Student politics with Wes Hazlitt and others continued.
It was the Manitoba Theatre School that became central. I loved improvisation. I loved creative dance. It wasn’t gay. It was intellectual and avante garde.
The Director of the Manitoba Theatre School was another incredible mentor. The trouble is I forget his name. He followed Don McQuaig as one of the great influences of my life. He too was a genius but of a totally different kind. Not Christian. But caring and deep and passionate. I loved the passion. The YMCA , the Amalgamated Baptist Youth Groups, Vincent Massey Collegiate, the Student Council and the Gym were all of a different kind. The theatre and poetry and improvisation were different. I was swept away. I wish I could remember his name He was larger than life, so charismatic and funny. He had an English accent. Had been recruited from the the source of all things theatre. The British Invasion was full swing. mod was in. Not a very tall man but larger than life. I loved his emerald green velour suit. His intensity was riveting. All the teachers at the Manitoba Theatre School were extraordinary. One unique and beautiful chameleon lady would morph from girl to woman, witch to angel. It was like joining a circus of happy multiple personalities and shape shifters. I’d had a taste of this kind of freedom and life with Mr. Fischer who’d later kill himself but here I was in the midst of these most unusual people. Linda Laidlaw had introduced us to back yard theatre. But here I was on the stage exploring myself. We really believed that life’s a stage. We knew metaphor in a world going more and more concrete. We were a dynamic force.
I’d later do and teach psychodrama. The Unconscious of Freud, Jung and Milton Erickson were the stuff of theatre classes. We studied Stanislav technique. Improvisation was unknown in Winnipeg. Indeed it was unknown in Canada it seemed. Creative dance was as original. Certainly I didn’t know anything of this weird and wonderful peculiar insane sanity. I was rolling around on the floor, shouting and screaming and visualizing with the rest of them. It was so freeing and invigorating.
Later doing drugs I think I’d be trying to capture the angst of those days, the scheer extraordinary breadth of human expression. Drugs and alcohol were never a source and came much later in life as an add on, parasite and usurper. The human spiri and the natural muses were so much more creative.
Trying on characters like clothes, always discussing after what it had felt like. Long animated Tete a Tete’s in the Green Room. The craft, these intense serious pursuits of expression and finesse, perfection really, in this vaudevillian circus of time and place. Adolescence was so intense in dance. Running back and forth across the black painted space. Freezing to command. Being used as props to make a band with sounds being assigned randomly. Striking up conversations and scenes surrounding a ball thrown onto the floor. An object became a person. Conversation with skulls and paper weights.
I excelled. I was rapidly brought into an inner circle
The government of Canada had a pilot project. It wanted to test ‘creative dramatics’ as potential a ‘school subject’. There was lots of funding. There was a move to introduce it to the school curriculum. The trouble is no one knew what it was. Chekhov wasn’t even known. I was in plays that weren’t Broadway. It was all Fringe before Fringe. Winnipeg was like that, We’d have pockets of insane modernity and be light years ahead of the mainstream simply because no one knew not to. This was before the attacks of freedom and the reign of thought an behaviour police. At least it was in a period of truce. A Renaissance.
“It’s the winter. People in the north are thrown together and have to play inside. In the south people can go outside. Here we have to tell each other stories, make up plays, find ways to entertain. Here there’s room for artists to grow. No distractions like sunshine and warm days. Stark endless days of snow and blizzard. We’re like the Russians that way. No Californian could produce a Anna Karenina. Not even the English could come up with the passion that is the product of years of facing each other with no chance of escape without snowshoes. “ my Czek friend would say years later. A surical lounge. A different kind of Green Room.
I’d love as only a Winnipeger could the greatest movie of our age, Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg.
Manitoba Theatre School was like that.
I got this job with 4 others doing improvisation theatre for children about the parks of Winnipeg one summer. The other group of kids did improvisational theatre about the province. It was a ‘pilot project’. It was a tremendous success. I’d write poems for these performances and my fellow actors and actresses would act them out. Improvisational Theatre. We’d use kids as props They loved being ironing boards and stoves and having us as mothers and fathers cooking in our kitchen with children as kettles and knives and forks. It was hilarious. Huge crowds would gather. It was utterly new and original. We’d be like a gypsey theatre group appearing and then disappearing after we’d wowed the crowds with insanity. We were big into guerilla theatre then.
A roaring success. Lots of coverage in the newspaper. I’d have my picture taken directing hoards of children , a regular Pied Piper. We loved the kids back then. They were so happy and parents were so happy. It was a bit of heaven. So much applause. Cheering and participating. The scare came years later. Maybe it was building. It wasn’t anywhere around then. Boogey men weren’t on every corner. Cannibals and pedophiles and rabid unicorns didn’t exist. The skies weren’t falling. People were more intelligent collectively somehow. We just had fun and the kids and parents had fun. It was a bit of unreality and jolly.
I organized an Improvisational Group after that. I don’t remember what we called ourselves. I got us the gigs and wrangled the money. No one was good at that sort of thing but I’d say I’d personally like $25 for doing this thing or a $100 and the gang would agree. Then I’d convince the Bay to have us on stage and they would. We were a big draw. We’d play coffeehouses, fashion shows, schools. I guess I was an agent and actor. We were all very busy and didn’t have a lot of nights to do this over the years of high school. But each gig was a gas.
I’d met Nina by then. Kathy was puppy love. A girl and boy playing. Nina was first adult romance. Harlequin, college edition. She was a woman and I was love struck apoplectic. I understand dogs who chase female dogs in heat. I don’t judge people with addiction. I rooted on her. She was the soil of my existence. She was so incredibly beautiful in the soft thin ballet dancer way, so creative and truly brilliant. She made all her clothes and they were things no one in Winnipeg had ever seen. Princess gown and the stuff of Stevie Nicks and Julia Roberts. She was a local but we all knew she could have been somebody anywhere.. New York, London and San Francisco. She was however one of God’s creations in Winnipeg. And she liked me.
She was a couple of years older attending University of Winnipeg while I was still in high school.
We’d all talk for hours in the Green Room at the Manitoba Theatre School, sharing poetry, ideas. I was reading Cohen and Chaucer. We’d imitate and myme and sing diddlies. It was a place where we were safe and creativity and expression were what it was all about. In retrospect it was an insane asylum quiet room for actors and actresses. We loved it. The Green Room remains forever very special place in my heart.
After we’d go to Nina’s. All of us would bus to or walk across Winnipeg to her down town home. We’d have tea in the basement. She’d burn incesnse and candles. Hughie was there. We’d talk all night. I’ve written stories that described these nights. I’d seen a ghost on the stairs. Nina checked the history of the house out and sure enough there’d been a bizarre death in that very same place. This lead to me being asked over and over again if I could find a ghost in a house. Sure enough I’d identify a child , a man or a woman. The history would confirm my sense. The Theosophical Society heard of me and were interested. I was psi tested by some folks from the university. It just seemed to be a ‘knack’, the air moved differently. I levitated in my bed but there were no sensors and later we’d reduce wall such phenomen to hypnagogic delusions. We were astroprojecting and reading the mystics. Years alter I’d see the Predator and that would be what I’d see, In Sweat lodges years later the medicine men would be surprised that I’d see their relatives. They saw them as matter of fact but it was just novel for an ootsider. I’d go on to visit with Holy Men around the world, drinking in their presence, smiling together as we talked of God. In the sweat lodges we couldn’t talk because the ancestors didn’t remember English.
We were into ghosts back then. Not for long but a phase. We tried a Ouigi Board and all sorts of crazy stuff occurred. Probably it had started around Halloween that year. The ghosts. The hunt for ghosts. The feeling of ‘vibrations’ off old objects. The discussion of ‘energy’. Hughie falling through the ceiling on a ghost hunt likely still seeing a psychologist from the trauma of that night. Kids pulling him from above and pushing him from below to get him out. I laugh to remember. Sometime wrote a story of that night and had it published in some magazine. Someone had thought they felt a ghost there and Hughie had been searching psychically for a ghost when he fell through the ceiling. At the same time another kid was below him searching psychically for a ghost, opening the mind for greater sensitivity, when very big Hughie fell from above, feet touching this kids ears. Search psychically was walking about very slowly with eyes closed feeling the space around like blind men or zombies. If you opened your eyes and look about through the incense smoke in the light of the candle all these kids moving about, it was weird and very exciting. The girls of course were all intoxicating.
Well, after we rescued Hughie without resort to the fire department, Nina and the girls and us guys discussed how Nina was going to explain this. I’d been here before with a marble table. Nina was right on top of it. Her father was mortified that the ceiling hadn’t held and ‘poor hughie’ had fallen through. None of us got ‘blame’. Good thing it hadn’t happened in my home. But no, her parents were sorry for the shock to poor Hughie and concerned the person below had almost been squashed. . There was no talk of ghosts but instead Nina said we’d been playing ‘hide and seek’. Wow.
It was a while before the builders restored the ceiling and Hughie was kept from upstairs.Hughie was a very big boy.
We’d all head off in the summer on the great overnight camping bicycle expedition to Kenora.Just the guys. Nina’s brother. Not Hughie. He wasn’t into exercise. But a couple of the other Theatre School guys. This wasn’t the YMCA crowd. I was the only ‘athlete’. I actually had a real adult bicycle. One of the guys had something a kid would ride. It wasn’t a fast ride by any means. Just a straggling pack of crazy kids. We didn’t even have a tent. We had candy bars and cokes. We’d thought we’d make it the hundred miles but it took us a couple of days. A guy travelling a cross Canada in a black English sports car with a little pup tent shared his stew with us and some tea. We thought we were going to starve. He laughed. Thought we were crazy. We were always quoting Shakespeare and acting. Somehow we made Kenora where one of the guys parents had a cabin. We had food and beds and couches and stayed the night before we headed home the next day. I don’t even think we rode our bicycles back. I think they ended up in a truck and we ended up getting a lift in a car or hitch hiking.
Nina was the centre of the crowd, her beauty, her individuality, the Lennon circular glasses before Lennon, the hair down to the floor, the drawings and paintings. She would eventually leave for the west coast and I’d hear she was doing interior design and drawing.
The night we made love I was a virgin. I didn’t have a condom so tried to use cellophane. “It hurts. It scratches. Take it off.” I didn’t want her to get pregnant. The BCP had just arrived. I ‘ve always loved Paul Simon’s song Couple in the Next Room going at it all night long. In that song he describes his first love making experience “just like a dog I was befriended.” That’s how I felt. The universe shifted and I knew love. Love conquered all. The Bible , the Beatles , Dylan, my parents, God all made sense right then and there.
“I think you’re supposed to move”. She said. I don’t know how long I’d just lain there dead and in heaven but I began moving. She seemed to like that more. It didn’t last long but I did do coitus interruptus. I don’t know how I knew. I was always considerate. She didn’t get pregnant but I’ve never been more involved in a girls cycle than I was with hers.
Too many guys have written about buying condoms. Suffice it to say it was all of that and worse the first time.
And no I don’t lust after Nina despite being an old man and remembering her as Venus stepping off a shell. When I think of women I loved I hear the Song of Songs sung to Handels water music. Really Nina looked just likethat painting of Venus. Except her hair wasn’t blond. I remember her mostly for her smile, her beauty, the way she tied her long hair, the ribbons, her gowns and the way she made me feel, whole, like a person. Having known her I understood the Milky Way, the Big Bang and why I still stop to smell the fragrance from a special flower. I’m am rewarded every time.
She left me for a guy with a car. I knew him and liked him. He was a year older than her and a couple of years older than me. I thought I should beat him up but that wouldn’t change anything. She loved him now. They headed with him for the west coast in his car. I went home and contemplated suicide. The darkness lasted months. But I was a poet. Poets must suffer. I nursed the doom as only an adolescent poet could.
Looking back I just feel for my poor parents. They loved me despite all the irritability and general obnoxiousness. So many times I’d miss the midnight bus home hitch hike a ride home with a gay man usually begging me to let him take me home. I ‘d just thank him for the ride. It was before timeshare pitches. I got all the pitches known but they were never dangerous. I had dangerous but never coming home late at night from Nina’s. I was kidnapped in broad daylight hitch hiking down Pembina. A guy with a knife threatening to stab me wanting to take me home. I found it in me to threaten him back, ‘if you don’t stop this car I’m going to grab the wheel”. “Not with this knife you won’t. “. “You won’t be able to cut me with me grabbing your wrist and the wheel’. I was already back then talking low and slow to crazy dangerous people, He let me out there and then. Once again it proved that predators were looking for easy prey.
The guys at night were just looking for a guy to pick up. Nice guys but I was in love and not interested. I wasn’t homophobic either because I was in theatre and dance and the gay guys like Hughie were just other guys.
I’d be in bed before two and up by six to get to Volleyball practice.
I think back to this time and how full my schedule was. I was actually reading texts and novels and history books between plays, on busses and waiting for Nina. I was never without a book and a notebook. But I was so involved. Years later when I’d get to medical school I’d finally find other kids who’d had similiar schedules, kids who rode horses, played violin, studied and worked in the same days. There were other kids that seemed to just go to school and go home and slowly but surely we drifted apart. I became part of this other involved group. I never had enough time. I was always rushing from one class to another. There was always so much I wanted to learn. I always felt so stupid and that I was always trying to catch up. The school year was full but summers were pretty relaxed. Time at the park. Time at the beach. Walking hand in hand with Nina. Reciting poetry to her. I’d make up songs and sing when I walked . I learned from my sister in law my brother did the same. Something genetic, I guess. Beautiful women made the Hay men burst into song. My mother told me my Dad had done the same. Now I hope that a guy will meet a girl that makes him burst into spontaneous song. I also like opera today and understand the Italian men doing this. I did it.
When I was sad I wrote sad poems and played sad minor seventh chords on the untuned guitar.
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