Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe - Journeys - Vancouver & Kenny Wong's Practical Jokes

Episode Date: October 24, 2025

“The baker, the chef, the Indian maestro.”Today on the podcast it’s a smorgasbord from Stuart McLean. About food, about journeys and more in between! We’ve got a postcard from Canada, a moving listener story, and one of our favourite Dave and Morley stories. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

from the apostrophe podcast network. Hello, I'm Jess Milton, and this is backstage at the Vinyl Cafe. Welcome. Today on the pod, we've got a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a. Welcome. Today on the pod, we've got a bit of a smorgasbord for you, a postcard from Canada, a story exchange, and a Dave and Morley story. Buggle up. Let's start with this. A few weeks ago, we played an essay, Stewart Road, about spending time in the eastern townships, eating cheese. I loved hearing that one again, and it got me thinking about how strongly food is linked to a sense of

place into our memories, memories of both places and people. It was something Stuart thought about a lot. He used it often in his writing to draw us into the stories. We've talked about this a bit before on an episode called Food, Glorious Food. If you want to listen to that one, you can just scroll back and find it in your feed back in May 24. In that episode, I mostly talk about how Stewart used food so evocatively in the Dave and Morley stories, but he did this in his other writing too. There's a wonderful essay that he wrote, one of his postcards from Canada, where Stewart takes the subject of food and uses it as a way into a meditation on immigration, on the journey that so many have taken to come here to Canada. That's where I'd like to start today with that

essay. Here's Stuart McLean recorded at the Coulch, the East End Vancouver Cultural Center, in Vancouver, British Columbia. Well, one of my favorite pastimes when I visit a town that is not my hometown is to explore local grocery stores. This is a habit that actually began here in Vancouver when I first began coming here on a regular basis. I used to look forward to going to capers on Robson and a urban fair in Yaletown because they were different from the stores I was used to at home, especially urban fair, where the aisles were super narrows and shelves super jammed and where I saw stuff I didn't see at home. I soon decided that Vancouver had the best grocery stores in the country. And what I would think of Vancouver, the first thing I would think

about was food. It started with groceries, but it soon broadened to include some of my favorite restaurants. I'd look forward to coming to town so I could have sushi at Shiro, or eat at the salt tasting room on Blood Alley, or watch the sunset over the beach from the patio at the rain city grill. When I knew I'd be in town this week, I decided to come a few days early to treat myself to a culinary walkabout. First thing I wanted to do when I was pumped about this was to try the fare at some of the new street trucks. And so I set off one day around noon

and had, can I admit to all of this? I had, and this is one lunch, a sweet and spicy pork sandwich from the re-up barbecue cart, a grilled cheese from mom's grilled cheese, and a fish taco from fiestro. the festive purple truck with a smoker lashed onto the front bumper. I didn't eat it all.

I just tasted stuff like a gastronomic sommelier. Who am I trying to kid? I ate it all. And when I was finished, I went to Gorilla Raw Food on Richards for a therapeutic juice intervention. A greeny, kale, spicy ginger apple-y sort of thing. I didn't stop there, however.

Thought if I'm going to talk about food, it behooved me to dig a little deeper. Why stop with half the hog when there's a whole pig on the table? On Tuesday afternoon, I reached for the phone, and with trepidation, I dialed Tojo's restaurant to make a reservation. Tojo's is Canada's most famous sushi restaurant, and Tojo's has a reputation for being pricey.

The man who answered the phone paused before he would take my reservation. Are you familiar with our prices? he asked. I felt like I'd bumped into the butler of a fine English manner, and the butler had sized me up and was looking down his nose. clearly I was out of my league when I showed up a few hours later the matri d did the same thing he looked me over and then he handed me a laminated

card which informed me that if I wanted to sit at the sushi bar and deferred to the legendary Hiday Katsu-tojo my bill would be in the neighborhood of $150 to $200 dollars you only

You only live once. I nodded at the matri-D as if this was nothing to me. I was led to the sushi bar, sat down, and before I even had time to say, Saki, overheard a man a few seats away from me, say, we had an 86 Margot at West the other night, which we paid $825 for. $825, said the woman he was talking to.

That's really cheap. Tojo looks surprisingly like a diminutive Asian version of the late Jack Layton. And he peered at me suspiciously. Do you have any allergies, he asked. Do you like spicy things, he asked. And then the disturbing coup de grace. Are you open-minded? And so it began.

Deep-fried zoos. zucchini flour stuffed with mint scallops, gooey duck and a nory cone, miniature crab, salmon, scallop, spot prawn, lobster crapes. Smoked sablefish, baked in parchment paper. Dish after delectable dish. Well, all the while, Tojo, or one of his assistants,

hovered over me holding my hand. No soy sauce with this one. Now, soy sauce here. When I finally leave, hours later, I am glad that I've walked and not driven. Next afternoon, I head up to Thomas Haas's patisserie. Haas is a celebrated chocolatier and pastry chef from Germany who works out of a little cafe on West Broadway and who might just make the best croissant in the country. He just returned from a holiday in France.

I went to every bakery I saw, he told me, and I tried their croissant. It's so hit and miss with croissant. We're sitting at a little table in the front of his cafe, drinking hot chocolate and eating one of his croissons, and abruptly he leans over and holds his croissant up to my ear and squeezes it. It sounds like rain hitting me. pavement. A good croissant, he tells me, should sing to you. And then he looks at his watch

and shakes his head. We should not be eating croissant at four in the afternoon. We should be eating them at eight in the morning when they're fresh. A butter croissant is all about the layers of pastry, the laminations. Haas has 288 laminations in his. You've fold the dough, he says, and then you fold it again, and then you fold it again and again and again, and again, and then you bake it for 16 minutes at 375 degrees, and then you do it all over again tomorrow. Suddenly, my phone rings. It's Vikram Vidge, inviting me to join him for supper in his restaurant.

Vidge's is a Vancouver legend. Thomas Haas says, Ask him why he never returns my calls. Vickram Vigge says, Tell him it's because he's a bloody German. We get together for supper maybe once a year, says Haas. He is a wonderful man. There's always a line up at Vigis.

You've come on a very good. Good night, I hear the matri-D telling someone who arrives just after I do, we're only running a two-hour wait. Everyone waits, and while they do, they're offered drinks and plates of complementary fredders and other exotic things. While all the while, Vikram, in his sandals, white pajama pants and his embroidered kirta, floats from table to table like a jolly elf. a bejeweled jolly elf Vickram loves jewelry and he's wearing lots of it including a large ring

made from a one dollar Indian coin my grandmother gave me the coin when I was leaving India he says she told me I should keep it with me and it would bring me luck so I had it made into a ring everyone in Vancouver knows the story of how Vickram

dreamed of opening a restaurant dedicated to elevating the concept of Indian food, a place where he would take the ingredients of traditional Indian food, the meats and the curries and the spices, and prepare them in the French way, at a minute. And how his father, who had just sold some businesses in India, came here with $23,000 in a paper bag, and how together they went out and found, a possible location, let me think about it, said Vickram, and how, while he was thinking about it

that day, his father went out and bought the business and presented it to him that very night. Here's your lease, he said. It was like an unwanted pregnancy, says Vickram. But there it was, so I had to fly with it. He took the $10,000 he had saved. And away they flew. He and his wife, Miru. We didn't have any money, he said, but we had a vision.

Today, there is probably no more successful a restaurant in the country. And no happier a restaurateur. Vikram dances around vizges like a maestro, like an opera conductor, welcoming his customers as if they were coming into his home. That's exactly the way I think of it, he tells me. I don't think of it as a restaurant. I think of it as my home. And then he told me about the night Justin Trudeau brought his father,

former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, to dine. They came the spring after his son died. And when he walked in, the whole restaurant turned as one. And it went pin drop silent. But no one said anything to him, not a soul. They didn't bother him. That's the greatness of our country. No one said a word.

They had their dinner, and he and Justin talked. And as he was walking out, I went up to him and I said, Mr. Trudeau, I want to thank you. It was his policies that allowed me and immigrants like me to come to the country and to be successful. And I bent down to touch his shoes in the Indian way because he was like the Dalai Lama to me. He lifted me up and gave me a big hug,

and he said, I have eaten Indian food at lots of places, and this is some of the finest I have ever eaten. I felt so loved by him. And then he looked at his watch, Vikram did, and said, I have to go, and off he went, and I sat there alone in the flickering light of his restaurant. There are little elephants cut into the shades of all the lamps, and the light spills through the cutouts, and the little elephant shadows dance all around. And in the dancing light, I stared at the front door, which is an original teak door from a Himalayan temple,

over 170 years old, and I thought of the three men who had fed me. Hadee Kazu Tojo, who came to Canada from Japan when he was 21 years old, and Thomas Haas, whose great-grandfather and grandfather and father, all three, ran bakeries in the black forest. His father closed his, the very week. Thomas opened the patisserie on West Broadway. And of course, Vikramvij. I thought I was going to come here and write about food. But really, I was writing about something else altogether. Passion? Yes. But also this. An Indian, a German, a man from Japan. Immigrants all

all. None of them wealthy when they arrived have brought wealth to this city and a heart to it too. We are all enriched by the diversity of this land, made richer by those who come here and bring their traditions and their passion with them. The baker, the chef, the Indian maestro. We are blessed, especially here in this city. While we are here, we are holding the world in a way the world has never been held before, ever. We are blessed by this coming together, blessed that those who are in charge of the gates have kept them open so that we can be enriched and renewed again and again and again and again. Like the layers of the croissant, we are folded over and over and over again.

And sometimes that is difficult. Sometimes it asks a lot of us. And sometimes when we are our best selves, we get up in the morning. And like Thomas Haas's croissant, we sing. That was Stuart McLean with Vancouver. We recorded that in 2012. Okay. I also promised you a story exchange as part of today's Schmorton. board. If you listen to the vinyl cafe on the radio back in the day, then you'll remember a segment that we had where you wrote the stories. We asked you, the audience, to send us your

stories, and we promised to read every single story that we received. We got thousands. It was amazing. I loved reading the story exchange. As you shared so many moving and powerful stories with us and lots of funny ones too, some days I'd be moved to tears and other days it would be tears of laughter. After reading through them all, we'd choose our favorite stories, and Stuart would read them on the radio. This is a story sent to us by Vinyl Cafe listener, Collette Arnold of Ottawa, Ontario. This story took place at the beginning of my public service career some 25 years ago. I was working in Calgary for the federal government, interviewing immigrants who were applying for Canadian citizenship. It was a job that reminded me every year.

day how lucky I was to be born in this great country. During my four years at it, I met many courageous people from around the world who had sacrificed so much to come to Canada. There is one family in particular that I think of often. In the early 1980s, many of the boat people from Vietnam had spent enough time in Canada to qualify for citizenship. One day, I interviewed a young Vietnamese woman who wanted help for her father. He was in hospital. He was dying. And he did not want to die stateless and be buried as a refugee.

He did not want to die without a country to call home. Time was short. Could we help? I'm proud to say that we did. We pulled out all the stops to get the paperwork processed quickly, and we arranged to go to the hospital to give this man the gift of belonging. When we arrived at the cancer ward at the Foothills Hospital, we were greeted by a nurse who told us our soon-to-be citizen was a very proud man.

He was not about to become a Canadian while lying in bed. He had struggled into a wheelchair and was in the lounge waiting for us. Well, that was not all that was waiting for us. The nurses had decorated the lounge in red and white, streamers, balloons, and flags. Patients from the ward, all doors. dressed in hospital garb were crowded into the room. The citizenship judge said a few words, administered the oath of citizenship, and presented the much-cherished certificate.

And then, a young man standing in the back of the room, bawled from chemotherapy and hanging on to his IV pole, started to sing, Oh Canada. One by one, people joined in. By the second verse, everyone in the room was belting out the national anthem. I often take for granted the life that I have here in Canada. I complain about the smallest things. When I catch myself doing that, I think back to that man in the hospital and the hundreds of other people like him who I've had the privilege to meet. And what I do, I thank my lucky stars.

That was Stuart McLean reading a story by Vinyl Cafe listener, Colette Arnell. And that was from the Vinyl Cafe Story Exchange. We're going to take a short break now, but we'll be back in a couple of minutes with the Dave and Morley story. So stick around. Welcome back.

Storytime now. and this is one of my favorites. It's an incredible story called Kenny Wong's practical jokes. Kenny Wong jumped out of bed early on the last Saturday in March. He got up, dressed and bolted out the back door without stopping for coffee or anything. He was a full three hours ahead of his normal Saturday routine. Kenny jumped out of bed and jumped into the car and he drove to a nearby mall and he bought the Saturday paper at a convenience store.

and then he strode across the mall's parking lot to a donut shop, whistling. He bought a coffee, sat down and spread the paper in front of him, he flipped to the want ads to objects for sale. He was looking for the ad that he had carefully dictated over the telephone on Wednesday morning, and there it was. When he spotted it, Kenny beamed and slapped the table so hard that his coffee jiggled and overflowed the cardboard cup, drenching the sports section.

Kenny's so excited he didn't even notice. Big Buck's poca, read the ad. Kenny slapped the table again. He looked as if he was going to burst. Record collector will pay top dollars for Walter Osternak and any or all polka albums. One day only, bring your records Monday morning to Dave's Poka Palace.

Formerly the vinyl cafe, no calls, early birds get top cash on the spot. Kenny closed his eyes and grinned. Imagine some guy in Liederhosen jostling for position out in front of Dave's store on Monday.

Monday, April, a 1st. Kenny wasn't sure he could wait. He folded the want ad section and stood up leaving his half full coffee and the rest of the paper behind him. He reached into his pocket and he dropped a tunie beside the paper. First time he had ever left a tip and a donut shop, ever. On the way to the car, Kenny started thinking about last year. Last year on April Fool's Day, Kenny called the police from a phone booth and told them anonymously that he had just been passed for the second

time in a week, a phony $20 bill at a local record store. Just before the cops arrived, Dave received a call from a voice that he recognized but couldn't place, reminding him it was April Fool's Day. Your friend Kenny Wong has hired a couple of university students and dressed them up as cops, said the voice. They're going to accuse you of passing phony money. You might want to give them a rough time. When the two detectives wandered into Dave's store and started asking questions, Dave breezily admitted to passing phony 20s.

I print them at home, he said offhandedly. I'm surprised it took you so long to turn up. He carried on like this for a good 10 minutes. When the puzzled cops suggest that he come with them to the station, Dave laughed in their face, told them it was time for them to go back to school. You aren't just dealing with an amateur, he said. The cops called for backup. It took four of them to bundle Dave into the back of a squad car.

Aren't you guys going a little far with this? He asked as they cuffed him. It took a good part of that night to straighten things out. Last year was good, but this year was going to be better. Now, it wasn't a one-way street. Kenny Wong runs a little restaurant down the block from Dave's second-hand record store, Wong's Scottish meat pies. If you asked either of them, neither Kenny nor Dave could tell you when this April Fool's business began. When April, Dave got into the cafe in the middle of the night and replaced the gravy powder Kenny uses for putine and hot turkey sandwiches, with chocolate pudding mix.

No one in the kitchen noticed anything until the cook splattered some of the chocolate gravy on the rim of a plate, wiped it with his thumb, and then absent-mindedly brought his thumb to his mouth. But that wasn't until late in the afternoon. As soon as he could, Kenny rewound his cash register tape and found to his horror they had already sold, seven hot chocolate turkey sandwiches.

That wasn't the disturbing part. The disturbing part was no one had complained. There was the year Dave got a mechanic friend to rewire Kenny's Volvo so the horn blew every time Kenny put his foot on the brake. In his wildest dreams, Dave hadn't imagined Kenny would edge up behind a policeman at the very first red light he struck. After three blasts from Kenny's horn, the cop burst out of his car, smoke steaming out of his ears. Now, to someone like Dave, who came of age on a tour bus with some of the, wildest groups in rock and roll. This is all pretty tame stuff, but it brings back memories of

his misspent youth, and for that alone, it's worth the minor inconvenience of a night in jail. For Kenny, the annual pranks are an echo of a different kind, a reflection from a flame lit when he was a boy growing up right here in Alberta. Kenny grew up in the town of Burnt Creek. His father, Henry Wong was the majority shareholder in the Half Moon Cafe. Half Moon is no more. Someone bought it out in the 70s and ripped out the old for Micah Booth and tore out the counter with its 12 high stools. It's now called the bamboo terrace. And it has an oversized menu with colored photos, but it's in the same building, just across the bridge next door to where the old hotel used to be, where the tracks used to cross railroad street. The moon-faced man who liked to smile, Kenny's father built a reputation for honesty in Burnt Creek. In the 50s, CPR linemen who would leave for work before seven and wouldn't make it back until after dark would leave their paychecks with Kenny's father to cash or to deposit in the credit union. It was the same service that Kenny's grandfather used to perform

for local ranchers who often had to leave town before they got their checks from the cattle sales. Kenny and his brothers grew up in the half moon. Their mother would march them into the restaurant every night and they would eat supper together at a table in the kitchen. All along kids had jobs in the cafe from before they started school. Kenny's first job was cutting the butter pads with a metal butter slicer that was kept on a table in the pantry, where the old man chew, skinny as a broom, used to peel potatoes and carrots and drop them into a bucket of water. the September that Kenny was six, that September he went to kindergarten, he was given the added responsibility of filling the miniature ceramic coffee cream.

Kenny would come into the restaurant at 7.30 after his bowl of sunny boy cereal, and he'd sit at the counter with all around top jugs arranged in front of him. He'd earnestly fill each one right to the top and then slide off his stool and carry the creamers one by one and line them up beside the jello and slices of pie on the glass shelf behind the Celadon green milkshake machine. In 1949, the year Kenny turned five years old, the Wongs were the only Chinese family in Burnt Creek. His first week at school, a group of girls from grade two surrounded him at recess and chanted Chinese, Japanese, look at your dirty knees. Henry, trusted by the linemen and the ranchers with their paychecks, was never accepted.

by the businessman of Burt Creek. He wasn't asked to join the Elks or the Rotary until 1976. He was never invited to the Businessmen's Association meetings, and when the Chinese were finally given the right to vote in Canada, in 1947, not one of the candidates asked him for a donation or asked to put a sign in his cafe window. The only person who got under his skin, however, was Eddie Cowlix. Eddie ran Cowlick's menswear where sharp men shop

and Eddie came to the half moon for lunch every Friday Eddie would sit in the same booth right in the middle of the restaurant and order chicky-flied lice which he always did loud enough so everyone in the place was sure to hear him when he got his meal Eddie would eat a few mouthfuls and then put his fork down and say this sure is good chicky every week he'd do the same thing he'd say

this sure is good chicky, and then he'd call Henry, who was usually up in the front somewhere, maybe serving coffee or cashing someone out. Hey, Henry, he'd call. I haven't seen my cat for a few days. You haven't seen the cat, have you? And he'd look around the half moon at everyone, and he'd laugh out loud. It bothered Henry Wong that he couldn't speak good Canadian English, and he felt humiliated when Eddie Cowlix made fun of the way he talked. Eddie Cowlix, standing by the cash with a toothpick in his mouth, saying, I'd come for lunch every day, Henry, but if I ate that much rice, I'm afraid my eyes would go slanty. One Friday night when he was 12, Kenny asked his father why he didn't refuse to serve Eddie Cowellix.

You should tell him he's not welcome. Henry Wong was sitting at the dining room table when his son said that. He was counting the days till. He didn't stop counting. He said, I don't want to offend the other customers. When he said it, he looked up and he saw his son's shoulders sag, and he saw the disappointment in his face. It was snowing that night.

Henry went back to the half moon to close. When he came home, everyone was already in bed. He shook his son awake. He told him to get dressed. They drove back to the cafe in silence. It was late. They were the only car on the main. Street, their tire tracks rolling silently behind them in the snowy darkness. Henry parked in

the alley, and they went in the back door through the kitchen and into the dark cafe. The only light was the yellow and red glow from the big jukebox at the front. Henry pointed at the booth where Eddie Cowellix always sat. Kenny sat down. He watched his father walk to the front where the cigarettes were kept in a scratched glass case. He watched him reach up to a high shelf. Henry Wong brought a carved wooden box the size of a pound of butter to the booth where his son was sitting, to Eddie Cowlick's booth. And then he walked into the pantry and he came back with a candle and a stick of sandalwood incense. He sat down on the bench opposite his son. He opened the wooden box and he unwrapped a piece of bright yellow silk.

Kenny leant forward and saw three old round coins with square holes in the center lying on the silk his heart was beating fast he knew what was happening his father was going to consult the sage Henry Wong had never thrown the I Ching with his son before Kenny knew without his father saying anything they were going to ask the sage about Eddie Cowellix they sat quietly for five minutes and then Henry wrote something in the small black book using the Chinese hieroglyphics that Kenny never learned when he had finished Henry picked up the three coins

and held them in the palm of his hand so the orange flicker of the candle lit them the smoke from the incense curling around six times he dropped the coins each time examining their faces and marking what he saw in his book when he finished he looked across the table and spoke to his son for the first time since he had woken him Juan he said wind over water what does it mean asked Kenny

Kenny's father got up and got a teapot and two bowls he poured them each a bowl of tea the sage says there is a harshness present he lent down and blew across the top of his tea little black waves lapping at the edge of the bowl. The sage says if you hold a hatred against someone, you become bound to that person. To free yourself from the binding, you must be forgiving. We must forgive, Mr. Cowlix.

Kenny looked disappointed. I don't think the sage has ever been to Burnt Creek, he said. Henry Wong looked at his boy with wonder. He brought the bowl of tea to his lips and slurped at it. If we are going to do something, Wingkin, we must be like the summer wind over the water. We must be so gentle that Mr. Cowlix does not even know the breath of the wind on his face. And then Kenny's father stood up and walked into the kitchen, and he came back with a cardboard box. It was full of little glass jars, jars of paints and colored inks.

He took out a small pointed paintbrush. Watch carefully, Winkin, he said. There was a painting hanging on the cafe wall at the end of the booth. The booth where Eddie Cowlick sat, the booth where they were sitting, where his father had just thrown the coins of the I Ching. It was a painting of a lake in a forest. Kenny had never looked at the painting carefully. His father reached up and took the painting off the wall.

He pointed to the far end of the lake. There was a figure standing on a rock. The figure was very small, smaller than Kenny's fingernail. He had never noticed it before. Kenny leaned forward and squinted in the candlelight. He had never looked at the painting so carefully. It was the figure of a young woman, a girl, maybe. She wasn't wearing any clothes.

She was bending at the waist, her feet in the water, her breasts in the sun. He looks at the girl, said Henry, gesturing with his paintbrush. Kenny watched his father unscrew a glass jar of blue paint. He watched him set the black lid upside down on top of the table. He watched him dip his brush in the dark ink, and then he watched him paint a bathing suit on the girl who was wearing no clothes and standing by the lake. Now, said Henry, putting the painting back on the wall,

it's time to go home. The next Friday, Henry saw Eddie Cowlicks frowning at the painting of the girl. He waited two weeks. After two weeks had passed, he added fluffy white clouds into the blue sky and a shadow over the girl in the bathing suit by the lake. Two weeks after that, he painted a sweater on the girl. Slowly over a period of weeks, the gentle wind blew more clouds over the lake in the painting, and the white clouds turned to gray,

and the leaves started to rustle on the trees, and then ever so slowly the leaves began to change colors as the season of the painting turned gradually, imperceptively, from summer to autumn. Henry brought out his box of inks and paints on Thursday nights when everyone had left for the day, even the old man chew who peeled potatoes and carrots in the pantry. And then every Thursday when he had finished with a painting, Henry Wong removed the bench from the booth where Eddie Cowlick sat

and replaced it with a bench which he kept at the back of the kitchen, a bench that Henry carefully cut a quarter of an inch off each week. So the seat was moving slowly toward the floor. So every Friday when he arrived for lunch, Eddie Cowellix would slip lower and lower, and the top of the table moved up his chest, like tea being poured into a bowl. After six months, it was so high that Eddie Cowlix looked like a little child when he sat in his booth.

He was becoming uncomfortable in this restaurant he used to lord over. We are making him a little man, said Henry, to his son one afternoon. Soon he will blow away. Each Friday, having shortened the bench, Kenny increased by a spoonful or two, the amount of food he put on Eddie Cowlix's plate. Just a spoonful or two. But as the weeks went by, the spoonfuls added up, and Eddie had to struggle to finish the plate of fried rice

that he used to eat with such gusto. One Friday, when Kenny set his plate in front of him, Eddie pointed at it and he said, is the rice going bad or something? You're giving it away? How I make living giving food away, said Henry dismissively. His arms crossed. The girl in the painting was now standing beside a frozen lake in the winter. Eddie turned to look at the painting and then back at Henry.

He looked pained. He looked like he wanted to say something, but he didn't. He shook his head and shifted uncomfortably. The table halfway up his chest. As the weeks went by, Eddie became more and more fidgety. He couldn't get comfortable. He sat in the booth, shifting his weight back and forth. fourth. Two Fridays in a row he splattered soy sauce down the front of his shirt, and then he knocked

over his water. And finally one Friday he was only able to eat half the food on his plate, and the next Friday he didn't show up. And that was the last of him. You see Winkin, said Henry, he has become so small that the sage blew him away. Kenny moved to the city in 1972. When he arrived he was carrying his father's instructions to look up Rob McGregor, one of the CPR lineman whose paycheck Henry used to deposit in the credit union. McGregor had lost his job with the railroad years before, and Henry had helped him out with a small loan. McGregor, with the help of the loan and an old family recipe for meat pies, had pulled himself through by opening a small cafe. He was ready to retire when Kenny showed up, and as a gesture of gratitude

to Henry Wong, offered to sell his cafe to Kenny. In those days, it was still called McGregor's Scottish meat pies. When Kenny took over, he didn't change a thing for five years, and then one day it occurred to him that he had earned the right to have his own name on his business, and with McGregor's approval, he painted out his name and added Wong's. He was still selling mostly meat pies in those days, but he slowly added a few. few Chinese dishes, mostly to please a regular customer who had received bad news about his cholesterol, and had seen what Kenny cooked for himself and asked if he couldn't try some. Gradually, and without any conscious planning, Kenny added more Chinese dishes, things he

remembered his father serving in the half moon, beef and green pepper, barbecue pork, fried rock cod, ginger and chicken. Five years ago, he put up a sign in the front window, and it's still there, it says, sorry, we're out of meat pies. But he never changed the sign. Wong's Scottish meat pies. Kenny was born in 1944, the year of the monkey. He likes to monkey around. No one asks for meat pies anymore anyway.

When he retired and sold the half moon, Kenny's father, to come to the city to visit his son every fall. He liked to sit at one of the round tables at the back and sip tea and smoke and read the paper, the way the old man Tong, the most infamous gambler in Alberta, used to sit in the back of the half moon in the 40s and 50s. One day when Henry was visiting, Dave came in for lunch and sat down with him,

and Kenny was hovering around, and then he sat down, and his father said something in Chinese, and Kenny pointed at a painting on the wall. A painting of a young girl holding a pair of skis beside a frozen lake. My father asked if you knew the story of the painting, he said. Dave looked at Kenny and then at Henry, who was grinning and nodding his head. And that's when they told him about Eddie Cowlicks and how they had blown him out of the half-moon, and they all laughed.

And then Kenny told him about the time he had put Kool-Aid crystals in the shower head before his mother had her Ma Jong club over. and how he'd once put Kool-Aid crystals in his brother's bed, and he had woken up as striped as a zebra. It was one of those lunches that went on and on all afternoon. Dave told them about the night they had filled the bathtub in some roadside motel with blue clothes dye and lowered the bass player from question mark and the Mysterians into the tub while he slept.

And how the bass player had carefully poured rubbing alcohol into the, the grout of the tiles in the bathroom where Dave was staying two nights later and had hidden in the cupboard until Dave was sitting on the toilet and then opened the door and lit the grout on fire. They told these stories and laughed until they nearly choked and it was the next year on April Fool's that Dave got into Wong's meat pies at night for the first time, and this was back in the days before Dave or Kenny had kids, before Kenny had renovated even, and there was still indoor, outdoor carpet on the floor, and Dave soaked the

carpet with water and scattered cress seed all around. This was on a Saturday night, so the seeds had all weekend to germinate. So by Monday, when Kenny opened up, the floor was a carpet of sprouted cress. and there was a sheep tied to the front booth. David borrowed the sheep from someone I can't remember who a friend of Dorothy's, I think, who has a farm. And that was the start of it. So a few weeks ago on April 1st, when Dave arrived at the vinyl cafe and saw the professionally painted banner hanging over his storefront declaring in bold red letters,

Dave's Polka Palace. He laughed, but he wasn't surprised. He stopped before he crossed the street and took in the tableau, the new sign and the ten people waiting. They had been there long enough that they had begun going through each other's records, and the trading had begun. When Dave finally crossed and unlocked the store, they were so caught up with one another that they didn't even notice them.

One soft, doughy-eyed man in a cardigan seemed, to be the center of attention, buying everything he could get his hands on. Dave was as polite as he could be and bought a little of what came, some simply because the people seemed so pleased just to have a place to bring poker records. But there was surprisingly little to buy, thanks to the man in the sweater. And that night on Monday, April 1st, on the way home, Dave stopped in at Kenney's for a coffee. Heard you had a big day, said Kenny. Yeah, said Dave. Yeah, said Dave, I just wanted to say thanks. Dave put down his coffee and reached into his pocket. It pains me to do this, he said, but I thought it only fair, and he handed Kenny an envelope. Kenny took the

envelope and opened it. It contained two crisp $50 bills. What's this for? He asked. That ad said, Dave, that was very funny, but it actually brought in a couple of very valuable records. I just had the biggest day I've ever had. I thought you deserved a finder's fee. Kenny Wong frowned. The newspaper ad had cost him $40. He'd paid $400 for the banner. He started to say exactly how much did you make,

but he stopped himself and he looked at Dave carefully. Wait a minute, he said. He was about to say, you're just yanking. my chain, aren't you? Instead, he looked at his friend and he said, you aren't going to tell me. You'll never tell me. Now what, said Dave, smiling innocently? Do you mean by that? Thank you. That was the story we call Kenny Wong's practical jokes. We recorded that one in Calgary, Alberta. that's it for today, but we'll be back here next week with this story. Kindergarten, Big Narrows Elementary.

In the town of Big Narrows, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, it could have been yesterday. Where they sat on the floor, the entire citizenry, and they watched the teachers who were on the stage behind the backlit white sheet, all of them dressed as surgeons. And what were they doing? Pulling a string of sausages out of the principal's belly. after that they were led one by one to the basement into the terrifying haunted house that the grade sevens had built down there down the janitor stairs through the boiler room

along the narrow passage behind the furnace past the flaking concrete foundation all the spider's webs and finally into the janitor's lunchroom where they were blindfolded. Sightless, they stuck their hands into the pot of teacher's brains, the bowl of stomach guts, and the jar of eyeballs. After that, they were led to the janitor's desk where, lit by a single candle,

they stood in front of the fossilized cat that Stephen Kerrigan's father had found in the grocery store wall when they expanded the butcher shop. That's the Halloween I remember, said Dave. Hands down. Of all his yesterdays and todays, that trip to the basement stands out more than any Easter dinner, Thanksgiving supper, or Christmas morning, so help them God. But there have been others. Morley would tell you about the disasters. Tell one, said Sam.

Well, for instance, the year your father waited until the last minute to get a pumpkin, and when he finally went out every place he went to was sold out. Sam turned to Tommy and said he came home with a watermelon. And he spray painted the watermelon orange, said Marley. Then he sat at the kitchen table and carved it. Disaster averted. That's next week on the podcast. I hope you'll join us. Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe is part of the apostrophe podcast network. The recording engineer is Sushi Master Greg DeClute. Theme music is by Danny Michelle, and the show is produced by Louise Curtis, Greg DeClute, and me, Jess Milton.

Let's meet again next week. Until then, so long for now. Thank you.