16 years old: Vincent Massey High School, St Vital Baptist Coffeehouse, Manitoba Theatre School

Age 16 I left Junior HIgh at Viscount Alexander School in Fort Garry to attend Gr. 10 at Vincent Massey High School on Pembina High School

I remember seriously planning to make high school special. I remember planning on ‘turning over a new leaf’.  I don’t know why. Maybe the influence of Jon and Camp Stevens. Maybe just maturity.  Kirk felt the same. We were the kids again too so had to do well to carve a niche for ourselves in the new school. Viscount had been our home for 9 years and Gr. 9 we’d been the big boys. Now were were the juniors.

I loved home room and our teacher.  She was beautiful, brilliant and sensitive. The school drug dealer suddenly stood up and started swearing at her. I turned around and said, “Stop that. (Now I don’t remember her name) Mrs. is a good teacher and she doesn’t deserve to be talked to like that.”  

‘Go fuck yourself asshole.”

“No I won’t. Just stop it.”

“Make me.” The teacher had told him to leave the class and go to the principal. He ‘d told her to fuck herself. Then he refused to leave. Thar’s when I got involved. Forget about Bruce Willis and the last Boy Scout. I was chivalry and the last knight.

“I’ll meet you after school,” I said.

It must have been the first week of school and there I was already in a fight.  He was waiting after school and all the school circled round.  He’d gone home and put on a parka. That was not all he got.  It was a hot sunny fall day. I guess he figured that would protect his body from punches and give him an advantage.  He immediately punched me clipping my eye with what I later learned with brass knuckles.  He had a knife under his big coat but couldn’t get it. I actually got to grab him by the shoulders moving in on him. He tried to get my hands off him grabbing my arms.  I fell backwards pulling him with me in a perfect classic Plains Indian Jujitsu toss, my foot shoving up on his belly and tossed him back over my head. He landed with a crash, winded. I was up in a flash ready to win but wondering why my eye was bleeding. That’s when  police arrived sirens blaring, He and half the crowd ran across the field.  I stayed and they  talked to me. I said I must have tripped and hit my forehead.The teachers came. The police drove me off in the back seat at our doctors on Pembina . He put in a couple of stitches. I’d heard the term ‘brass knuckles.’  I had this cut under the eye sutured up.  My mother met me at the doctor’s office.

“Why can’t you keep out of fights?” She asked, seriously concerned.  I told her about the drug dealer and the teacher.  She said, “I know but why can’t you let someone else take care of it. I worry about you Billy.”  She did. I knew it. My mom loved me but I was at that stage where I didn’t trust adults much.  

A week into school and I was known. I fought three of the older kids to a draw one day when they said I’d hurt their dealer. It was pay back time. No weapons, just feet and fists. I took a beating but didn’t go down. I walked home. Hot bath and trying to not look at my parents or brother who could see I was all bruised up again.

I played volleyball for the Vincent Massey High School Vlleybal team. Our Viscount Alexander team which had been winning through three years formed the core of the Collegiate team and we kept winning.  Kirk was there spiking up up a  storm and Anderson was making the great sets.  Several mornings a week we arrived at school an hour or an hour and a half be fore class. We’d play competition games on the Friday.  Eventually we won the provincial championship.

In Gr. 10 I joined the Drama club.  My friend’s sister,  Charlotte, a year old, European, was brilliant and into theatre and poetry. She’d introduce me to the Manitoba Theatre School. I’d join.  I was no longer lifeguarding but continued with the YMCA Gym Club another year or two. I actually came in third in the provincial vaulting championships. Our team would take the provincial trophy. The Manitoba Theatre School would soon become my major interest.

I was the lead in the high school Christmas play.  It was an English comedy where a man played the woman’s lead and a woman played the man’s lead. The English teacher tall beaded Ed and into tweeds  taught theatre and directed the play He  could have been gay but likely was just eccentric in an English way. The play was a hit success. The female lead playing a man would get the theatre bug and eventually end up on Broadway, New York.. I remember borrowing my mother’s bra and stuffing it with socks. She’d sew the socks in for me and there I was in the mixed change room putting on a padded white bra. The girls objected so I had to put on my bra and come out in my gown. I looked really cute in the make up.  My first transvestic appearance.  Klinger was wearing a dress on MASH as a conceintious objector to war and trying to get himself kicked out of the army as insane.  Historically the Molly’s were the Irish renegades who dressed as women to protest.

I played a cute medieval princess and the whole school found me hilarious.  The play was a great success. More and more I loved poetry, plays and literature. I saw myself becoming a playwright. I still read science fiction but began reading the classics. I loved T.S. Elliot’s plays and Death of a Salesman, 

Through Junior High I’d studied French and Latin. In high school I didn’t continue Latin and the French teacher was this Quebec dollard whose only idea of teaching was to talk Quebec French to us. Up until now we’d learned French in the combined English French study way not this immersion French which only worked if you had more than one class a week. I was having enough trouble with his uncouth barbarism. Dirty fingernail nose picker guy. Not the only nose picking high school teacher but the one who also didn’t clean his nails. 

When he was screaming French obscenities at a little girl we all knew was beaten by her father, she broke into tears and I climbed on the top of my desk and screamed “mange de merde, professor stupides. Mange de merde.”  Several of my male friends in the class climbed on the tops of their desk and took up my chant. The girls crowded around the little girl who was crying and  hugged her. Standing between her and the teacher. The imbecile stormed out of the class and went to the principals office.  

Mr. Zotolov came back to us all now sitting in our desks. He called three of us to return with him. We all told the same story and were dismissed. There were no consequences.  Mr. Zotolov was a political guy but not a bad sort at all.  I actually liked him and knew him to be a smart man. The IQ of the French teacher was seriously in question.  He was a mean bully who the girls collectively didn’t like.  I had loved French before this . but it’s amazing how one teacher can turn you off a subject. I lost interest in French. Especially as we had great biology and literature and history classes.  

Those Vincent Massey School teachers were collectively great with the exception of the French teacher and a couple of the English teachers.  One of the English teachers was head of the union, all political. His idea of teaching was reading the text.  He didn’t like me telling him, “I read the book at home and don’t need to hear you read it to me again. Can I go to the library and learn some English the real way.”  

I found Leonard Cohen in the library and fell in love.  I’d already found Souster a WWII pilot who’d become a Toronto banker but continued to write poetry.  Cohen was something else.  I loved Canadian poets after that.  I’d memorize poems and read poetry and write poetry all the time.  I had little note books in my pockets and loved fountain pens.  I’d have these three ring binders I’d tape the pages I’d written poems on in the little pocket note books into.  

My mother taught me typing on a manual type writer. She was amazing. No mistakes and the speed of light. I practiced and soon was copying the poetry I’d written and others poetry typing it out on blank sheets and keeping it with me.  

I was getting A’s and was liked by teachers and students alike except for the French teacher, the uncivilized bore. Later when Monty Python mocked the French I thought of this little popinjay.  

At the church I was elected President of the Amalgamated Baptist Youth Groups. This was just weird. My friend Doug was a great guy, deeply spiritual and really ought to have been president but everyone wanted me to be. Doug eventually became a Baptist minister.

I wanted to have a coffeehouse. St.Vital Baptist had a great couple who volunteered to be the youth group advisors. They were as keen on folk music as I was though they tended more to the Christian songs. I just loved the music. 

Ken Nattress a great folk singer and Christian who had a cross over repetoire, no Jesus music but that Gospel Folk music, Go tell it on the mountain, Michael Row the Boat Ashore, Momas and the Paぱs. Pete Seeger, Turn Turn Turn, eclesiastacis stuff. He helped me get a better idea of what a coffeehouse would be and there at St. Vital Baptist in the basement we had our first coffeehouse. It was a great success. I was MC and brought in the entertainment. 

I’d go on to help start a dozen of church basement coffeehouses after that.  St. Vital Baptist was a great success. Tea, Cocoa, Coffee, and cookies, a place for young people to meet , three half hours sets of music, no booze, lots of intellectualism, quiet when the performers were on, just a great place. I had created this winning this winning formula. We were soon turning people away.  The age was 16 to 21. After 21 people went to the bars.  Lots of high school, college and university students came. I thought it was a great place because people who would never step into a church or associate with Christians had this great encounter.

This was when Neil Young and Randy Bachman we’re creating the Winnipeg scene. The coffeehouse were where the young musicians got their start and where the acoustic folk rock, blues and jazz thrived.

The Coffeehouse  didn’t go over with the minister at my church. He considered the folk music scene heathen and wanted us to use the coffeehouse as a means to evangelize the sinners. The wonderful youth advisor couple sided with Doug and me who thought the coffeehouse should be broad based and not just Jesus songs. The minister wanted kids singing hymns.  He didn’t like Kum Ba Yah and They will know we are Christians, songs being sung in those days. The contemporary Christian music was demonic to him. Meanwhile the other churches like St. Vital were liberal. Broadway Baptist which was Doug’s church was the most liberal and loved what we were doing.  It was a huge and influential church. 

I soon had a list of all the acts in town. I had the phone numbers of these entertainers and then began putting together nights of entertainment and finding that right mix.  We had couples and bands and I even convinced my beautiful brilliant church friend to bring her harp and play there.  It was a heady time. It would lead to my being called by the YWCA to help set up the YWCA Wise Eye Coffeehouse which became a great city success.

At school I loved the academics. I’d do my home work on the bus going to the YMCA or the Manitoba Theatre School. I’d do assignments for school between parts at the theatre.  One night I did creative drama and improvisation.  Another I did creative dance and another I did elocution and voice.  On Saturdays I was at the Y and Sundays at the church and a lot of Friday nights either at the church coffeehouse or at the theatre doing a show. We had regular shows with this tiny theatre that seated maybe 30. 

I played a potted plant in my first major role. Then I moved up to playing a corpse. The potted plats, since it was only a prop, didn’t get me any credit but the corpse was an actual role. Though I had not lines and didn’t move I got a mention. I definitely had critical acclaim.  The Green Room entered my heart and soul.