[UPDATE, Wednesday night: At the request of my friends at Hugh’s Room, I’ve added the script of my monologue from Saturday’s show. It’s now at the bottom of this post. — pw]
Saturday was mild and sunny in Toronto. The traffic chaos that some had predicted because of a FIFA match on the CNE grounds didn’t materialize. Torontonians, who are capable of many moods, were mostly beaming, and many of them came to Hugh’s Room in the East end to make an excellent audience for the second Paul Wells Road Show. Today I’m thrilled to bring you photos and audio.
This one looked action-packed on paper, but in the event it matched the cheerful mood of Hugh’s Room in the new location it’s inhabited since 2023: a decommissioned church, low-slung and comfy, with very little distance between audience and stage. I came out wearing a Côte d’Ivoire jersey, and we were off.
Toronto mayor Olivia Chow talked about the challenges of city government. She’s in a tough race for re-election, but our show was one of six events she had scheduled that day, so she’s showing up for the fight. I had a great panel to discuss the city’s challenges and promise: Toronto Star editor Nicole MacIntyre, longtime provincial and federal Conservative strategist Jason Lietaer, and Marco Mendicino, who’s senior counsel at Cassels (it took me two tries to get that right) and who was Justin Trudeau’s minister of public safety and, briefly there at the start, Mark Carney’s chief of staff. Mendicino came out in kicks and a t-shirt, quaffing canned gin and tonic. Note to future Road Show guests: this is the correct attitude.
Michael Healey, the playwright whose latest hits Rogers v. Rogers and The Master Plan have helped make Crow’s Theatre one of Canada’s leading venues for new Canadian theatre, dropped by to share his thoughts on Toronto as setting and character for his plays. Rollie Pemberton came to discuss his new book Ways of Listening, about hanging on to your personality in an age of streaming and AI slop, and to rap “Alpenflage” off his latest Cadence Weapon album Forager. Incidentally, even after practicing, I mispronounced Pemberton’s first name: it’s Role-y, not Rawl-y. Sigh. Nerves. But more than anyone else on the bill, he performed a central function of my live events: convincing a confused and skeptical audience that there’s much more to a good life than can be contained on Parliament Hill.
We heard three songs from the young singer-songwriter Gavin McLeod, who will shortly need no introduction. He’s been playing and singing since he was 10, and he’s ready for everyone to hear his music. As he made abundantly clear.
And I did one of my monologues, about how Queen Street concert flyers made an impression on me when I was just another nerdy kid from Sarnia.
Big show. I want to thank my Presenting Sponsor, Cameco, for making this show possible. You’ll hear from their Managing Director of Government Relations, Dale Austin, welcoming the audience at the top of the show. Cameco is turning into a formidable Canadian success story, and I’m always grateful for their support.
I do these shows because I want my subscribers to know how much you mean to me. Thank you, always, for your interest and support. Keep spreading the word.
UPDATE: The good folks at Hugh’s Room asked whether I’ve published my monologue anywhere. Here it is.
What a great city is for
What can I tell you about Toronto when I don’t even live here and you do? Maybe I can start here: If I had to nominate a great novel of Toronto, it might be Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion.
There’s a scene in it that I’ve never forgotten.
It’s right around the First World War. A Macedonian immigrant named Nicholas Temilcoff is new in Toronto. And he’s working on his English.
Ondaatje writes:
“Most immigrants learned their English... through mimicking actors on stage. It was a common habit to select one actor and follow him throughout his career, annoyed when he was given a small part, and seeing each of his plays as often as possible.
“Usually by the end of an east-end production at the Fox or Parrot Theatres the actors’ speeches would be followed by growing echoes as Macedonians, Finns, and Greeks repeated the phrases after a half-second pause, trying to get the pronunciation right.
“This infuriated the actors, especially when a line such as “Who put the stove in the living room, Kristin?” – which had originally brought the house down – was now spoken simultaneously by at least seventy people and so tended to lose its spontaneity.
“When the matinee idol Wayne Burnett dropped dead during a performance, a Sicilian butcher took over, knowing his lines and his blocking meticulously, and money did not have to be refunded.”
Now, that’s not my Toronto story. As far as I can tell, it’s not even based on something that ever happened in real life. But it rang true for me when I read it.
People have always taken what they needed from Toronto. Different people take different things. You could almost say that’s what a great city is for.
I was coming to Toronto for years before I came here for journalism or politics. Years.
I grew up in Sarnia, three hours away. When I was a kid, we’d come here every year for Caribana and the CNE. When my dad was young he lived on farms, so the Coliseum at the Ex was his best chance every year to catch up with what the livestock were up to.
When he was older, my Dad lived in Barbados for a while. So the Caribana parade was his best chance to feel like he was revisiting that part of the world and that part of his life. I was just along for the ride.
Any great city is a Choose Your Own Adventure. When I was a little older, I had my own reasons to come to Toronto. Video games, mostly, and then Bakka Books, in its original location on Queen Street, a bookstore that sold nothing but science fiction.
And then, when I was maybe 16, I came here on a school trip, and I had a couple of hours on my own, after dark, before I had to be someplace. I walked up to Queen Street from the train station, because for me, Toronto was Queen Street.
The bookstore was closed. So, for the first time, I looked around.
What I noticed were the concert flyers. Hundreds of them. Taped to lamp posts.
This was the early 1980s. Punk was a few years old, and in Toronto Queen Street was the centre of it, although if word of that had reached Sarnia, it hadn’t reached me. The spirit of the age was Do-It-Yourself. If you had a gig, the best way to let people know about it was to tape flyers to lamp posts.
I don’t know if I can convey to you how much of an impression these homemade posters made on me — a good student on a school trip, a kid who didn’t get out much. Posters for bands like The Viletones, Stark Naked and the Fleshtones, Cardboard Brains, Crash Kills Five. Venues like the Black Bull Tavern, the Beverley Hotel, the Horseshoe. These little posters — really little manifestos — were almost aggressively ugly and weird. Hand lettered, or with type cut out of magazines, taped to a page, and Xeroxed like ransom notes. Photos you could hardly decipher.
It all seemed a bit — unwise. Dangerous. And free. Everything I wasn’t.
Now, who am I kidding, a bunch of flyers taped to light poles didn’t make me run away and join the circus. I did wind up seeing some of those bands later, at university or after I moved to Montreal for work. But mostly this… information was something I tucked away. Like I’d caught a whiff of something subtly corrupting.
It said: There are places in a big city where you could be yourself. Make your statement. Find your people. And do it all again the next night.
Eventually I started coming back to Toronto for myself, by myself. To hear music. You might not be surprised to hear that mostly it was jazz clubs. In those days it was much more common for a prominent American jazz musician to come to Toronto with his band. Or to come as a “single” and play with a local bassist and drummer. That was almost better. You could see — and hear — the musicians getting to know one another in real time.
In the space of a few years, I saw Clark Terry at Bourbon Street. Woody Shaw at East 85th and Front. Freddie Hubbard at the Bermuda Onion. Doc Cheatham at Café des Copains. Those names won’t mean much to some of you. They meant everything to me.
Even later, what kept me coming back to Toronto was journalism. I was working for the Montreal Gazette and living in Ottawa, but there was a magazine here that was willing to buy my longer articles. At first the only reason I had to write anything that ambitious. It was called Saturday Night. It had a young editor who thought I might make something of myself. His name was Ken Whyte.
After I’d written a couple of articles for Saturday Night, Ken started inviting me to editorial meetings. And then, to the office parties.
To this day, nothing in this world triggers my imposter complex more than a Toronto media party.
Everybody looks so cool! Every time! And they’re not even trying! It’s like they just… know where things are.
For my first party at the Saturday Night offices, some kind of survival instinct told me to dress in black from head to toe. Like 90s hipster camo.
When I got to the party, it seemed like every man there was dressed in black. From head to toe. It was like a convention of very approximate Johnny Cash imitators.
I say every man was dressed in black, but it can’t be true, because Terence Corcoran was there too, and he only ever wears a navy suit. He was a business columnist at the Globe and Mail in those days. Imperious and sure of himself. Younger then than I am today, but not by much. Later I learned that Terry Corcoran is a total sweetheart. But in those days he was terrifying, because I’d seen his little photo staring out at me from the Globe’s business pages.
Now here he was in three dimensions, and as I watched, horrified, he became the first person I’ve ever met who physically looked down his nose at me.
Later there were more parties. Christmas at Conrad and Barbara Black’s. National Post launch party. National Post anniversary party. A party at Christie Blatchford’s a few weeks before I quit the National Post.
Somehow Terry Corcoran was at every one of those parties. Looking at me. I tried to be strong.
I said I’ve never actually lived in Toronto, because I’ve never worked here. But I came close once.
In 2006 the CBC called and asked me if I wanted to audition to be host of As It Happens. In those days, the Corp would cast its net wide for new talent. They told me to come to Toronto to record some fake interviews, so they could hear whether I had any chops. And they asked me to write a monologue, so they could hear how I wrote and talked. It can be about anything, they said.
I wrote about going to hear a guitarist I liked named Kevin Breit, at a legendary club called Hugh’s Room.
In those days it was in a very different part of town. Go west on Bloor until you fall off the end of the world, I said. Then go a little further. Then turn left on Roncesvalles. And then you’ll be in one of those spots that every city has. A place where everyone can be themselves.
I didn’t get the gig. That was the year Carol Off joined As it Happens, so I think the producers got it right. But they liked the monologue. That’s all I needed.
And tonight, 20 years later, I’m back. At Hugh’s Room. A great city always gives you what you need.
