Playing something of a supporting role in this excellent début, I claim my right to nostalgie. I believe it was our babysitter Dennis who recruited us for the Lottery. Of course, some years later you and I would produce our own version at Fredericton High School; it was a stunning achievement - fusing two plays into one (rather Frankensteinian) spectacle - I still have faded purple mimeographed copies of the script. // I always say that Oscar Peterson playing in Fredericton changed my life (perhaps we were there together - 1973-ish). Sitting in the third row, I had a dawning sense that I was in the presence of greatness - and that such a greatness could exist. I remember a shy smile, profuse sweating and a large handkerchief on the piano top. He was humble. Gentlemanly. I still sit occasionally at the piano and try to play like he did. (this might sound presumptuous, but that's what Jazz IS - being presumptuous.) I have somewhere his piano course, with tapes and cheat sheets and the like. It is a deep wish that the métro station Lionel Groulx in Montreal, not far from his childhood home, be re-named Oscar Peterson station. There have been pétitions to that end that I have signed. // The dream, of the art installation, as many will know, is not far from reality.// Yes, you were always careening down hills, and skimming over deep drownable water, while i was busy hitting fungos into the neighbours' picture windows at Finkway Park. I sprained my ankle something fierce in Rodney Mcinnis's back yard for God sakes; my Krazy Karpet headed purposefully into a stand of birches. Crabbe Mountain would have been the end of me. I still think of Crabbe Mountain as a kind of Mount Doom. Sauron ran the T-Bar. Odd, when we sailed under the Confédération bridge together in the early nineties, I remember thinking - hmm, this water is so shallow- I bet I couldn't drown in it! Ernie
Playing something of a supporting role in this excellent début, I claim my right to nostalgie. I believe it was our babysitter Dennis who recruited us for the Lottery. Of course, some years later you and I would produce our own version at Fredericton High School; it was a stunning achievement - fusing two plays into one (rather Frankensteinian) spectacle - I still have faded purple mimeographed copies of the script. // I always say that Oscar Peterson playing in Fredericton changed my life (perhaps we were there together - 1973-ish). Sitting in the third row, I had a dawning sense that I was in the presence of greatness - and that such a greatness could exist. I remember a shy smile, profuse sweating and a large handkerchief on the piano top. He was humble. Gentlemanly. I still sit occasionally at the piano and try to play like he did. (this might sound presumptuous, but that's what Jazz IS - being presumptuous.) I have somewhere his piano course, with tapes and cheat sheets and the like. It is a deep wish that the métro station Lionel Groulx in Montreal, not far from his childhood home, be re-named Oscar Peterson station. There have been pétitions to that end that I have signed. // The dream, of the art installation, as many will know, is not far from reality.// Yes, you were always careening down hills, and skimming over deep drownable water, while i was busy hitting fungos into the neighbours' picture windows at Finkway Park. I sprained my ankle something fierce in Rodney Mcinnis's back yard for God sakes; my Krazy Karpet headed purposefully into a stand of birches. Crabbe Mountain would have been the end of me. I still think of Crabbe Mountain as a kind of Mount Doom. Sauron ran the T-Bar. Odd, when we sailed under the Confédération bridge together in the early nineties, I remember thinking - hmm, this water is so shallow- I bet I couldn't drown in it! Ernie