A total solar eclipse last month and a spectacular aurora borealis show on the night of May 10th have both luckily occurred during that sweet spot on PEI when the snow has disappeared but the biting insects haven’t yet emerged, when being outside is a pleasure.
I have seen the aurora on the northern horizon before, but between 11pm and midnight they danced and flickered dimly overhead and all around, something I’ve never experienced. We don’t live in a completely dark-sky environment, as there are a few yard and street lights dotted around, and the glow from the lights in the town of Alberton to the north can sometimes be detected, but it’s pretty close, and I got some nice photos.
To the south
To the north
It was only 4C on Friday night and I hadn’t dressed appropriately for the cold, damp weather, but I stretched out on the grass anyway to watch the show. Last night I was better prepared for another cool night, donning long underwear, heavy sweater, gloves, hat, winter boots and splash pants.
Alas, the northern lights stayed undetectable except in long exposure photos, just a glow on the horizon. So my careful preparation wouldn’t totally have been in vain, I recruited Steven to join me in a gimmicky shot to commemorate our month of celestial awe, but now looking at it, I think it also captured how we have moved through our life together over these past 25 years: arm in arm, heads up, finding each other in an infinite and beautiful universe, walking through the darkness toward the light.
I picked up Steven at the Charlottetown airport last week. The Air Canada flight from Toronto was late. It had been deiced twice at Pearson. When it finally took off, I started my 100 km drive over snow-drifted highways, and the plane touched down just a couple of minutes after I got there.
I haven’t been in the terminal since before the pandemic. They’ve done a bit of renovating, removed the Cows Ice Cream cow that used to greet travellers in the arrivals area. A much more multicultural array of folks were waiting with me than in the past
Two children tried to find a place to hide so they could surprise the person they were meeting. A young man held a bouquet of flowers, shifting back and forth and looking at the floor, thinking hard. A Buddhist monk in orange robes and the biggest snow boots I have ever seen came in decked out in a couple of DSLR cameras. There were the pasty potato-faced people like me.
I was sitting on a bench far enough away that I couldn’t see the when the doors opened, but I knew a couple of seconds before they did because those waiting near the doors suddenly started to crane their necks to spot the person they were meeting. There are no jet bridges at Charlottetown, so people have to make their way across the tarmac through whatever weather awaits, emerging from the darkness at night.
The passengers trickled in at first, and then suddenly they burst forth, a flock of black four-wheeled suitcases with long handles, twirling and pirouetting across the bumpy tiles, click click click, a ballet of surcharge-dodging swans. Their human handlers seemed to have the most gentle of grips on them, just a couple of fingers, and that let them deftly maneuver around the people hugging babies and kissing grandmothers and out to waiting conveyances.
A few people carried those bags too tired to swivel or were reluctant to bump over the snow from the plane. A couple of my hens don’t like walking on fresh snow and will insist on being carried when they tire of the uncertainty of the puffy white, so I expect the bag owners faced the same thing.
In just a couple of minutes, the clattering cases were gone. The children were hugging a tall man, the youngest clinging to his leg so he sort of dragged her around, everyone laughing. I lost sight of the man with the flowers, so don’t know if the person he was meeting arrived. The monk was talking to a family with a young boy, no photos being taken yet. Steven grabbed his backpack off the conveyor belt and we stepped out into the drifting snow.
The Charlottetown Airport arrivals area, July 2014. The Cows cow was joined by Anne of Green Gables that summer, both patiently waiting for Matthew Cuthbert.
I’m a couple of weeks late marking the 50th wedding anniversary of Tom Connors and Lena Welsh, and not even sure now how that milestone came into my mind. Tom was a singer/songwriter known as Stompin’ Tom. He was born in Saint John, New Brunswick and adopted by a couple who lived in Skinner’s Pond, PEI, where there is now an interpretive centre to showcase his musical talents and life. Tom died in 2013, but Lena is still alive, as far as I know.
He wrote and sang, in the classic country and western style, about working people and places he visited while criss-crossing Canada numerous times. Every Prince Edward Islander who attended elementary school in the 1970s and 80s probably sang in choir and can still remember every word to the song of his that is most connected with PEI: “Bud the Spud”.
Why do I remember when he got married? Because we watched it on television in school. I was in second grade, and we sat on the floor, gathered around what was probably a black and white television, on Friday, November 2 to watch Tom and Lena get married on the CBC Television program Elwood Glover’s Luncheon Date. I don’t remember Glover, and only have dim memories of watching the wedding, but I knew it was a Big Deal because television was still viewed as slightly unedifying in 1973, Sesame Street be damned, and wasn’t used in our primary education, with only a few exceptions.
Original Toronto Star caption: Happiest moment of my life, says Stompin’ Tom Connors as he weds Lena Welsh, 26, Magdalen Islands barmaid, on Elwood Glover’s TV show, Luncheon Date, today. Here, Glover, left, congratulates bride and groom after an estimated 2 million viewers tuned in on the formal, 12-minute ceremony. The 36-year-old folk singer is from Skinner’s Pond, P.E.I. Wedding was a first for TV in Canada. (From Toronto Public Library Digital Archive. Copyright Toronto Star, photographer Frank Lennon.)
When you are seven years old, experiencing things for the first time is commonplace, so I had no idea that famous people didn’t get married on television all the time. The only other non-royal person who had their wedding televised, that I can think of, was Tiny Tim and Miss Vicki, but I was only three when that occurred, we wouldn’t have received the US station it was broadcast on, and Tiny Tim terrified me, so I would have avoided it: if you want me to give up state secrets, just play him singing “Tiptoe Through The Tulips” and I’ll tell you everything.
Stompin’ Tom possibly wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but Islanders LOVED him to bits. When Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip visited PEI in the summer of 1973 to mark the 100th anniversary of our province joining Canada, a concert was held in Charlottetown to mark the auspicious occasion. Family friends were visiting us from Toronto, and one of our guests was a woman who had recently moved to Canada and had grown up in a unionist household in Northern Ireland. She loved the Queen, and was thrilled we would be able to watch the concert live on television.
I don’t remember watching this show, but the family lore is that the broadcast began with the usual pomp that accompanies the arrival of a royal. The audience, in all their Charlottetown finery, politely applauded to welcome the royal couple. There were speeches, and I would bet Anne of Green Gables made an appearance. Our Irish friend watched with great interest.
And then Stompin’ Tom took to the stage with his guitar, undoubtably in his trademark black outfit and cowboy hat. Don’t know what he sang, but it would have been something twangy and foot stompin’. The crowd, who had given the royal couple a suitably dignified and muted welcome, erupted into hoots and hollers and thunderous applause for this tall skinny fellow who looked like a bad guy from a Hollywood western. Our friend couldn’t understand how he could get a bigger reaction from the audience than the queen did, and my mother said she watched the rest of the broadcast with a slightly bristly reserve.
I met Tom once backstage at the famed Toronto music venue, Massey Hall. The Stompin’ part of his stage name came from his habit of stomping his left foot so hard he would make a hole in the stage, to the displeasure of venue owners, so he started using a small piece of plywood to stomp upon, holding it up at the end of the performance to let the particles he dislodged with his heel drift to the stage.
At some point he started auctioning off the boards for charity. In September 1999, he decided the Daily Bread Food Bank would get the money from the board auction at his Massey Hall concert and although I wasn’t the PR person for our organization, I was the token PE Islander on the staff (an exotic creature!) and given the opportunity to attend the show and accept the donation.
It was fantastic to finally see Tom live and even more wonderful to be in an audience of true fans, many of whom were also originally from Atlantic Canada. We sang along, and cried with him as he became overcome with emotion while singing “Confederation Bridge” and couldn’t continue the song: “And it’s calling, calling me over, the blue water’s rolling and soon I’ll be strolling out there. Down by the ocean, where the Island devotion to friendship is found everywhere.”
Illegal and very poor quality flash photography by me (a former theatre usher and stage manager who knew better), Massey Hall, Toronto, September 18, 1999. I swear that’s Tom.
The board auction was held during the show, and the winner was able to meet Tom after the show to get his board signed, and I was present to arrange to get the money, a very generous $5,000. I first met Lena, who was lovely when I told her I was from PEI (she’d likely met everyone from PEI by that point), an elegant, quiet lady. Then Tom came into the green room, bigger than life, holding a beer in one hand and a cigarette in another, greeting each person one by one.
When it was my turn to speak to Tom, I thanked him for supporting DBFB and then told him my father often spoke of the night sometime in the 1960s at our local community festival when the organizers heard that Tom was in the audience. My father, acting as emcee for the evening, asked Tom up on stage to sing a few songs, which he agreed to do. The roof nearly came off the rink with the audience response, and as he headed out into the night, they gave him a big feed of cooked lobsters. He slapped me on the back and said he remembered that night, though I wonder if he really did.
Hugh Gillis, the man who bought the board that night at Massey Hall, drove to PEI four years ago to donate it and two others he bought over the years to the Stompin’ Tom Centre. He apparently has no connection to PEI, even though he has a classic Island name, but just seems to be a wonderfully generous man.
The other reason I remember September 18, 1999 was that when I got home from the concert, there was a message on my telephone answering machine from a fellow I had met at a birthday party the week before, asking if I wanted to go out on a date some time. I did, and we did, and now we are married, like Lena and Tom.
Stompin’ Tom celebrates the $5,000 his Stompin’ Board Auction bought for Daily Bread Food Bank from bidder Hugh Gillis. Here Hugh (on left) and a friend enjoy a laugh with Tom. Taken backstage at the Stompin’ Tom Connors “Meet and Greet” after his show at Massey Hall in Toronto on September 18, 1999. (Photographer: Barry Roden – Credit: Library and Archives Canada)
US President Joe Biden’s granddaughter, Naomi Biden, will be marrying a fellow called Peter Neal. Saw this photo of the couple this morning.
Peter Neal and Naomi Biden
Hmmm. There was something about Neal’s eyes and smile that reminded me of someone, a television actor from my childhood, but I couldn’t remember who it was, or what show he had been on, but I knew the actor I was thinking of had dark hair and a moustache.
I showed the photo to Steven, who is a decade older than me and has a much better memory, but he drew a blank. So I added a moustache.
Very natural.
Funnily enough, this still didn’t help Steven, and neither TinEye or Google Image Search could pinpoint the 70s star with my life-like rendering. I mean, come on, that moustache looked so natural! You know, that guy on that show! Nope.
Needing to scratch this pop culture itch, I searched for “1970s US sitcom casts” and scrolled until I found him.
The cast of Petticoat Junction and not Peter Neal.
Gomez Addams, Commander Sherman, husband of Patty Duke – John Astin! I didn’t watch either the Addams Family or Petticoat Junction, but there he was, sitting in a dark corner of my tv-addled brain, barely discernible, but just clear enough to let me match him with someone who looks absolutely nothing like him. Good try, brain.
Steven and I moved to PEI on May 1, 2001. There was so much snow at our cottage, where we spent that first summer, that my mother had to hire my cousin to clear the lane with his tractor and snowblower. Collective amnesia and too much British pastoral poetry in our education system makes us believe that May 1 in PEI should be all spring flowers and tea on the terrace but, like this year and 2001, it’s often not.
While I’m considered to be from PEI (though regarded with slight suspicion by some because I spent nearly two decades in other places), Steven is, and always will be, “from away”, a term hated by some people who move to PEI and feel they are never really accepted. I get it, and try not to use it for fear of offending someone. I’m really from away, too, not being Miꞌkmaq, and if I was living where many of my ancestors were from, I would be having tea on a terrace in Devon or Dorset.
I heard one of the members of the band Wet Leg talking about growing up on the Isle of Wight and how people who are not born there are called overners, I suppose because they are from “over across”, as we on PEI sometimes refer to the mainland. I am an Islander with overner traits, I guess.
Today I decided to try out the new bus service for western PEI. There are both intercommunity routes connecting towns in West Prince, and long distance runs to Summerside and Charlottetown. I chose to go to Summerside and took a late morning bus (which ended up being a large passenger van) from the West Devon carpool parking lot to uptown Summerside. The trip took just under an hour, cost $2, was quite comfortable, and there was only one other passenger.
The main drawback to the service at this point is a distinctly user-unfriendly online schedule, which I managed to figure out with a bit of persistence. As a non-driver who has lived in rural PEI for over 20 years, and only gets to town when my wife, Thelma, is driving there, it was a novelty to be able to make the trip on my own. “On my own” for most of the way, at any rate, because the other challenge of the service is that Thelma had to drive me to the pick-up point because it is too far to walk to from where we live. But baby steps, so to speak, since PEI has no real culture of public transit.
The trip back to West Prince was a different story, with a roomier bus and more passengers being picked up at the Summerside Tax Centre and Slemon Park, workers who were on their way home at the end of their day. The driver informed me that for a relatively new service (the transit service on the eastern end of the Island has been in operation for two years and is well used), the “Up West” run was quickly being adopted, mostly by long-distance commuters.
I plan to use the transit system as much as I can and keep my fingers crossed that the powers that be get the message that rural public transit is something our Island is in dire need of, and deserves as much support as they can give
Steven’s lunch at G&T Book Cafe, 30 Spring St., Summerside.
Last week saw the start of public transit bus routes for the western end of PEI but, like so many things that seem new, this is actually something we once had that we just forgot about. There was passenger train service from the 1870s until 1969, bus service from Tignish to Summerside in the 1930s and 40s, and a short-lived bus service in the 1980s. I took the 80s-era bus with some friends exactly once to do back-to-school shopping around 1980, when I was in that sweet spot between being old enough to travel on my own and getting my driver’s licence and, soon after, a car.
I just returned from taking Steven to meet the bus at a carpool parking lot in West Devon. Steven lived in cities with public transit his entire life until we moved to PEI in 2001. He’s never learned to drive, so he relies on me or someone else to take him places. Before this, the closest thing to public transit would be calling a taxi from Summerside, which is $75 one way and so not really viable for anything but an absolute emergency.
The little bus arrived almost exactly on time, he hopped on as the lone passenger, paid his $2 (heavily subsidised by government) fare, and off they went in the direction of Summerside. He’ll do some errands, have lunch, and hop back on the bus to be back in West Devon at 5. He’s promised to pen a guest post to share his experience.
The Steven Mayoff Film Festival opened with Steven’s second film, Happy Birthday to Me, so it had to end with his first and only other film appearance to date, Hog Wild. It stars Tony Rosato of SCTV fame. It is a terrible movie. And although he appears in the credits as “Chubby Cadet”, Steven was actually nowhere to be seen! It could have been him in a bathrobe in a hallway near the beginning, but he can’t remember, and it was such a brief shot it was difficult to tell. I watched the whole thing to see if he would appear, but no Steven.
Real Professional Actor Matt Craven was also in both of those illustrious movies, so that’s something, I guess. Craven was also in the single-season TV series L.A. Doctors with my NTS classmate, Rick Roberts. I wouldn’t have dreamed that I had at least two tenuous connections to Matt Craven.
The made-in-Canada-but-starring-Americans slasher movie Happy Birthday to Me was released 40 years ago today. Even through I’m not a horror movie fan, we watched the whole darn thing tonight, wall-to-wall gore, buckets of blood, screaming teens. I did the classic wimpy thing of covering my eyes when the yucky bits came on.
So why watch a scary movie when you don’t like them? Because my husband is in it, that’s why! Yes, now that I’ve mentioned it, you’ll remember his pivotal role as “Police Officer.” He has an entry in IMDb and everything, even though he’s called Stephen there and not Steven. I needn’t make fun as I don’t have any movie credits, and he has two (he was “Chubby Cadet” in another Canadian classic, Hog Wild).
Happy Birthday to Me starred Melissa Sue Anderson, who played the older sister Mary Ingalls on Little House On The Prairies, and Glenn Ford, who was in tons of classic Hollywood movies including Gilda, The Big Heat and Blackboard Jungle. Ford was born in Quebec, so must have gotten a kick out of being in Montreal for the shoot. (Or he just needed the money. I bet he probably just needed the money.) If Wikipedia is to be believed, Anderson later moved to Montreal with her family and they all became Canadian citizens, so she must have had fun, too.
The rest of the cast is filled with names and faces you’ll recognize if you watched Canadian TV in the 70s and 80s. Most of them probably did at least one episode of Street Legal or King of Kensington. And a lot of them were theatre actors who welcomed small parts in dumb American movies shot in Canada, because that’s what pays the bills. Frances Hyland was a much-beloved Canadian theatre star. Lenore Zann had at least one season at the Charlottetown Festival right after this movie before eventually entering provincial and now federal politics in Nova Scotia. Ron Lea had been at the National Theatre School with Steven, and I worked with the lovely Lesleh Donaldson on the play How Could You, Mrs. Dick? David Eisner, Matt Craven, and Louis Del Grande are all in there. Even Maurice Podbrey, who founded and led the Cenatur Theatre in Montreal, had a role in this goofy film.
I tried to interview Mr. Mayoff about his experience on set, but he didn’t have much to report, no gossip except that Mr. Ford didn’t want anyone watching him film his scenes, so the set would be cleared. Steven said Frances Hyland said something nice to him, but he doesn’t remember what it was. No reports of fist fights or how good craft services was or anything. Oh well.
Beyond Steven’s star turn, there weren’t any really outstanding performances. Hyland gave it her all, and managed somehow to retain her dignity. I actually enjoyed the movie much more than I thought I would. It’s a pretty terrible script, but it was so ridiculous that it was funny.
I’ll leave you with photos of Steven delivering his one line, in both Spanish and Japanese subtitles. He was hired as an extra, given a line, and the rest is Canadian movie history. There are no small parts, only small actors with big hats that hide their faces.
Spanish subtitle of “Sir, you better come outside.”Japanese subtitle of “Sir, you better come outside.”
Steven recently posted The Mirror on SoundCloud, a song he wrote with his friend, Ted Dykstra, for their yet-to-be produced musical, Dorian, based on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.
While the recording is a bit sketchy from a wobbly old cassette, the performers are straight up Canadian music royalty. Stratford Festival star Lucy Peacock is on lead vocals, Paul Hoffert from the band Lighthouse is on organ, Creighton Doane on drums and Kevin Breit on guitar. Steven’s not sure of backup vocals, but I would guess Melanie Doane and Damhnait Doyle are likely in there, maybe Terry Hatty, no doubt Ted, definitely not Steven.
Speaking of Ted, it’s 25 years since he and Richard Greenblatt premiered their play 2 Pianos, 4 Hands at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto. Mirvish Productions just released a podcast interview with Ted and Richard and their devoted stage manager, Beatrice Campbell, my pal and classmate from the National Theatre School of Canada. Stage managers are NEVER included in such things, so it’s lovely to see Bea tell her stories.
Steven and Ted are working on a new show based on the Greek myth of Dionysus (no, it’s not contractual that they only work on subjects starting with D!), so poor old Dorian must be feeling a bit left out, like a forgotten painting in an attic or something.
