Miyo

Miyo Takeda (1983-2025), Toronto, July 30, 1998. We were shopping for a camera and I suggested she get this Olympus Stylus. It was rugged and weather resistant and had a fast 2.8 lens for candid photography. In my Plymouth Neon.

I thought I'd look up a friend I hadn't seen in years. The first thing I found was her obituary in the Toronto Star from a few days before. "No, it can't be the same person," I thought, but it was. I met Miyo at Canzine 1997 in Toronto, when she was 14. She did 'zines and organized music shows and later worked in art galleries and became a landscape architect for the city of Vancouver.

She lived in a rough part of Toronto - when I parked nearby, a prostitute came up to my car. When her dad had painted a door that he'd taken off the hinges and left it outside to dry, someone stole it. We both wondered what kind of market there was for a stolen used door.

We drove to the Beach (Beaches District in Toronto) and she noticed that there were very few black people there, something I, being white, didn't notice! She was always concerned about racism and remembered how one of her teachers had in all seriousness asked whether it was the Chinese whose eyes slanted up or down or the Japanese!

She used to work at an ice cream stand at Harbourfront. She told me she stole from the till and I wondered how she did it, and she showed me - she just pocketed some change and never got caught! "So how are you avoiding not having to shower with several heavily tattooed women, all named Butch?" I asked, and she deadpanned "Hello, Cutie!" in a butch voice, and said the owner just didn't pay that much attention to what was going on. A few years on, I saw her walking down Queen Street West, a club scene in Toronto, in a beautiful outfit and six inch platform shoes with a guy from CFNY, the hip radio station. 

She suffered from depression and was on paxil even in her teens.