Three Things from Edmonton podcast - Episode 58: showtime, story time, freeze frame


Here's this week's  Three Things podcast. Thanks for giving it a listen. Or a read.

1. Showtime 🎭

Auntie Shelagh and I were sitting at the back of the Chez Pierre Cabaret when we met Battista, who was at the table next to ours. It was a few years ago. That night, Darcia and Boris, aka the Mercury Opera Company, late of Edmonton, used the infamous strip club to stage La Traviata, in full voice and fully clothed.

At intermezzo, the lights came up, conversation rose and we said hello to the neighbours. Saying hello to strangers in Edmonton isn’t like saying hello in other places. Nobody really asks Where do you live? or Where are you from? or What’s your church? to get a read on someone’s beliefs. It’s more, How are you doing? or Are you enjoying the show? Maybe the prying extends to, Where did you go to high school? But looking at Battista’s Roman profile and judging his age to be within three years or so of mine, I knew his high school was either O’Leary or St. Joe’s. I went to O’Leary, and was pretty sure he didn’t. “I went to St. Joe’s,” he said. I shrugged and nodded. “O’Leary,” I said. He shrugged and nodded.

St. Joe's

We talked about neighbourhoods and our families and he invited us to his shop on 118th Avenue in Parkdale. What’s your shop? I make calzone, he said. Okay, we’ll be there. We’ve kept going back, and we were back last week.

Why does this calzone taste so good? I asked. It’s not an easy question. It turns out the dough has to rise in three acts. And it helps if your mother made calzone for you when you were seven.

“My mom used to make dough,” Battista told us last week. “She always had a little left over and she said, ‘I’ll make you a calzone, I’ll make you a calzone. It was perfect. A calzone is hand-held, and I can still go outside and play soccer.”

To finish the story, Battista went back to the kitchen, into the wings, and produced one of his mother’s giant towels that he still uses to cover the rising calzone dough. That brought the house down. Bravo!


2. Story time 
📝

I was walking to Vic’s Drugs on 149th Street when I saw a piece of writing paper that appeared frozen in the ice on the sidewalk. Now, cannabis packaging, Rice Bowl receipts, remote controls, yes, but I had never before seen a piece of blank paper under ice quite like that—like a protected manuscript in the Museum of Paper.

I stopped, took a pencil out of my parka pocket, leaned down and tried, for effect, to write a word on the sheet. Nothing showed, of course. Graphite on ice doesn’t work. But stories have a way of working, and this was a short story I had stumbled into and played along with. It’s cheap entertainment, with a beginning, middle and end.

Beginning: man walks along sidewalk on way to get muscle relaxant. (This is the character and setting.)
Middle: Man says, huh, that’s something different and attempts to pencil out a few words. (This is the tension.)
End: Man is unable to write on paper, laughs to himself, walks on. (This is the release.)



It’s a good reminder of how a story works. Story DNA is good to know. Like it’s good for a fish to know how a Len Thompson #7 works. To understand how we are being lured in. But mostly, it’s fun to use story theory to bring to life the little things you see, which is what stories do—they bring life to life. Just need a working title for this one. How about, Sheet of Ice: A Work of Non-Friction? That kinda works.


3. Freeze frame 📷

The photographer Garry Winogrand said that “the photograph isn't what was photographed, it's something else. It's about transformation.” I know he said this because the cryptic teaching is in the email signature of our friend Jerome, himself a talented visual artist in Edmonton. Jerome emailed me after I had emailed him after I had seen remarkable shapes in the windrows while walking in the Meadowlark dark. The deposits left by the snow-clearing machines are many things. Mountain ranges. Hoodoos. Erratics. Long piles of hay drying in the wind. I sent Jerome a couple of pics, and waited for his reply. True to form, he got right back to me with generous observations about my abstractions. He included a tightly framed photo of the colourful door of a cupboard that belonged to his late wife. He did that, I think, to make the point Winogrand makes, which is that putting four sides to an image, framing something, (through photography or carpentry or photography of carpentry) transforms the thing into a kind of cupboard itself, a container that holds who we were when we made it and who we remember when we look into it.

Let’s all try to have days that we notice!

More from Battista, including a friendly dig at my high school, in the podcast: 

                                  


                                   




















  

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