Dear Jessica Brennan,
I was thinking tonight about a gig from a few years ago when I was managing Alan Frew, where we ended up without car keys in the middle of the night in Oshawa. I was driving Alan and the gear. It was a charity gig and as such there was a $5.00 cover charge at the door to get into the club, 100% of which was going to the cause. It was a night for children with special needs as I recall. Anyway, wherever you go on the planet, there’s always these situations, the guys who don’t want to pay. They want to come in, hear the entertainment and enjoy the night but they don’t want to pay the cover. In this particular case I met them at the door and we discussed the matter. Finally rather than taking on three men in their 40s who had already had a lot to drink, I decided on behalf of the charity to forfeit the $15.00 and just let them in.
I’m not sure it was the right decision and now I might act differently, but that night Alan and I discussed it and decided that we would simply kick in their share so that there was no incident. Despite the three of them getting exactly what it was that they wanted – a free night out, that still didn’t sit well because somehow in their intoxicated minds, my letting them in for free, offended them even more than asking them to pay $5 each. It seems I was going to be the enemy whatever happened.
I ignored them and went on about my business, and at 2:00 AM when I went to get my keys to drive us out of Oshawa and back into Toronto, the keys were gone.
We took the place apart, and finally the one bartender said that he had seen one of the mighty three hovering around my things. It was clear. Out of some unfathomable act of non-cover-charge revenge, they had taken my keys.
Alan called his friend Kenny who graciously came and got us and took us to his home. Kenny’s wife got up to make sure we were OK and we all sat in their kitchen and chatted and then in the end, they loaned us their car to get back to Toronto until we could get keys to my car sorted out the next day. It was a massive hassle for all concerned but no one died.
In the morning, by a not so big miracle, when dumb, dumber and dumbest sobered up, they returned my keys to the club sheepishly saying they must have accidentally picked them up the night before.
This is a very long preamble to what struck me and stuck with me about that night with all its malice mixed with controversy and kindness, and that was a very simple thing.
When we were sitting in Kenny’s home at 3AM, I looked at his kitchen counter and saw his coffee maker and I thought, “Wow, look at that, we’re all the same.” While all the discussion about the action of the three bozos unfolded, I was looking at the coffee maker thinking about being in Berlin, Montreal, Amsterdam, and how everywhere you go people get up, put on the kettle and have a chat. They go to their work, come home, talk about their day. No matter what country, what language, it doesn’t matter. There is so much more that connects us than separates us.
This story comes back to me regularly, which is interesting because it is a very tiny blip in all I have done in my life, yet it must have felt profound because it resurfaced again recently as I was contemplating how we are living in what can appear to be a fractured world, but really most of us aren’t. Fractured. We just love our kids, walk our dogs, live our lives and plug in our kettles. I bet even the three charity-cover-charge-dodgers, once the booze of the night before wore off, pressed brew on their coffeemakers and told their kids to get their uniforms on or they would be late for soccer practice.
As I thought about this I realized that the very mundane and often robotic parts of our lives, can also be the parts that keep us sane and connected more than any social media network. It’s those fundamental similarities that you don’t even notice or think about that are the most real and precious sometimes. Life gives you lessons in the strangest ways, and in this particular case it took three selfish guys and a coffee maker to create an image that regularly grounds me.
Love Mum
xo
