I need stuff you wrote as a kid

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Do you still have anything you wrote as a kid? A poem? A book report? A diary?

I want you to read it out loud. In front of people.

I think most of us have a collection of stuff from our younger days sitting in a box somewhere. We cart it around from apartment to apartment, strangely attached. We have no practical use for this stuff, but at the same time, we don’t have the heart to throw it away.

So let’s put an end to that, shall we?

On Monday, February 19, 2007 at 8:00 PM, upstairs at The Victory Cafe, I’m hosting an evening of drinks, laughs, and adults reading funny, sad, and/or embarrassing things they wrote as children.

Here are the rules:

1. You have to be the one who wrote it, as a kid
2. You have to be the one who reads it, as an adult
3. It has to be short (<5 minutes-ish)

It will be free. And it should be fun. But it will only be fun if people actually attend, and bring things they wrote as kids.

So clean out your closet. Dust off that shoebox of grade school love letters. Call up your mom in Newfoundland and get her to send you that old book report. Then show up, with cash for a drink from the bar downstairs.

Backstory: Over the holidays, Jenna and I were visiting her parents in Kingsville. She came across an old diary, and we spent a good chunk of the afternoon reading it aloud to each other. On their own, the entries were really sweet and funny, but they were even sweeter and funnier out loud. So I made it a New Year’s Resolution to start a reading series. This evening of reading is the first step towards that.

P.S. I also need a clever name for this evening. Got one for me?

&#8220;Send him the money. Thank me later.&#8221;

They night after I moved to Toronto, my friend Laura took me to Graffiti’s in Kensington to see Kevin Quain play. It was a Monday, I remember. Earlier that evening we watched the sun go down and the city light up from the top deck of a ferry on its way back from Centre Island.

And I was really excited to see Kevin Quain.

Not long before I moved, my friend Neil had seen Kevin play in someone’s living room.* Neil bought both of Kevin’s CDs, Hangover Honeymoon and Tequila Vampire Matinee, and had lent them to me. I was amazed. The songs were wild and raw, with lyrics about vampires and hangmen. Kevin’s voice was gravelly as hell. And he played the accordion. The accordion!

But more than anything, it was the lyrics that got me. For me, Kevin Quain’s songs do the thing that all great songs do; they make me feel like they were written just for me. Take “Hangover Square:”

What if your dreams don’t come true?

What if your nightmares come looking for you?

Listen kid, you’re gonna love it here.

Doubt, fear, and hope.

In three lines, exactly how I felt after leaving everything I knew to follow my dreams in a city I didn’t understand.

The first night I saw Kevin Quain perform, it was just his voice and a guitar. It was everything I’d expected.

A few Sundays ago, for the first time in almost a year, I went to see Kevin Quain and the Mad Bastards play at the Cameron House. And I picked up a copy of his new-ish live solo CD, Dog Show Volume 1. Listening to it now brings me right back to that first night in Toronto. The songs are bare, and sad, and beautiful and perfect.

Honestly, I cannot recommend this man’s music enough. Trying to explain how good it is is really frustrating. But perhaps that’s a testament to his songs.

Go to Kevin’s website. Or his MySpace. Listen to his music. If you live in Toronto, go see Kevin play. If not, follow Ralph Alfonso’s advice and buy his CDs: “Send him the money. Thank me later.”

_{* I honestly cannot recall why this performance took place in someone’s living room. I do, however, remember that Neil’s explanation included really greasy hamburgers}

How to keep your glasses from fogging up

So it’s the first day of February, one of the coldest months of the year. To mark the occasion, here’s a tip for keeping your eyeglasses from fogging up when coming indoors from the cold:

Walk in backwards.

I have no idea why this works, but it does. It’s a trick I learned when I was a kid delivering newspapers in Lower Sackville. My glasses would always fog up when I entered people’s homes on cold nights to collect paper money. One night, one of my bespectacled customers suggested I try it.

People have been looking at me funny ever since.

Is this the world we live in?

This morning, Jenna got some good news in a text message:

IT’S A GIRL!  we think.  XXX is excited YYY and ZZZ had their baby  according to facebook.  No other details though.

Yes, that’s right. Facebook.

Facebook?

News travels fast. And through increasingly bizarre channels.

Rock and Roll news

So I’m in a band.

Last week, we spent some time in Murray Daigle’s MDS Recording studio.

The result: a seven song EP without a name (yet). You can listen to the whole thing three songs on The Canaries’ NewMusicCanada page. We’ll also sell it in fancy packaging at shows, probably for a fiver.

Speaking of shows, we’re playing The Savannah Room on February 6, 2007, with Joan’s Smith’s band The Achievers. Should be fun.