today

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I wish I'd saved some of my old band shirts. Van Halen, the Diver Down tour and U2, The Incredible Fire. Why didn't I collect more? I was in a swish shop a few weeks ago, and classic rock band t-shirts cost between $400 and $1400. Seventeen-year-old me didn't know they'd become collectible. I also wish I'd saved copies of Creem and Hit Parade magazine. 
 
I bought a Bowie shirt at the AGO (from the V&A touring show). I wore it one day in Charleston and was stopped twice and asked where I got it.
 
***
 
The CNE starts this weekend. Whoosh… 
 
My mom took us every year. Those childhood memories are a full tank of fun. There's a photo of two of us on the Polar Express — we're maybe six and eight years old. It's mostly tonsils. The ride operator asked if we wanted to go faster, and we screamed, "No." 
 
We went on the steam train that ran parallel to the Gardiner. I still have the ticket. We visited the horses in the stables. From the time it opened until just before closing, we did everything.  
 
My uncle Jay was a DJ at CFRB in the 70s. His baritone voice was smooth and rich. We'd visit him in the booth. Being in a glass box felt special — people looking in at us.
 
If there is a heaven, it's how I remember the International Food Hall.
 
My mom bought us gendered surprise bags one year. She paid decent money that my dad worked hard for. In my bag, the big prize was a girdle. A GIRDLE. I was too young to understand that a woman's body needed restraining. We weren't worshipping in the temple of FUPA in the 70s. In my early teens, under severe bodily insecurity, I fished it out from the back of a drawer and tried to squeeze into it. Imagine the person who packed those bags. 
 
***
 
Seeing Thelma & Louise might become an annual event for me. 
 
I feel relief that I never hitched myself to a husband like Darryl — that shot of his dinner and the note still in the microwave when Thelma calls at 4 a.m. because she's in trouble. That loathsome moment is brilliant storytelling.
 
The movie's been restored, and I saw it with a full house at the TIFF theatre last Saturday night — we applauded their courage a couple of times and laughed along with them. I had a good time.

Watching the taillights on the 1966 green Thunderbird convertible weave through the desert night — Marion Faithful crooning The Ballad of Lucy Jordan — is breathtaking. It quenches my thirst. Thank you, Ridley Scott.
 
I went looking for something to read about it the next day and discovered this jewel of an essay by a favourite writer, Rebecca Traister:
 
"It's not just that Thelma and Louise get inarguably hotter with every discarded lipstick, floral blouse, and trapping of conventional femininity; it's that, in Khouri's script and through director Ridley Scott's lens, along the geographically impossible road from Oklahoma to Mexico, their increasing liberation makes the country itself more beautiful, both to them and to us. These women and their willingness to disobey, hang up on, laugh at, and even kill the men who degrade and underestimate them are not a blight on the nation; rather, their trek west, toward imagined freedom, flatters America, lights it up from within."
 
***
 
My friend Heather sources "gently loved vintage." She has a great eye. And it's getting better with practice. That's what happens when you do something you love.
 
Some of you have admired this old-fashioned glass I bought from her. She sold me the four plates in the photo. I want to use them. Do you want to come over for biscuits, homemade peach jam and cultured cream, the colour of okra flowers?
 
***
 
Broken English was huge when it was released in 1979. I was sixteen, and everyone had the album. Thirty-three-year-old Marianne Faithful expressed the anger and sexual confidence we were craving.
 
I've been loving Yves Tumor.

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1979

2023