Log booms

It must have been listening to Monty Python's "I'm a Lumberjack" song that triggered thoughts of the Ottawa River log booms behind Parliament Hill. The song mixes up lumberjacks with log drivers at the beginning.



Thoughts of the long-gone log booms reminded me of Kate and Anna McGarrigle singing "Log Drivers' Waltz."

Summer in the city

I removed a few posts because they were too work-centric. Since then, I haven't written much because I've been busy procrastinating whenever I sit at my computer.

Somehow the winter of record precipitation levels has become the summer of record precipitation levels. Weird that I don't really feel like there's been much rain.

I was reminiscing today about the first rock concert I ever attended. It was David Bowie's "Heroes" tour. I saw him at the Ottawa Civic Centre. It was before general admission seating was abolished at concerts (which eventually happened due to some people getting crushed to death at a Who concert, I seem to remember). I went with a friend . . . have no idea where he is now.



I had a weird general admission experience when I went to see Graham Parker and the Rumour at the Civic Centre a couple of years after the Bowie concert. Parker was opening for Cheap Trick. I wasn't interested in seeing Cheap Trick, but most people there were. I got there early with some friends and we made it onto the floor right up to the edge of the stage.



It was a fabulous place to see the show, but what happened was not fabulous. It was very crowded and hot at the front among the crush of fans.

Some people wanted to get up to the front for the Cheap Trick part of the evening. They asked a great hulk of a guy standing next to me if he would trade spots with them. I can't remember what they gave him to help them to the front.



His way of making space for them was to ram me to the side by slamming me in the chest. I was winded and blacked out as I fell.

Fortunately, a friend I was with had the presence of mind to grab onto me and pull me to my feet as she shouted out: "This girl will die if you don't get out of the way for her."



The crowd parted for me and I was back at the front again gasping for breath. It was very weird.

Great concert and we left after Parker finished playing.

Four times to the opera in a week

For a period of time when I was a child, my father and I would set out on our bicycles on Saturday afternoons to tour various used book and antique shops—or junk stores as they were then called—in the Glebe and Centre Town neighborhoods of Ottawa.

One of my favourite shops was an antique store on Third Avenue, just west of Bank Street, called The Gay Blade.

At the time, the term “gay blade” referred to a dashing young man. I don't recall if the proprietor of the shop fit that bill.

I’d paw through the odds and ends in The Gay Blade with the sound of grand opera blaring, broadcast, then as now, on the CBC FM radio show Saturday Afternoon at the Opera.


One weekend we arrived and the shop was silent. My father asked the owner why he wasn't listening to opera.

The owner explained that CBC was broadcasting an Italian opera. Being German-Canadian, he did not think it worth listening to, in fact, he didn't even consider it to be opera.

I was reminded of that incident this week after attending the dress rehearsals of Richard Wagner’s four-part German 19th-century epic Ring Cycle at the new Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto.

Sitting through 15 hours of opera in one week seemed a daunting prospect at first, but I wasn’t bored once.


The singing, music, sets and costumes combined to create a spectacular experience. Of the minor characters, I particularly liked the forest bird who helped Siegfried.

It’s been a long time since I’ve sat through rehearsals.

A photographer snapped hundreds of pictures during the performances. I took mainly photos without flash when the lights were up in the house. I didn't risk it during the performances.

During one intermission, I rode the elevator to the top level and walked down floor by floor.

The upper floors are edged with perilous, low glass half-walls which give gut-churning views of the front-of-house foyer on the orchestra level.


Vertigo kicked in on the top floor. Sickened by the altitude, I got down on my hands and knees and crawled to the edge of the precipice to take photos of the view through the glass wall.

A storey lower, on the fourth level, I was told by an usher not to take photos because, she said: "the theatre is under copyright" ~