me to start wondering: Gad. Who is this guy?

When he came on again, they called up his mother from the audience. His parents had just flown in from New Brunswick and it had been his dad's first time on a plane, apparently. Matt sang a duet with his mum and it was...great. Then later, he sang "O Holy Night". I don't even like "O Holy Night" and I was transfixed.

Damn. This guy is good.

The rest of the show wasn't bad either.

Canadian Christmas traditions (part one?)

Yesterday, elder daughter and I set off into the snowfall smothering Ottawa. I knew we were in trouble when the CBC website described the snowfall for our area as "heavy". Quick translation: "flurries" = "light snowfall"; "light snowfall" = "heavy snowfall"; "heavy snowfall" = "no sidewalks to speak of and cars that resent your crossing the street because they're scared to stop". So elder daughter and I trudged through the ankle-twisting snow, trying to hit sidewalks where many pedestrians had been before us to wear a path down. Tricky on a Sunday, but more likely given the bus strike that has been going on for nearly two weeks and is unlikely to end anytime soon. (I'm planning to blog on this, but somehow none of my sentiments fit in with the Christmas spirit...)

We figured about fifty minutes to make it to the National Arts Centre, which is a little over three kilometres (2 miles for you Yanks), and we were about right, even with the wind whipping white into our faces. We joined the Resident Fan Boy and younger daughter, who had spent the morning at church and had lunched downtown. I took off my boots to relieve my stressed toes and chafed shins and watched my daughters watch the show for which we'd made the pilgrimage.

For the past five years or so, the Resident Fan Boy and I have been taking in Stuart McLean's Vinyl Café Christmas Concert. The Vinyl Café has been playing on CBC Radio for the past fourteen years; the Resident Fan Boy listens to it every Sunday as he prepares lunch. Stuart McLean is kind of like Garrison Keillor of The Prairie Home Companion, but not quite. His radio show showcases a bit of music (predominantly Canadian artists, particularly new jazzy, bluesy, country, or folksy ones). Somewhere in there he started telling the stories of Dave, the proprietor of The Vinyl Café, which is of course a vintage record store, and his wife Morley. The stories took off and are now the eagerly-awaited focus of the programme. The show, concerts and stories go year-round, but the Christmas stories have become a Canadian custom, particularly an early one entitled Dave Cooks the Turkey which now has legendary status. My personal favourite amongst the Dave-and-Morley Christmas stories is Polly Anderson's Christmas Party, and my favourite non-Christmas story is called The Cat in the Car which has actually physically hurt me; I was laughing that hard.

Anyway, this is the first Christmas we've taken the girls along, and I watched for their reactions nervously. Those tickets were expensive. Younger daughter grooved to the music; Christmas carols and songs expertly played by top-notch musicians. Also, a school-mate was invited to come on stage and distribute give-aways; she caught a glimpse of younger daughter in the loge and waved. Then I watched as elder daughter giggled helplessly to the three stories, which included Christmas at the Turlingtons, the first story we heard live five years ago, and I knew we were going to be okay. There was now simply the matter of trying to get home...

The Vinyl Café can be heard on a selection of public radio stations in the States, and on BBC7 in Britain, but I think you can hear most of the stories I've mentioned for free here.