Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe - Bonus Episode: Postcards from Canada - Nelson & Danceland

Episode Date: June 30, 2023

In today’s bonus episode, two Postcards from Canada.When people think about the Vinyl Cafe, they often think about the concerts we did across Canada, in big towns and small. Stuart opened many of those concerts with an essay about the place and over the years it has added up to quite a collection. Here are two of our favourite ‘postcards’: one from Nelson, British Columbia and the other from the glorious Danceland, in Manitou Beach, Saskatchewan.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From the Apostrophe Podcast Network. Hello, I'm Jess Milton, and this is a bonus episode of Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe, I think they mostly think about the live concerts we did across Canada. We recorded most of our shows live in front of audiences, and we performed in big towns and small, in tiny theaters like the 50-seat theater in Tofino, British Columbia, and also in huge hockey arenas like in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Stuart and I would usually arrive a few days or even a week before the show so we could get to know the place a little bit. We'd research, we'd talk to people, and we'd just sort of hang out and get a feel for the place so that we could describe it on the radio. I always started by asking the exact same question. so that we could describe it on the radio. I always started by asking the exact same question.

I'd ask people, what do you want people to know about this place, about your home? Slowly, a story about these towns would sort of reveal itself to us. We'd start to be able to capture the city or town and the people who lived there. I always hoped it would feel kind of like the audience at home was sitting there with us. I wanted it to feel like you'd traveled with us too. So many of you have written over the past few months and asked if we could share some of those essays. And so today, that's what we're going to do. We have two. We're going to start with this one. This is an essay about one of my favorite towns in Canada. This is Stuart McLean with a story about Nelson, British Columbia. From the Capitol Theatre in Nelson, British Columbia, it's the Vinyl Café with Stuart McLean.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. I'm just as happy to be here as you are. Well, we left Vancouver in the late afternoon. We flew east in a little Dash 8, up and over the Coast Mountains and the Monashees and into the Selkirks, which means over more mountains than anyone reasonably needs.

An hour of mountains, here to the southern interior of British Columbia, where we banked over the Columbia River and followed the Crow's Nest Highway into the little town of Castlegar, or as weary air travelers call it when the weather turns, Cancelgar. At the airport, we got a car and followed the Kootenai River along Highway 3A. Half hour later, we came out of the hills and saw Nelson spread below us on the western shore of Kootenai Lake, sitting in the valley as pretty as any mountain town anywhere in the world.

The water lapping at its front door the mountains at its back the mountains, the Selkirks are tree covered here and softer looking when compared to the other western ranges they fall back almost politely almost deferring to the town so you can see the sky and the trees and even scramble your way up to Pulpit Rock,

from where you can gaze down on Nelson as if it was a page torn from a picture book. The town is so perfect a little place, it's hard to decide if it's prettier by daylight when you can see Bob, the big orange bridge that crosses the lake at the north end of town, or by moonlight when all the kitchen lights are twinkling as if the houses and the cafes and restaurants are just waiting for little old you to drop out of the mountains for a visit. The tree-covered Main Street is as pretty a Main Street as any I have seen, with cars parked on the angle along one side in front of parking meters of the old style that still take 25-cent pieces. There is a noticeable absence of national chains on Baker Street.

Nelson's probably the only town in this country with a population over 10,000 without a Tim Hortons. thousand without a Tim Hortons. I spotted only two empty storefronts among the busy clothing stores and the sports stores and the photo stores, the 78-year-old ice cream parlor, the restaurants and cafes, the coffee shops and the banks, the jewelry stores and the hardware stores, the bakeries, the restaurants and cafes, the coffee shops and the banks, the jewelry stores and the hardware stores, the bakeries, the dentists, the shoe stores, and the surprising number of barber shops and hair salons. Too many for a town where most of the men look like they haven't had a haircut since Jerry Garcia passed on. And smack in the middle of it all, there's Otter Books,

an honest-to-God independent bookstore. Did we crash in those mountains? Is this heaven? The smallest storefront on Baker, measuring a mere seven feet wide, and created when someone divided a single store into three, is Baker Street's only travel agent, which makes perfect sense. Why would you need a travel agent, Nelson? Who would ever want to leave?

The perfection of Baker Street is enough to recommend, Nelson. But the thing that really makes this town, I was going to say special, but I will use instead the word everyone here seems to use, magic. The thing that makes this town magic are the people who live here. Let me tell you Anne de Grace's story. Anne is here today, and I know a lot of you know her, but a lot of people listening don't, and her story bears telling today because I think it captures the spirit of Nelson as well as anything else I can think of. Anne de Grace came here 33 years ago.

She came as a wannabe hippie. She wasn't sure what she wanted to do with her life. But when she got here, she knew one thing. For the first time in her life, she knew where she wanted to be. Anne came for a weekend, and essentially she never left. She was 21 when she arrived, and unbeknownst to her, she was also pregnant. When she found that out, she knew she was going to have to make, well, some changes. And so she decided to do what so many Nelson folks have done when they needed a job. She decided she'd open a business and hire herself to run it. And decided to open a second hand bookstore. Basically, she told me,

what we do here in Nelson is sell stuff to each other. She took a lease on a basement property. She phoned a friend and borrowed $1,500. She borrowed a station wagon and drove to Spokane and filled it full of used books. And here is where it gets weird. Once word got around town what Anne was doing, boxes of books started appearing at her door every morning, like foundlings. People were giving her their books so they could buy them back from her. It's just the way it works here, said Anne.

Everybody wants to make it better for everyone else. A few weeks before the birth of her child, things got weirder. Two women who Anne had never seen in her life appeared at her store and introduced themselves. They said, we want you to call us when you have your baby. And when you call, we're going to come and run your store for a month and we won't take any money for it. And they did just that. Those two women changed my life, said Ann. They gave me a different way of looking at the world and a different way to be in it. They taught me that if you see a need you can fill, you should fill it. You only get one kick at the can, she said. You only get one kick at the can, she said.

Why not make it as good a kick as possible? Ann stayed in Nelson. She had three children with two different men. It's a Kootenai thing, she told me. And she sold her bookstore, works at the library now, and writes for the newspaper, and has published four novels with two major Canadian publishers. But she has also worked tirelessly, like so many others here in town, on the boards of the Co-op radio station and the civic movie theater and the arts council. There is something special at work here.

Everybody I met does some sort of volunteer work. Everyone I met has some way of giving back. Maybe it's the mountains that surround the town Make it necessary for people to pull together The weight of climate and geography that some have argued Have had an enormous impact on the development of many of Canada's better impulses We have to do things together Or maybe it's the way we have opened our doors to people like the pacifist Dukobors from Russia

who settled around about these mountains, the pacifist Quakers who followed them, the young men and women who opposed the Vietnam War who settled here too. Whatever it is, it is here. I have no doubt about it. I am smitten by your town and by everyone I have met. I don't know why it took us so long to get here, but I know this, we'll be back. So thank you for your welcome and your generosity and for your values and for your spirited way of doing things.

If Ottawa is ever swept away by a tidal wave or whatever, let me be the first to propose Nelson, British Columbia as the next capital of Canada. It's a bit out of the way, in body that is, but it represents the best of who we could be, trying to make things better for everyone else, giving until it hurts a little, preserving what's best from the past, and most of all, coming together in the belief that in coming together,

we could do more than we can ever do staying apart. Thank you. It's a Kootenai thing. So great. I love that line. I feel like every person we met in Nelson was interesting. I don't know how it happens. It's sort of got a counterculture sort of vibe. But yeah, like every single person we interviewed was more interesting than the previous one. It was amazing. And I hope to make it back there sometime. I actually had a trip not only planned but booked, and then COVID happened, and it got canceled, and I haven't made it back, but I will. And while I daydream about that, you listen to this, and then we'll meet back here in a couple of minutes. Okay? Plan? Plan. Welcome back. I want to play another one of our postcards from Canada now.

This is another one of my favorites. We recorded it in a magical place in Saskatchewan that's, well, you know what? I don't know why I'm telling you about it. Let's let Stuart do that. Here we go, back to the summer of 2013. From Dance Land in Manitou Beach, Saskatchewan, it's the Vinyl Café with Stuart McLean. Thank you. Thank you very much. Well, it's six kilometers from town to the beach. Follow the main street right out and keep going. You can't miss it. After six kilometers, you'll see the lake and the burger stand and the little coffee shop and the big hotel. right onto the lake road and it's just another minute or so. Just past where the wood sidewalk ends. Little cluster of mailboxes. The antique store with a sign that says relics if I remember right. And just after that, just around the corner from the antique store, the road goes right down by the water's edge. And that's where it is. On your left, a big white building with a curved roof.

You first thought it's going to be an ice rink. Until you see the rainbow painted over the door stretching right from one side of the building until the other. And the sign on top of that, And the sign on top of that, Dance Land. Built back in the 1920s and pretty much the same today as it was then, a barn of a building with a snack bar and a stage. The lady at the door taking tickets is Millie. And she can explain better than me how the dance floor is built on a bed of horse tail hair to give it just the right spring.

Bounces about an inch and a half with a good crowd on it. You can ask her about that. And how Tommy Dorsey played here back in the day when the big bands traveled by train. And Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller, not to mention Buddy Holly and Elvis.

You listen to all that, and then you better get yourself a beer and a table, and you sit there a spell under all the twinkling lights. You'll need to sit for a moment, because it's about then that it is going to hit you. The thought that maybe time travel is possible after all. Maybe there are portals where you can step back through time because surely you just walked through time when that screen door slapped behind you and you walked into dance land.

First time I ever danced was the autumn I was in grade four. One morning, out of the blue, instead of dodgeball or mats, our gym teacher wheeled a record player out of the supply cabinet and announced that that was what we were going to do. The record player was screwed to a gray metal table, a sturdy machine, more military than musical, and capable, I would learn later, of sucking the soul out of whatever record was placed on it. The dancing we were about to engage in was also, in an odd way, military, a square dance, a structured dance with both rules and a leader who, like a sergeant major, would tell us exactly what to do. Our leader, our gym teacher, began by dividing us into groups of eight. Appropriately for us, our groups were called squares.

eight, appropriately for us, our groups were called squares, as square we surely were in that decade after the war. My partner for my first dance was, like a mate in an arranged marriage, assigned. Her name was Lindsay Henderson. Like most of the girls in my class, Lindsay towered above me. If this had been a boxing match, Lindsay would have flattened me in the first round. She would not, please forgive me if you are listening, have been my first choice. But then I can't imagine I was hers. For my part, were I able to choose and had I the courage to give voice to desire,

I would have chosen the obscure object of my desire, the girl I never got to dance with, Marianne Nottenbelt. Marianne was the first of a long list of girls I wouldn't dance with. As I stood in Lindsay's shadow, as Lindsay picked me up and twirled me around, I ached to twirl with Marianne, but the dice was thrown, and I got Lindsay, who towered over me, and Lindsay got the skinny kid with the banana face and the ears that stuck out. Lindsay got the skinny kid with the banana face and the ears that stuck out. The other move I remember from those first dances, besides the do-si-do, was the booms-a-daisy. The booms-a-daisy was the moment when you turned your back to your partner and bumped bums.

The command was, do the booms--daisy, if you please. And even back then in my foggy grade four way, I could feel as my bum bounced against Lindsay's, the voltage of some unknown and faraway switch being flicked. I liked it. And consequently, I like dancing. I wanted to dance more. Sadly, I left Elizabeth Valentine the next year for an all-boys school and left Mary Ann and dancing behind me. I did

not dance again until my parents bought a cottage in the Laurentian Mountains and we became members of the Lac Marois Country Club. The club was a barn-like gathering spot, not in many ways unlike this one, with a sand beach where I learned to swim. Most Saturday nights, it was home to a community dance. The girl I wanted to dance with was Georgie Murphy. And for one brief moment during the summer of 1961, Georgie and I danced. That was the summer I was 13. The summer Georgie and I danced. That was the summer I was 13. The summer Georgie was 12. The summer began as it always did with the club's opening dance, a dance of incredible formality featuring a big band,

the Andy Snee Orchestra, four guys with matching suits and music stands. If my memory serves me, Andy Snee played the quintessential big band instrument, the accordion. These were the rules. Kids under 12 danced from 8 until 9 and then went home. The parents and the teens had the floor to themselves from 9 until midnight. There was, however, one exception. A 12-year-old girl could stay until 10 if she was accompanied by a 13-year-old boy.

I asked Georgie to accompany me. Anxious to stay later than 9, Georgie accepted. Georgie lived on the far side of the lake. I headed off to pick her up in our 10-horsepower motorboat. It was a barge-like wooden thing. Imagine a salad bowl with an engine. Imagine me sitting in the stern like an overdressed salad, swimming in my father's Old Spice. Years later, my mother

told me you could see a shimmering haze evaporating around me as I drove into the setting sun. Now, 1961 was the summer the twist was sweeping North America. Somehow through that unknowable teenage way, I had a vague awareness of the basic moves. However, suspecting there must be more to the dance than twisting in one place and not wanting to look foolish in Georgie's or anyone's eyes, when we got to the club, I got my friend Donald Moore to accompany me down to the beach. When we got to the club, I got my friend Donald Moore to accompany me down to the beach. Alone on the dark sand, I asked for his help. What comes after this part, I asked, twisting my feet back and forth like a golfer in a sand trap.

Nothing, said Donald. You just keep doing that part over and over. I was not a coordinated boy, and with the wisdom of hindsight, I can say with some certainty that me on the club floor doing the twist was not a pretty sight. Instead of holding my fingers loose and relaxed and moving my arms coolly across the front of my body, the way I have now seen Chubby Checker twist, I pointed my fingers as if I was sprinting, and I pumped my hands back and forth in an arrhythmic manner that gave me the look of someone sprinting to some faraway finish line. I remember thinking the straighter my fingers were,

the cooler I looked. Of course, the advent of the twist spelled the death of the jitterbug. Pretty much all touch dancing died as I stepped onto the dance floor. My generation, the me generation, more or less did away with the necessity of partners. As the years slipped by, the girls would more and more often dance alone or beside, if not with, other girls. And I slowly slipped quietly from the dance floor to the side of the room, and there I stayed, clutching the wall. But that night with Georgie, I twisted the night away, until ten at least, when I had to take her home. Before we left, there was the last dance. And when it began, Georgie wrapped her arms around my neck

so she was holding me in a bear hug and held me tighter than I imagined possible. It was a remarkable moment, way better than bumping Lindsay Henderson's bottom. I was so swept away that I almost kissed her when I dropped her off on her dock. Instead, I kissed the air, the space between us, our lips about a foot apart.

When she asked me what had just happened, I said nothing, and I got out of there as fast as I could. Georgie might have become my first girlfriend, but the next day, the 17-year-old girl who my mother had hired to babysit my younger sister and who had been at the dance that night, teased me mercilessly and called me lover boy. And I became incredibly self-conscious, and though I liked Georgie, I ignored her. We never danced together again, ever,

and she became someone else's girlfriend, and I didn't ask a girl to dance again until my prom, which was a disaster of a whole other proportion. Since then, there have been many nights when I have danced, at frat houses and bars, at weddings and parties, less and less now. And most of those nights were notable for their awkwardness, the moments when my partner and I were not in sync.

The moments when I was pushing and she was pulling. The moments we stuttered across the floor almost in time, but not. Most of my dancing has been the dance of recovery rather than the dance of glide. Quartz rather than quicksilver. A musical hiccup more than a meal. But once, in a blue moon, I have found a partner with whom I seem to fit. And we have for some inexplicable reason. Is it the quarter of the moon? Is it the wine?

Is it the dancer or the dance? Is it the wine? Is it the dancer or the dance? I have no clue what it is. Just that once in a blue moon, something magical happens. And I have glided into the room of rhythm. And dancing is a soft touch and a knowing look, a swinging and a swaying. And when one goes left, so does the other. For what the one is thinking, the other is thinking too. On those nights, you stand on the dance floor waiting for the next song,

and the next song is always better than the last, and you realize that as much as dance is about rhythm, it is also about trust. The trust that your partner will follow you where you take them, or if you are following, will take you where you want to go. And when that happens, when you and your wonderful partner, Mesh. The music will fill your heart. The stars will fill the skies, and the dancer and the dance will become one. And here we are again, today, in Dance Land. And what we need now is for me to sit down and for the band to step on stage, for the music to start and the magic to begin. What a wonderful place. If I close my eyes, I can still picture it perfectly and still hear that screen door,

which, to be honest, kind of drove me crazy during the recording. But it, yeah, it does bring back some nice memories. I have some great photos from that night, and I will post them on our Facebook and Instagram. Because even though Stuart was so good at describing places, Facebook, and Instagram, because even though Stuart was so good at describing places, Dance Land is so magical that not even Canada's greatest storyteller can do it justice. You need to see some pictures. And if you're new to the podcast and you liked those two little postcards from Canada,

you should know that we gathered a bunch of them together on an album a few years back. It's called, surprise, surprise, Postcards from Canada. And you can find it on CD. Yes, actual CD, like those silver glittery things that you put into machines and like stories and music and stuff like that play. You can find it on actual CD. You can also find it digitally wherever you stream music. We have to take a short break now, but I have one more treat for you. So stick around. We have one more little treat for you before we start Season 2. Oh, and I guess I should tell you, we're starting Season 2. It will kick off on Friday, September 8th.

We will be there, and I hope you will be there, too. But we will drop in one more time between now and then with a special guest, Stuart's long-suffering story editor, Meg Masters. Meg and I got together recently to talk about everything, everything from her favorite David Morley story to what Stuart was like 30 years ago when Meg first met him, to what happened to her after she, you know, did you hear that podcast where we found out that she was the one who accidentally took her cat's thyroid medication? We'll find out the whole story. My favorite moment from that conversation with Meg was this one. You know, I was thinking about favorite stories that, and one of the

things I realized is that some of my favorite stories are probably not ones that listeners or even anybody else who worked on the show would necessarily spring to mind. And those are the really early ones, like Pig, Tunnel of Love, Make Money, Earn Prizes, some of those really early ones. And that was because the characters seemed to be sort of being born on the page. I was being introduced for the first time. And I remember how exciting that was. Tunnel of Love was about, you know, that was the one where I think we first got introduced to Stephanie in any kind of real way. She's a teenager. And for the first time, Dave is bumping into the problems

of communicating with his teenage daughter. And so I do remember them kind of just growing almost organically. And you're quite right, what would happen is we'd realize we tried to keep the characters more or less the same age for years at a time. So we didn't allow them to age. But then we get to a point where we think, you know, Sam's going to hit middle school.

I mean, he's got to be old enough now to go to middle school. Like it's been 21 years. Exactly. He's a 30-year-old middle schooler. That was my friend Meg Masters and you can hear our full discussion on the next bonus episode of Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe.

It will drop into your podcast feed automatically in a few weeks. And when it does, we'll be sure to tell you on Facebook, Instagram, and our website. So keep your eyes there, too. Until then, so long for now.