The Great Montreal Theatre Escape: Day 1

Dearest and most beloved reader,

Today marks day one of a 25 day journey to the Great Quebec City known in some quarters as "Montreal". For the next 25 days you will be treated to my many madcap adventures as I seek enlightenment as Artist-In-Residence at the Nouveau Theatre Ste-Catherine. Please be advised that what you are about read may be the product of a body polluted with cheap steamed hot dogs, $2 late night chow mien, beers with images of polar bears printed on their labels, and smoked meat sandwiches served with large dill pickles and dark cherry pop. You have been warned.

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Outside my plane window I can glimpse heaven. It is beautiful even though a little cliche. Bright sun, Blue to every corner of the earth and clouds lining the open air beneath me like cotton swabs. High above Toronto heading to Montreal, I can only guess at where the next few weeks will take me. Artist-in-residence or, as Alain likes to call it, "Poet-In-Residence". I'm not sure if I'm a poet really. I am prone to writing short and ethereal pieces of writing from time to time, sure, but whether or not these words are indeed "poetic" is really not for me to decide. I tend to think they are honest at best, smug at worse. But hey, call me what you will.

For those who don't know, I am in Montreal for the next three and a half weeks, sleeping at the Nouveau St. Catherine performing in plays, conducting workshops and writing a show for the Toronto Fringe Festival. It is an exciting time, one marked by a true desire to shed my current life for a while as I attempt to recharge depleted batteries corroded with acid. I have amassed a vast collection of distractions at home and my trip here is an attempt to avert my drooling gaze, if for only a moment. I have been in serious regression mode as of late and have tired many of my friends with persistent rants about it. The fact that I can't write a blog in any sort of timely manner has been one of the pronounced effects.
Yes, I promised about a quadrillion times to write Girls Part 2. And yes, there has been an actual response from readers to produce that blog. (and I thank you all for your enthusiasm)
GIRLSGIRLSGIRLSGIRLSGIRLSGIRLSGIRLSGIRLSGIRLS. Girls. Girls. girls. g.i.r.l.s.
The word has lost all meaning to me.
The truth is I tried to write it (and this is no excuse for my poor blog production) and twice it was accidentally erased. I mean, I had gone through all of grade 7 and 8 on that second write. But the truth was, even with the blog half written, I was never really happy with it. To be honest, I'm sick of girls. Completely and utterly sick. Puke inducing, fever increasing, pus spouting, stay at home and suck down mama's homemade chicken broth kind o' SICK. Girls have been the only thing I've thought about for the last six months. They are the only thing I ever think about. And in trying to relate my early experiences with them here, I realize I was never any good at understanding them in the first place. It can be said that in some respects I have grown wiser but in regards to my understanding of women? Murky at best. Nothing is as it seems, nothing is what you wish it to be and (and this one applies to most things in life) nothing worthwhile ever comes easy. I love and I bleed and I let the wind pull me off and over the mountain and into the watery rocks below. Where I'll be skewered is any one's guess but skewered I will be. To UNDERSTAND women, to understand any one's motivations really, is well beyond my current capabilities. I can only hope to understand myself and even that is a work in progress. So enough with the women already, as beautiful and mysterious as they may be! My intention here is to get shit done. To work as an artist instead of working as a hotel worker or a beer vendor. Not that I mind working those jobs; they are fine ways to piece together some scratch. But sometimes I forget about the Me that I enjoy, the one that works towards creating something meaningful. The Me that tries to dance with the invisible forces we all know are shaking their booty on the dance floor beneath the surface of our lives, while our cool selves stand slouched against the gymnasium wall. Too cool to dance, too cool to care. I want to find that ME on the hooker laden streets of St. Catherine and St. Laurent as the lights from Pussy Corp (the brothel that sits across the theatre) glint through my bedroom window. I want to sit him down and remind him that he still exists.

The sun is so bright that it glints off my Steam Whistle can like a lit match. (and yes, there is free alcohol on this flight and although its not even noon, I'm on my second). Over the next few weeks I will be sharing my adventures here if only to remember them as nights of Boreal Blonde and St. Ambroise Rouge claw their way into my memory like a sandstorm kicking up a dusty haze. No doubt I will find something here. Perhaps we can even discover it together.

When I land, I'll have three hours to get to the theatre and rehearse MOANS, a drama written by Alain Mercieca and directed by Robin Henderson. I have yet to meet my cast but already I feel like they are good friends. I'm not sure why, but I somehow know that they will be.
However, Moans opens on Feb. 18th and isn't the first show I'm doing while here. Squeegee Nights, another Alain penned script, opens Feb. 3rd, a week from today. Its a show I did in 2006 at Theatre 314, a small underground space at the corner of St. Laurent and Des Pins. This means nothing, I can barely remember the last 25 minutes. Its like starting from scratch and we only have three days of rehearsal before getting it up in front of an audience. Yeah, I'm kinda freaking out about it. But this is working with Alain and I'm accustomed to throwing myself into the fire.

How far we have come and yet so much remains the same.


Moving from the piecemeal stage of a converted loft to the three-story fully licenced Theatre St. Catherine, I'm really excited for Alain and Mark Louch. They have created something beautiful here.
I realize there is a large spectrum of accomplishment within the sphere of anonymity, and within that spectrum I'm starting to feel quite accomplished. I am like the Bobby De neiro of unknown and unimportant and although this comes with no tangible award and serves no meaningful distinction, I wear this invisible badge proudly. I think it's the little delusions that add up to create our own personal veils of reality. The big delusions are just too phony and too easily crumpled like tissue paper. We need the strong binding of interconnected little lies to make it
durable. Delusion that you can feel between your finger and thumb.

Incidentally, urinating on a plane is an odd sensation. The seemingly mundane act of pissing hundreds of miles above the ground amazes me. Not only have we mastered flight, but we've mastered flight while including the comforts of alcohol, defecation and media consumption. Oh humanity, will you ever cease to amaze?

Now you may be wondering, how did a broke-ass "poet" ever find himself suited up and on a Porter flight? Well it turns out the hotel I work for gets discount flights and apparently this discount means that for $15 more I can fly to Montreal in an hour rather than sit cramped on a bus for eight hours. And if you ever flown on Porter, you will know that this is a significant upgrade indeed. Free coffee+free booze+ free Wi-Fi= free boner. It's almost as heavenly as the clouds billowing outside my window. Almost.

Oh. Apparently the flight is about to land. I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm away, that I'm excited and that I'm going to write here on this blog every bloody day. To all those in Toronto, Au revoir. Keep the city poppin' fresh while I'm away. And to all those in Montreal, Benvienue. I'm here to theatrically rip your town a new one.
My third Steam Whistle is on its way. I'll enjoy it. It's all Quebec microbrewery shit from this point onward.
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Its now 3:44am. I'm sitting in third floor office of the Theatre St. Catherine. My fold up mattress sits across from me and the desk I write on is covered in Alains' paper work, scripts and scattered DVDs. Pussy Corps sits outside my window like a leering vampire and the hollering screams of drunken revelry continue to mingle with cars cutting through slush. My first rehearsal was uplifting and I'm pleased to announce that my cast were the insta-friends I had hoped for. Karl, Lise and Gekko (a nickname everyone calls Steph, I figure I'll adopt it) are extremely talented actors who seem geniunely excited to be working on the project. And Robin our director worked on Dance Animal, a show that did extremely well at last years Fringe. I am playing Fritz, a drunk and abusive lover. The material is difficult but I knew I was in good company when Robin asked Gekko if she was comfortable with me being rough and sexual with her on stage and Gekko replied, "Bring it on". These are some dedicated individuals who aren't afraid to take risks. I can't wait to dig in.

Tonight I visited friends for dinner. I would be specific on who they are but when I told them that I'd be writing about them in my blog, they asked me not to name them. Given that I have openly spoke about my awkward experiences with colonoscopys and pubic hair growth, I'm not at all surprised by their reservations on the matter. We drank wine and ate a pizza that instead of dough used 4 types of meat as a base. A meatloaf pizza if you will. It was fucking awesome. The night was fun and I was introduced to Gary Vaynerchuk, a self-proclaimed wine guru who can be found at tv.winelibrary.com. He's quite the character, tasting and reviewing wine with an unbelievably refined pallet while spitting into a New York Jets helmet. Apparently, his parents worked in a wine store but because he couldn't drink until he was 21 years old, Gary Vaynerchuk decided to seek out the ingredients of the wines his family carried and consumed them to better understand the liquor he could not consume. That just seems crazy and I was skeptical but his plain spoken wine information was actually pretty entertaining and he did know what he was talking about. I think I'll post a video of his on Facebook before calling it a night. Apparently, if you drink a bunch of chardonnays from around the world and then drink a Californian Chardonnay while thinking about buttered popcorn, it will change the way you look at Californian Chardonnay. I can't imagine this to be true, but as soon as I can afford multiple bottles of wine, I'm going to give it try. I don't know why I'd want to link the flavor of wine with popcorn but the more I think about it, the more I'd like to.
And so the night ended with me arriving by Metro back to the theatre but being too restless, I decided to go for a walk and pick up a pack of cigarettes. No, I don't really smoke, but when I'm drunk and restless and there is no pot around, I often opt to have a smoke or two. So I set foot through the snow to find a Deppanneur that was still open. And much to my dismay, there wasn't one. I often hear Montrealers say that they dislike Toronto; that their city is more vibrant than ours. And while I can agree with this sentiment on certain fronts, one thing is for sure: If I'm wandering the heart of the city at 1 am where there is heavy foot traffic in Toronto, I would be sure to find smokes if I needed them. I walked nearly 40 minutes looking until my toes went numb and my nose dripped like boots coming in from the snow. Forty minutes. Not a single open convenient store. I eventually ended up at a bar where the people outside smoking spoke English. The man I spoke to seemed generally uninterested in helping my search but told that being from Toronto I should ask the guy from New York (?) who was standing outside smoking against the wall. So I asked the New Yorker if HE knew a place to buy some cigarettes. Since he himself had gone through a similar futile search, he pulled out his own pack and gave me 5 cigarettes. I shook his hand and thanked him for his generosity. His name was Douglas and he was an intellectual property lawyer. I asked him what he was doing in Montreal. He told me he had come up with his brother who had months ago gone through experimental corrective eye surgery. Apparently, laser eye surgery shaves off the top layer of you retina, taking off the defective part of you vision. However, Douglas' brother had too much of his retina shaved and now the fluids that build underneath the retina had nowhere to collect. So his eye bulged out of his socket, throwing his pupil off to the side of his face. On-line he found an experimental doctor in Montreal who invented a way to reverse this by FURTHER removing yet another layer of his retina and then injecting it with a vitamin compound that would thicken it, thus giving his eye fluids a place to collect and thus taking the pressure off his eye and hypothetically reverting it back to its original shape. Sound far fetched? Yeah, Douglas thought so too. That's why he was here to chaperon, to curb his brother's desperate need for a solution with sobering questions and inquires on the success rate of this operation. An experimental procedure was the reason for this mess in the first place, it seemed illogical that an even more experimental procedure could save the day. I could tell Douglas was drinking to alleviate the stress of it all, though hearing the shriek of the live band playing from inside the bar he was drinking at, I couldn't imagine any true peace could be found until he got back to his hotel room. I told him that I was a Torontonian living at a theatre for the month and we both parted ways wishing each other luck in our current affairs. With smokes aquired, I came back here and started to complete this blog.

And I am so tired. Its lonely here at the empty theatre but already I feel something happening. It might just be indigestion, but it's french indigestion and it comes cheap.

Having a gas.
That Blogging Bastard.