"She's chewing on a rubber chicken!"
"blah, blah, blahblah"
"So you mean dildos are good for me?"
And suddenly the basement was erupting with laughter and I realized that my first night in Montreal is always hard, and that my second one is always too perfect.
Saturday afternoon my sister begged a lift to work, essentially provided the fleet-footed excuse which allowed me to escape my "pre-birthday luncheon".
The girls made me birthday cards all by themselves, with the sproutlings of poetry on them. Such gifts are always the finest, drawn by their own hand.
I learned to cook Chulente. I don't plan to ever do it again.
My uncle has forgotten so many things about his passions in the shadow of trying to raise his children.
He remembers the talk we had after the metallica concert when I was fifteen, when I cried on his shoulder about the universe.
He has forgotten that he used to believe in the things that he told me then, though.
Maya's wiccanning was a fairy tale in a brightly-decorated room, a circle of people with faces that smile from the inside gifting her with wishes.
I wished for her perspective, and the true meaning of words like: book, giggle, green, onomatopeia.
I snapped a few photos with Mr. Pyke's digital camera until the batteries conked out because I'd forgotten to plug them in o'ernight.
I raced away from Vincent's neck-squishes and Maya's rapidly developping giggle and smile and Emily's ladylike one year old caress, and met Hansy on the wrong streetcorner in Chinatown; I was convinced that the Beijing was on the corner of Clark, no St-Urbain.
One street off, though, not bad.
We ended up going next door to Mon Shing where we indulged in what will always strike me as a Montreal chinatown outing.
In Paris, chinese food consisted of a french-shaped meal, each person with an appetizer, main course, wine, and dessert.
Mine always had mangoes or palm leaves in it.
In Toronto, chinatown safaris always involve tiny little restaurants with perfect dumplings, one dish ordered from the cryptic etchings on the wall, always cooked in a way that leaves me yearning to race into the kitchen and take notes as though I were in a surgeon's observatory. A little bland sometimes, but so honest.
In Montreal, we order too many meat dishes, too much rices, sauces leak buttery and thick from everywhere, and the steamed greens are there to emphasize the gooeyness.
It's a pig-out trip, and we did so heartily, a bottle of hot sake at exactly ninety eight point four degrees streaming down our gullets.
Then it was through the finally-familiar biting cold, no longer stooping to shiver but walking with my head held high enough to cultivate the best possible rosyness for my cheeks.
And then it was the front row of the balcony, being shamefully spoiled with gallant treatment, taking my coat, opening doors and ushering me through with a hand in my back, offering me an arm to help limp my gimpy way up to the foyer where we sat overlooking familiar scenes and argued why North American opera houses will never play a Wagnerian opera.
Attention spans. There's no way there are enough attention spans left in the land of Television that will allow a four-and-a-half-hour first act play in its entirety.
Halfway through the first act of Cavaliera Rusticana, when I stopped wondering what they'd done with the sopranos (an entire opera of Mezzos! Can you imagine?! Hans seemed awestruck that I noticed - whereas I DIDN'T notice that the horns played flat for the entire first act) and realized why the opera is my ultimate form of entertainment, of performance.
It has all the elements of why I prefer theatre over cinema, the real live people down on stage showering us with real live talent that isn't piped through a thousand projectors across the multiverse.
In a play, the actors are there for us, the evening is a special one time bubble of magic.
THen there's the music, oh the music, the thrill of being at a concert when those opening chords begin to spring up at you. Next are even the lyrics, and the acting, and the sets and the voices and every aspect is somehow covered leaving me wondering, amazed
how impossibly difficult it is to write such a piece of horizontal mastery.
Il Pagliacci began with a greater bang than Rusticana, a soliloquy on the part of the freak who snuck through the curtains to stage-whisper sing at us, telling the audience, this is just a play, we are only actors, if we make you cry it is simply because we are imitating real life. It is not our suffering which makes you cry, but your own reflected in our gesticulations.
Then the soprano came on the stage and before she even sang a note she had charmed us all, fitting perfectly what Hans and I had decided was the most difficult thing to find in modern opera singers -- stange presents and the ability to act.
Holy shit could she ever, she had our tongues lolling at her sexiness, when she lay on the ground and writhed with ecstasy and the gleeful chirp of the birds in the trees.
She had the perfect walk, the perfect thrust of the hips, the perfect arrogant flip of her hair as she spurned the gimpy freak's advances.
The perfect facial expressions when she was being needlessly silly, which of course was the part which appealed to me most of all.
In the last scenes, she was even chewed on a rubber chicken whilst wagging her head and carousing about and being generally ridiculous on the stage within a stage.
(soliloquy's? stage within a stage? play within a play? Shakespeare had nothing on Leoncavallo's libretto.)
Oh, and she got to play with a whip onstage too.
Yummy. I'd forgotten how much fun this opera is, and last night's cast performed the comedy most comedically. Our entire row was giggling.
And when the tenor sang Pavarotti's famous aria, about the pain and loneliness of life as a clown that everyone enjoys laughing at but no one gets close enough to truly love
I cried because he sang it beautifully, but somehow -- I didn't identify as much as I once would have.
Afterwards we walked the frozen streets again and our paths led us to Chris Brown's birthday party, which had been mentioned in passing that afternoon, right before a different Nancy gave me a sewing lesson while I drove her to the metro, in exchange for calculus advice.
"Gila! I remember you! You spilled beer on me at the St-Patty's day parade in 1999!"
At the party there was a squeal as my telltale mop of hair appeared around the bend in the basement stairs, and then all hell broke wonderfully loose, culminating in the conversation which began with "I can't believe the soprano sat there on stage chewing on a rubber chicken!!!" (I'm still a little overexited about that)
and ended with the common agreement that if I chew on dildos more often then my underdevelopped mouth will stop spewing such random obscenities.
Of course, I wasn't the one who began theoretizing on how to build up enough electromagnetic charge with a spinning vibrator inserted in your mouth to pull out my fillings.
I am not that fascinated by radical dentistry, but when I tried to pin the blame for the outlandish experimentation that was being discussed on Dan's engineer's spirit, the two of us were found guilty of the most delightfully unique brains.
(I know, I know, they were putting it way too nicely.)
I may or may not have been the one that initiated a writhing pile-up of people because I wanted to get up to go to the bathroom upstairs.
Between Hans and Nicky, it was all my new climbing muscles that got me off that couch.
There were a thousand hugs and at no point in the hour or so that I spent there that didn't involve physical contact with someone, curled up in a hug with Isabelle or sucked into a massage chain between a roomful of people who spend more time hunched before the computer than I.
There are new faces in the crowd, all of them brilliant and worthy of being there, and before I could start feeling left out too many people made mention of being thrilled to finally meet me. Me.
A few faces had so much pain in them as I asked for the truth behind how they were doing, and we pledged to buy lifetime memberships to the long-distance-spenders club.
Driving home I crept up beside Eric's car and somehow got invited over to smoke a j.
We did, then we talked of a thousand little pains and suddenly he didn't hate me so much for leaving.
We drank green tea and let chunks of perfect chocolate melt on our tongues, smoked enough that it should have me nic-fitting this morning, only it doesn't seem to have hit me through the padding of all the accumulated warmth.
We watched Donny Darko completely stoned out of our gourds, then discussed the most mundane things in the most intense ways, the way only a high-school stoner can.
I drove home at five o'clock in the morning, along once-again familiar streets, turned the wrong way by rote memory and passed the park where I experience my first kiss (ironically after I had already lost my virginity) and was suddenly wishing I could show all this to Mr. Pyke, out of the simple urge to give him everything of me, so many of these one-celled memories, snippets of every emotion which I have experienced.
My father didn't leave his room yesterday and hasn't left it yet this morning, and when I conversed with my mother she actually told me that I was doing good.
My sister is stressed as ever and unpleasant to spend hours with, but I've always been her person to snipe at, and sometime during yesterday's drive we managed to exchange a few meaningful sentences as well.
She surprised me again with how much she has become her own person.
Now it is going on noon and I have to find the frenchies because they wanted to come to brunch, then I have to brunch, hopefully do a surprise drive-by which will be more successful than yesterday afternoon's ringing a doorbell that never got answered.
Then I'm picking up the co-pilot who whispered his happinness in my ear when we crossed paths for a half hour yesterday, and we're braving the roads to take us back to Toronto as early into the morning as possible.
And then I will press my cold hands into the back of my love who reminded me what it is to miss someone this weekend, and I will suffer the consequences of his being-woken grumpiness.
Friday night I drowned my sorrows in television, in a movie that was filmed half in Quebec and half in Toronto and the wilds of Ontario.
The city was mentioned so many times that by the end of it I was proud that they were talking about my town so often.
And now I'm rambling in that way that the short on sleep do so exquisitely.