Things that shouldn’t remind me of my adolescence

Moebius Strippe — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I didn’t date when I was fourteen. The main reason was the lack of prospects, to be fair, but on top of that I simply wasn’t interested in dating when I was fourteen. At fourteen, I gazed briefly into that abyss, it gazed back into me, and I turned away and didn’t look back until I was old enough to vote.”I didn’t date when I was fourteen, because the sorts of fourteen-year-olds who dated were kids like Jessica and Matt, and it takes a special kind of self-loathing to want to be like Jessica and Matt. Jessica was this cute, perky, na

And Now, Some Name Dropping

Moebius Strippe — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

When I was ten, I was enrolled in some sort of an after-school drama class for kids. There were about a dozen-odd of us in the group, but the only ones whose names I remember were this girl from my school who was a really good artist, and Ben Mulroney, son of then-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. The play we presented at the end of the class was some holiday schtick about a poor family that ends up almost missing Christmas but is then saved at the last minute by the generosity of I don’t remember. Anyway, I played the mom, and Ben Mulroney played the dad. Unfortunately, Ben Mulroney came down with the flu just before the big day, so I ended up having to play the mom opposite one of the other drama students, a girl who wasn’t Ben Mulroney’s official understudy and who consequently had to read Ben Mulroney’s lines from the script onstage. The drama instructor assured us that this sort of thing happened all the time in real life, but I still felt cheated. It didn’t make a difference in the long run, though. Fifteen years later, Ben Mulroney had parlayed his acting experience into a successful career as the host of Canadian Idol, and, not to brag or anything, but let’s just say that no one ever made a negative remark about my posture or diction during any of the dozen-odd times I delivered that lesson on factoring trinomials.”The drama class was in the fall of 1988 – the fall during which Brian Mulroney was re-elected with a second majority government. A day later, my drama class met, and naturally the election was the main topic of conversation. Being ten years old, I didn’t know anything at all about the politics involved, aside from the fact that well, my parents didn’t vote for him, but I felt I needed to say something positive to Ben Mulroney, because it’s rude not to acknowledge things like your father getting a second mandate to govern the country. And so I said to Ben Mulroney – and, I’m warning you here, you should probably start cringing right now – I said, Tell your father congratulations from me.”And Ben Mulroney, bless his heart, smiled graciously and said something like, Thank you, I will, as opposed to Like he gives a shit what you think, which would also have been correct. Because Ben Mulroney, age twelve, was a perfect gentleman.”Where was I going with this? Oh, yeah: he sure didn’t get that from his father.

tall dark and mysterious » When We Were Young, Home And Native Land, I Read The News Today, Oh Boy.

Things that shouldn’t remind me of my adolescence

And Now, Some Name Dropping