Three Things from Edmonton podcast -- Episode 118: special sauce, youngsters, percussion

And that's a wrap on the week, friends!  Here are three things that left behind tracks of happiness and gratitude.

Three Things podcast, episode 118*:  

                    

I bought a pizza from a vending machine last week. No, don’t report me to Sonia Piano. It was for science. I wanted to know if the pizza was as good as, say, Tony’s on 111 Avenue. It was not. The crust, the sauce, the cheese, the haphazard pepperoni placement, the pepperoni, the fact I couldn’t get into the machine to watch the pizza being made—all of this made the encounter with the food machine unnerving. It was the sound, though, the lack of human sound that really got through. The machine pizza itself was disgorged like a tired bus passenger. 


At Tony’s there was a hum. The servers wore black, the cooking staff wore white, together, as they moved back and forth at the kitchen counter, never colliding, they struck me as a kind of real-life Player piano. There were other sounds to be heard. From the long table by the bar rose a joyful happy birthday in song. No “happy-happy <clap-clap> birthday-birthday,” just the song and the affection in the air. And life to be overheard. At the table to my left, a young person talked to a dining partner about no longer having suicidal thoughts. At the table to my right, a father explained to his water-wary son that each swimming lesson will get easier if he just keeps at it. The advice was enough to elicit from Shelagh her ooh-sweet-broken-heart face. Sal said hello. Sal is the eldest son of Tony Sr., who is retired in Italy. Shelagh had pointed to photos on the wall of the old man and two sons. Sal asked which one we thought was him as a young man, and which was his brother, Tony Jr., and by what heaven was it fair that the youngest son was named after the patriarch? We laughed and bemoaned the injustice. He’s told that story more times than he can count, I thought. 

He asked if the meal was good, we said it was, and, it was, the crust, especially, and the atmosphere in the place, too. Sal said he’s been at it for 36 years. Making a great pizza is a different skill than making a great pizza 36 years later. You might say it takes a kind of machine.



2. Youngsters 

The young-uns were front and centre at the Winspear on the weekend. Jacques Forestier was back. He’s 18 or so now. He debuted with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra at age 11. This time around, he played the Fantasy on Bizet’s Carmen by Sarasate. For the first time in two decades, the Edmonton Youth Orchestra players joined the  ESO musicians on the same 

stage. Back next to the timpani, the young cymbals player was giving Rimsky-Korsakov everything he asked for back in 1888.

The other youngster who dazzled the audience that night was Michael Massey. At 78, Massey is not a current youngster. But he’s still on good terms with the boy he was. The composer conducted a piece called  Avenue House, which is a remembrance of a park in the north London neighbourhood where he grew up. He played with his brother in the wonderful trees in the park. The trees stayed rooted in his musical imagination. Massey said he hoped we all had our own memories of a fabulous place from childhood, a place where adventure happened. 

When it comes to trees, it’s easy to see the old tree in the seedling. With Massey, it was striking to see, and hear, the seedling in the aging tree.



3. Percussion 

I know how my Delwood Suite will start. I don’t have the musical talent to actually write the musical tribute to growing up in the northeast end, but I know the first few bars will come from the percussion players. It will start with the rattle of a spray paint can. Something was always being spray-painted back then. Go-karts, bicycles, goalie masks…My buddy Bruce and I played a lot of Coleco table hockey. It was the Cold War. I was Team Canada, he was the Soviet Red Army. He spray-painted his Minnesota North Stars red. Bill Goldsworthy became Valery Kharlamov. No matter the spray-paint job, it started with a shake of the can and that resonant rattle of the marble inside. 


Last week, I went to Southtown Automotive on 104 Street for a canister of metallic grey spray paint for my Miyata One Thousand. It’s a 1980s-vintage bicycle with some chips on the frame from the stuff it has seen.  A few touch-ups will keep the rust away, I hope.  As I walked out with the aerosol can, I gave it a shake. <Rattle rattle rattle rattle>.  To keep the propellant-paint mixture inside from coming apart and quietly settling out.


Thanks for being out there, friends. 


* Podcast episode features Little Buddy on the piano. Cute.




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