Don Cherry plays John Simcoe

Don Cherry playing John Simcoe at Trinity Church, Wolfe Island

Wolfe Island, Aug 20 2004 - Don Cherry made his stage debut in a costume that made his regular sports jacket look conservative.




"How do I say this? Arkigological??", Cherry asked a reporter before he went on stage in a humble church hall on Wolfe Island. Cherry descended from his pickup truck wearing a white wig, three-corner hat, full length riding boots and a flaming red 18th Century British soldier's jacket.




A few days before, Cherry had been driving past the Anglican church that he attends when he's at his home on Wolfe Island, a large island near Kingston, Ontario, Cherry's birthplace.




Cherry saw three women rehearsing the opera and stopped to talk to him.




They were Augusta Cecconi-Bates, the Opera's author and keyboard player, flutist Carrie Wyatt and singer Rhona Gale, who are the only musicians the show had. They immediately told him "It's an opera - and we need you to be MC" Wyatt said. "He said 'What am I doing Friday?' and 'What do I have to do?'".




Everyone on the island knows Cherry, who often walks his fullblood Staffordshire terrier, one of the breeds that are called "pit bulls", along the narrow roads and shoreline.




Cherry, who's been appearing on national TV for years, said he was nervous before he walked out in front of the stage to an audience of about 150 people, many retired cottagers with their grandchildren mixed in. The tiny stage had a backdrop of brown wrapping paper, and was decorated with hand-knitted afghans.




Cherry was dressed as a "Royal Yorkers", an American regiment that stayed loyal to the British during the revolutionary war in 1776, and settled in Canada after they lost the war.

Cherry introduced the opera "Molly Brant", about a Mohawk clan mother who married an English official and brought the Yorkers and other loyalists to Canada after they lost the war.




Cherry introduced the author and players, and told Brant's story, reading in his familiar gravelly voice from a hand lettered script that did not save him from constantly mispronouncing archeology.




Cherry said he took the role to promote knowledge of Canada's history.




"99 out of 100 kids in school in Canada don't know who Molly Brant is, in the States they know George Washington, Benedict Arnold - We got the best country in the world, and we don't teach our history!"




Cherry knows a good deal about local history, and remembered that Stan Jonathan, one of his players with the Bruins, was a Tuscarora Indian, one of the other members of the Six Nations Confederacy the Mohawks are a part of. "I asked him if he was a hunter - he said 'No, I'm a warrior'!" Cherry said.




Cherry said that he doubted next season would be cancelled because of a strike. "I don't think the owners are dumb enough - I don't think the players are dumb enough" because a strike would kill a few of the weaker franchises, but thought the season might be delayed til January.






Asked whether he'd want to pursue a career as a actor, he said "Not if I gotta say "Archeological" again!"

Jane Siberry

SAW Gallery

Saw Jane Siberry at the SAW gallery in Ottawa. She was a waitress at the old Baker Street Bistro in Guelph  (The one that closed around 1981 - not the new one) and used the money she made there for her first album.

We talked about our friend Goldie Sherman, a potter, dancer and artist who still lives in Guelph, and she asked me what I'd been doing since 1981. Not thinking very well I said writing about murders and talked to her about Albert Walker . She said she might have heard of him before this. Walker, a conman and murderer, did have offices in Southwest Ontario - when I was working on the story he seemed to have had one in Guelph.

Dalai Lama, Alanis Morissette

 Ottawa Civic Centre, April 24, 2004

He sometimes used the Tibetan gesture of slapping the back of one hand against the palm of the other to emphasize a point.

Alanis Morissette opened for him

Odd Objects I've found

from my old website - 

As seen in Frank

Peter Mansbridge is the chief anchor for the CBC, Canada's state owned TV network. He wrote this article in the TV Guide - second paragraph says he began a "16 hour run without a break" after the planes hit. Only in the second last paragraph did he talk about "awful human dimension", but only in terms of how he had to "make a conscious decision to push it away". Nowhere does he talk about anyone dying......

Lucky Smoke bubble gum cigarettes
Hey Kids! Want to have a hacking cough just like Dad?

This is a paperback from the twenties - Games were called things like "General Sedgewick", "The Besieged City" and "Napoleon at St. Helena"

Wag

Is self published by Joe Ollmann, seen here with poet Julie Crysler.

who prints and binds palm size and in one case, finger size, chapbooks. He doesn't have a website, at least not the last time I checked. He's in !*@# ( better known as Exclaim! ) as a cartoonist. His address (he sells the books for 2 or 4 dollars at zinefests) is 1900 Main Street W. #104, Hamilton, ON, L8S 4R8, Canada. And you get a free piece of (thumb size) original art in each book!

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Hmmmm, that Japanese guy in the shades playing a Chinese gangster in a 1982 SCTV episode with Robin Williams looks oddly familiar... could it be David Tsubouchi, in 2002 Ontario's Solicitor General???

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Chocolate Stamps!!!!

Brenda the TV psychic!!CJOH-TV is the local Ottawa CTV station. Even though it has the biggest market share the noon-time news format is a real embarrassment - they segue from news to fluff rather akwardly. "200 killed in plane crash - and Janet's in our kitchen telling you how to lose those holiday pounds!"
Every once in a while they have a "psychic" named Brenda in to read tarot cards on the air - she doesn't seem able to pick up on anything at all and gives out the usual fortune cookie advice - 'Trust your inner self blah blah blah'.
I've been in the studio where they do the News at CJOH. They have big red lights on the front of the cameras to tell people which lens to look into. Brenda the Psychic is the only person I've ever seen who keeps on talking into the wrong camera pretty much without fail......

Brenda..... Brenda.....BRENDA!!! We're over here!!

CJOH-TV, January 2, 2002

And she can afford Chanel........

Great Black Out 2003 Ontario

Black Out 2003

Photo by Mark Bellis

Vehicles line up at closed gas bar on 401 during power blackout
Note from 2023 - I had just hit the highway out of Toronto when the power went out, so I avoided the gridlock from traffic lights going off. The southeastern part of Ontario where I was driving had power back on before nightfall since it is on the Quebec grid and only had to isolate itself from the rest of Ontario.  

August 14, 2003, Kingston, Ontario -
Really cute - I had put the Lamine family in my car and was about to take them to Kingston to find a hotel when Troy came up to me and said he was going to take everyone to the gas station. As I drove back everything was pitch dark until near Brockville. The bikers are firefighters from Ottawa who were on their way to Detroit, but had to turn back. I gave a little flashing pendant to Sarah in the story.

Hundreds of cars and trucks were stranded at the service stations along the 401. At one service station near Kingston, the Lamines, a family from Paris, France, who were vacationing in Canada and spoke little English were baffled. "Can you tell us what's going on?" said Florence Lamine, who had three children with her, aged 20 months to 10 years. Her husband Lassad said they had been driving from Niagara Falls back to Quebec to fly home, when they first stopped for gas in Trenton to find all the stations shut down and the family were preparing to spend the night and possibly miss their flight home at the isolated station on the 401.
Douglas Dean of Missisauga and his daughter Sarah, 7, were more up beat when they were stuck on their way back from vacation in Nova Scotia. "It's no big thing " as he settled down. "I'm on vacation until Monday!" Many of the stranded became distressed as their cell phones stopped working when the batteries that powered the transmission towers began to run out of power.
The stranded motorists were saved when 16 year old Troy Ottenhof, who drove to the station where he'd work the past month and a half to pick up his pay check, organized a convoy of about a dozen cars to drive to a gas station nearby that he noticed had a working generator. "Everbody got there OK" said Troy, who wants to be an architect after he finishes high school. He put the cars in a convoy and drove slowly with a rope he'd borrowed from the mechanic in case anyone ran out of gas before they got to the working gas station. "One person did run out of gas, but it was just at the station so it was alright" he said. "One girl gave me 20 bucks!" to thank him for his help, "which is pretty cool" he said.
The convoy headed to O'Neil's Econo Fuels, a family owned station in Odessa, west of Kingston on Highway 2. The owner Chris O'Neil said that people began stopping at the station when they ran out of gas. "One woman had a tiny baby, two weeks old" and some other elderly people. Irene Storms, a woman who lived across the street saw how much the baby and mother were suffering in the intense heat and offered them a generator her late husband had for his hunting camp. "When the chips are down, we Canadians have to shear together", said Storms, a war bride from Manchester, England who married her late husband Claude when he was serving in the RCAF, and who said her determination came from her experiences of neighbours helping each other during war time.
Chris O'Neil said his nephew rigged the generator up to the fuse box so they could pump gas, and another man donated another generator he'd just bought and had in his trunk so they could pump diesel. He said his whole extended family, wife, in-laws, nephews and children, pitched in to direct traffic and even the local pizza parlour sent over some pizzas after he gave them gas to get their generator running.
O'Neil said they pumped $ 5,000 dollars worth of gas in two hours, something they normally do in three days, and only charged their regular price.

Evil Dead - The Musical

Evil Dead : The Musical

Photos from the Media night before the premiere - the premiere happened on the night of the great 2003 power blackout - I later learned they went ahead with the show using flashlights!



Photos by Mark Bellis
Please feel free to use these if you are cast or crew for your portfolios!
August 13, 2003, Tranzac Theatre,
292 Brunswick Ave., Toronto, near Bloor and Bathurst just East of Honest Ed's
Next performances 20-23 August

416.723.EVIL Ticket info
or
Click to visit the musical's website for ticket info


Blue shirt - Ash (Ryan Ward) , Overalls - Jake (Daniel Krolik), Blonde, Khaki explorer shirt - Annie (Ashley Callaghan),
Brunette, black sleeved jersey - Linda (Victoria Nestorowicz), Brunette, red striped shirt - Cheryl (Danielle Meierhenry),
Blonde, busty - Shelley - (Mackenzie Lush), Plaid shirt, white pants - Scott (Matt Olmstead), Grey cardigan - Ed (Pat Brown),
Various - Tim Evans

The Necronomicon

Playing the recording that awakens the Evil

 


Cheryl develops ESP.... who's evil now?

Then Shelley....  

 






Cheryl plays the demon in the cellar played by the mother in the movie  

 





Evil Ed's solo

Annie starts translating the final pages to destroy the evil

Do the Necronomicon!

Hail to the King finale
All characters, indicia, etc., copyright their respective owners.

While there was an earlier cabaret in Chicago this year, this is the first Evil Dead musical that had the copyright owner's blessing, thanks to Bruce Campbell's intervention. Campbell made some calls after the producer wrote him. Beyond Chudleigh was formed from Queen's University drama students in 1997, and this is their first Toronto show. As you can see, it's low budget and it looks like they raided Honest Ed's for those bowls or whatever on their heads in the last scene, and the bridge that leads to the cabin is a 3 foot arch of plywood, which gets yellow taped to represent it being ripped up.
They're hoping that it would be another Rocky Horror cult hit, but 'Do the Necronomicon' needs a bit more ommph to become a 'Time Warp'. Nice Tango and Polka music though!
It borrows from all three Evil Dead movies, despite its title, Evil Dead 1 & 2: The Musical, but the best things in it were the scenes that never were in the originals, like Evil Ed's solo where he laments being a bit player who's going to be blown away by the hero in a few seconds, and the 'Do the Necronomicon' penultimate number. George Reinblatt wrote the book, after having written gags for Howie Mandel during the Just For Laughs festival in Montreal. Mandel has used Reinblatt's material on the Tonight show. Co-creator and artistic director Christopher Bond said that neither of them spoke to Campbell, but after they'd emailed him, he'd made calls on their behalf to secure the necessary permission to use the characters. "He's one of the all-time nice guys" said Chris.
Chris had been a fan of the Evil Dead for years but George had never really watched them until Chris came up with the idea when he was doing a stage version of Rocky Horror. "It was 25 years ago that Rocky Horror started as a stage play that grew into a movie." he said at the beginning of the media performance.
There's a product placement, when they use a Mastercard, one of the sponsors, to jimmy open the door.
I don't know yet what they did the next night...... August 14, 2003.... the city and much of the North-eastern part of the continent was plunged into darkness by the biggest power outage in history.

Diary 2003

2003

April 6 - Right, TFO, the French channel run by the Province of Ontario, was running the videos MTV wouldn't, like the Beastie Boys anti-war... And David Bowie's "I'm Afraid of Americans". 

April 14 - Seeing Saddam's yacht in Basra on TV, bombed out hulk now, I saw it in 1982 in Stockholm, when it must have been moved during the Iran-Iraq war.

April 14 - Seeing Saddam's yacht in Basra on TV, bombed out hulk now, I saw it in 1982 in Copenhagen, when it must have been moved during the Iran-Iraq war.n-Iraq war.