Mrs Lavoie's

 I wanted to go back to St. Lawrence HS, so I rented a room in a boarding house owned by Mrs. Lavoie (sp?)  and her husband on 705 Walton Street - she was a very good woman, sometimes cooked us food, and so old she remember the great Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918-1920 where people were dying throughout the world and the hospitals were overflowing with patients. Her husband, who didn't speak English that well, and I couldn't speak French at all, was a mill worker who used to love to play the piano but got rid of it when his hand became paralyzed. They had a big front parlour with the radio tuned to Radio-Canada and people from all around the world dropped in, mostly international students, but also a prospector who had worked up north. There was a Venezuelan named Adnobio (sp?) who died suddenly of appendicitis after I'd moved out.

1976

 Nurses Residence. 

I was staying there with my girlfriend during the summer when it wasn't used by students, and hoping to get back into St. Lawrence HS, since Char-Lan was a terrible place, with a lot of bullying. I remember waking up one morning and hearing this coming from another room:

The Nurses Residence, as people called it, was the Regional School of Nursing and then  Mille Roches Hall student residence, for St. Lawrence College. It had a little library on the main floor. It was actually pretty dirty, and I even saw a maggot crawling on the floor in the collective kitchen/TV area. The cleaning ladies would usually just park themselves in front of the TV and eat a bag of chips. The building is now part of the Chartwell Chateau Cornwall seniors' residence.

The Cinema Show

 (writing Jan 14, 2025) Alexa played 'The Cinema Show' by Genesis, from Selling England By The Pound. 

It made me remember my first kiss, by the railway tracks near her house and then the backroom of her parents' house. She played her album.  "I will make my bed/With her tonight, he cries. Can he fail armed with his chocolate surprise?" The song was appropriate. I was trying to get laid. We did do it at the Château Laurier. I bought us bus tickets and a room at the huge hotel in Ottawa. Had nuts from room service.

 Chateau Laurier, 2010, Michel Rathwell, wikimedia commons

The Hollow Crown

 I saw The Hollow Crown, presented by The Royal Shakespeare Company, in Cornwall in 1974 in the fall at I think General Vanier Secondary School - it was touring Canada.  John Barton devised it as an anthology about British monarchs from William the Conqueror to Queen Victoria. I remember a reading about King George III's break from sanity when he addressed people around him as 'peacocks'. Prunella Scales, best known as Sybil Fawlty from Fawlty Towers, was in it. I can remember the closing scene with a man holding up the crown. I felt sophisticated going by myself to see it at 14. I think I saw Dracula at CCVS the same year.