In the summer of 1997, between 10th and 11th grade, a movie production company approached my parents, well-known local realtors at the time, for help scouting locations around Sainte-Agathe for a Hollywood movie that would be filming.
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My parents sent me on one of the tours with the location scout and I learned that they were looking for young, specifically Jewish-looking, extras, and would be auditioning in a few days. The movie, under the working title The Blouse Man, was mostly shot barely 10 minutes from home on the 1981 Suzuki A10 motorbike that I had just bought from my brother, who had bought it from the neighbour, and it was the best summer job any teenager could have.
They would call me on the days they needed me and I would arrive, change into my 1960s New York Jewish-looking outfit, whatever that is, and go sit in the cafeteria at Camp Hiawatha, where they were filming, and wait to be called out to the set. On days I wasn’t working, I worked scything fields, feeding horses and chickens, painting, mowing, and stacking firewood, breaking beaver dams, and other such tasks as required by the handyman/farmer in Ivry where I worked through three summers. Between the jobs, I spent my summer working 70+ hour weeks and having a very good time.
On the movie set, I was only called out to the set about a dozen times. Often I would go whole days on standby and never be summoned.
The director was Ghostbusters actor Tony Goldwyn, who was very friendly and approachable, treating the extras as people and generally being fun to be around. For the time between shoots, I borrowed my parents’ copy of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — the five book version of the trilogy — and read the entire thing in the cafeteria.
When the movie finally came out two years later under the name A Walk on the Moon, I found that I had only made the final cut in a single scene, and at that only for about three seconds, staring blankly at a non-existent “movie screen” we had to pretend to watch while sitting in plain view right behind Anna Paquin, one of the movie’s stars. My acting skills never improved — as evidenced by my scowl in the above screenshot from the scene.
But even that was not my first encounter with public exposure.
On my 9th birthday, my grandfather gave me a walkman, and borrowed a cassette tape of the Brandenburg Concertos from my parents to test it before giving it to me, forgetting it in the machine. When I opened the present and turned on my first walkman, I listened to the tape that seemed to have magically come with it and spent the next weeks listening over and over to the most extraordinary sound of that music.
My family built on my new-found interest for classical music, starting piano lessons for me that fall, and we occasionally went into the city to the Notre Dame Basilica to listen to the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, which I loved every time. I distinctly remember giving a thumbs up to the orchestra at the end of a concert from our upper balcony seats and a horn player at the back taking the bell off what was probably a French horn and feigning frisbee-tossing it to me. As a child that was very exciting indeed.
In the spring of 1993, when I was 12, CBC DiscDrive’s Jurgen Gothe held a contest to write a limerick about Bach in order to win a boxed set of Bach CDs. I entered a single stanza submission, which got an honourable mention and reading on the radio:
Once while I was listening to Bach
My big brother yelled “beuch!”
“I prefer my RAP
Over this old crap!”
I just ignored him and turned my back.
My early musical interest resulted in many years of music lessons. In freshman and sophomore years of high school, I played violin in the school orchestra, having taken up violin a couple of years earlier in Val-David. I was not an especially good violinist, sitting in the last row of the second violins mostly making sure my bow appeared to be in the same place as the one in front of me. Before NMH, my violin teacher, André Monette, was getting us ready for our spring recital, where we would be playing, among other things, the Toy Symphony.
We would be making bird sounds with our violins and I told the teacher that I did not feel the bird sounds we were making sounded particularly realistic, and demonstrated the call of the white-throated sparrow, what we called the weather bird, common in our area. For my troubles, I was granted a solo of the bird call, and only told my family I would have a solo in the concert, without telling them what it would be.
I also spent most of two academic years as co-host of a radio show on the campus radio station, “WNMH 91.5 FM serving Northfield, Gill, Keene, and Brattleboro!” which earned me a brief and impromptu appearance on Shelagh Rogers Take 5 in Montreal when my mother introduced me to her as a high school radio host at a live airing.
But the best of all was when a short-lived show on the Discovery Channel called What’s That About invited me to the Coteau Via Rail station to be a token rail enthusiast for their 2006 episode “The Train Yard”.
I couldn’t have guessed it then, but after politics I went on to be a rail traffic controller responsible for that very section of track, some 15 years after this interview was recorded.
I may not have learned to act, but I learned fairly early to be reasonably comfortable at either end of a camera or microphone, which would certainly come in handy later.