Conference Call from God?

My husband in front of the Cafe Bellagio in their Chinese Atrium, or whatever it is. Pretty place and empty at 6 in the morning when we went for Breakfast.

I just awoke from a very peculiar dream: I was visiting my eldest son, who had a course for university to finish, but I left because I had to get back to my babies, I missed them. I had left them with babysitters, (I was hoping it wasn’t my in-laws, as it wasn’t smart to leave babies with 89 year olds, was it?)

In short, “time” got all mixed up in my dream, and that’s not surprising. I feel kind of mixed up time-wise, these days.

I refuse to believe I am 56 and that, basically, everything’s over. (Now, that I’ve just put my 14 year old dog Tessa to sleep.)

It didn’t help that before I went to bed I listened to an audio chapter of a new agey workshop by Caroline Myss called Energy Anatomy, that I had purchased and downloaded last year from Sounds True.

Back then I listened only to the first five chapters, because it freaked me out a bit, and today I listened to the fifth again. The lecture series is all about unplugging from you past and your perceptions and ‘ascending’ very Virgin-like into your higher levels of consciousness. Easier said than done.

Of course to do this you must let go of your need for human-centered order and, I guess, “time” and the idea of ‘passages’ or phases in life, is part of that.

It seems heretical to let go of the notion that you are in a particular phase of life and that you have just so many options in this phase, as dictated by convention and the lifestyle media (Vegas, Baby! Get your fun in before it’s too late.) It’s only something that you allow yourself to do in dreams.

Also yesterday I decided to force myself to get out of the house by doing some freelance reporting.(When you are a writer, the sky’s the limit right? As long as you don’t need to support yourself on the income from said reporting.)

So, I looked up conferences coming up in Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto and decided which ones might be of interest and emailed the organizers to see if I could attend of a journalist. (I did this kind of thing in the past.)

Well, this weekend there’s a Study and Go Abroad Event for new graduates in Montreal and that might be fun to cover. (I’m an education writer.)

On Monday and Tuesday, Centennial College in Toronto is holding a Conference called Engaging Hearts and Minds: Equity, Social Justice and Global Citizenship in Action with an exciting list of speakers.

I emailed them and was invited to attend as a journalist, but I had to pay the hefty conference fee – and that I can’t do. Too bad.

And at the end of the month the Conference Board of Canada is holding an event called The Public Sector and Social Networking – another interesting topic. (I’ve been writing for decades about technology and the family, a topic that only gets exponentially more complicated.)

Ironically, but not surprisingly, the Conference Board is very traditional. To cover their events you either have to have be working for a media outlet or get an established media outlet to sponsor you. Considering the topic, you’d think they’d be more flexible. The TRADITIONAL MEDIA IS DEAD. Get it?? You’d think they’d be more open to freelancers like me, journalists who are trying to adjust to this new reality, since I’m the future, whatever my age.

But there’s still hope, I changed my title to “Food Journalist” and emailed a Montreal Salon related to the grocery industry. I’m interested in food (first chakra is it?) but from the social justice point of view (third chakra?) Fair Trade and all that.

So, I’m thinking of starting a Montreal Food Blog, instead, in the style of the BBC’s Food Programme, or at least covering the same range of topics. (The tag line of that terrific show is “Covering every aspect of the food we eat” which is pretty broad The presenter of the Food Programme, Sheila Dillon, is a brilliant radio reporter. Her job is to paint word pictures of what she’s eating and she never fails to do so. And her show is big on promoting Regional Foods and Fair Trade Foods and issues like School Meals. Really good stuff. And I could do that, but with a Quebec slant. Of course that’s harder than blogging the way I do here, just off the top of my head.

Also, yesterday, I listend to a BBC documentary on Charlie Chaplin. All very interesting. Chaplin was the first global movie star, the most famous man in the world at the time, thanks to the brand new film medium, that was not much older than social networking is right now. (Chaplin worked for Max Sennett (of Richmond) but in 1916 he moved to Essanay and somehow, within six months, he was a house-hold name in the Western World.

The commentator suggested this wasn’t entirely ‘organic’: that someone was pulled the strings to make this happen. How did that someone know which strings to pull with respect to this BRAND NEW MEDIUM of film? I guess he (or she) had attended the equivalent of a Conference Board Workshop..Ha! Ha!

Another person interviewed for this radio doc claimed that the motion picture only became popular with the middle class at the onset of WWI – as they were curious to see war footage. What nonsense! As my Flo in the City blog reveals, Marion Nicholson went to see Man in the Box at the Nickel in 1909. And in Montreal they had the Ouimetoscope, designed to raise the tone of the traditional Nickelodeon… also the Royal, a ‘respectable Nickelodeon’ that showed only proper films to a proper clientele and had regular fire inspections. Had the middle class not been into motion pictures at that time, these special motion picture emporiums would never have been built.

Five Cent Fascinations

Edison nymph. early film.

This below is from the “entertainment” section of Jane Addams’ 1909 complilation of newspaper articles: Spirit of Youth and City Streets. The nickelodeon era was only in its third year, so it is safe to say, the motion picture took off with youth from the very beginning. Addams’ point of view is similar to what most moral reformers held. Addams’ uses more ‘science’ although of the anecdotal kind and less vitriol in her editorials. She also reveals some insight into the nature of the new medium, which she ties in with theatre in general. It is a passive medium. Movies became an adult entertainment in the next decades, only re-establishing itself with very young audiences in the 50′s and 60′s with Disney and then becoming a youth-focused medium in the 80′s. when I was raising my sons. (At least that’s how I see it.)

“Going to the show” for thousands of young people in every industrial city is the only possible road to the realms of mystery and romance; the theater is the only place where they can satisfy that craving for a conception of life higher than that which the actual world offers them. In a very real sense the drama and the drama alone performs for them the office of art as is clearly revealed in their blundering demand stated in many forms for “a play unlike life.” The theater becomes to them a “veritable house of dreams” infinitely more real than the noisy streets and the crowded factories.

One Sunday evening last winter an investigation was made of four hundred and sixty six theaters in the city of Chicago, and it was discovered that in the majority of them the leading theme was revenge; the lover following his rival; the outraged husband seeking his wife’s paramour; or the wiping out by death of a blot on a hitherto unstained honor. It was estimated that one sixth of the entire population of the city had attended the theaters on that day. At present, however, most improbable tales hold the attention of the youth of the city night after night, and feed his starved imagination as nothing else succeeds in doing. In addition to these fascinations, the five-cent theater is also fast becoming the general social center and club house in many crowded neighborhoods. It is easy of access from the street the entire family of parents and children can attend for a comparatively small sum of money and the performance lasts for at least an hour; and, in some of the humbler theaters, the spectators are not disturbed for a second hour.

The room which contains the mimic stage is small and cozy, and less formal than the regular theater, and there is much more gossip and social life as if the foyer and pit were mingled. The very darkness of the room, necessary for an exhibition of the films, is an added attraction to many young people, for whom the space is filled with the glamour of love making.

Hundreds of young people attend these five-cent theaters every evening in the week, including Sunday, and what is seen and heard there becomes the sole topic of conversation, forming the ground pattern of their social life. That mutual understanding which in another social circle is provided by books, travel and all the arts, is here compressed into the topics suggested by the play.

The young people attend the five-cent theaters in groups, with something of the “gang” instinct, boasting of the films and stunts in “our theater.”

They find a certain advantage in attending one theater regularly, for the habitués are often invited to come upon the stage on “amateur nights,” which occur at least once a week in all the theaters. This is, of course, a most exciting experience.

If the “stunt” does not meet with the approval of the audience, the performer is greeted with jeers and a long hook pulls him off the stage; if, on the other hand, he succeeds in pleasing the audience, he may be paid for his performance and later register with a booking agency, the address of which is supplied by the obliging manager, and thus he fancies that a lucrative and exciting career is opening before him. Almost every night at six o’clock a long line of children may be seen waiting at the entrance of these booking agencies, of which there are fifteen that are well known in Chicago.

Thus, the only art which is constantly placed before the eyes of “the temperamental youth” is a debased form of dramatic art, and a vulgar type of music, for the success of a song in these theaters depends not so much upon its musical rendition as upon the vulgarity of its appeal.

Photoplays, picture shows, silent dramas and movies.

Mary Pickford. From Commons WIkipedia.

This is also from Maclean’s Review of Reviews 1911. No attribution.

Well, you learn something new everyday. I knew there was a famous magazine PHOTOPLAY, but I never realized that the term “photoplay” meant movie. As I’ve written before, they called the movies motion pictures or 5 and 10 cent picture shows in 1910, but I have a letter written by Edith in 1917 that says she is going to the movies and she has the movies in quotations “movies” which means it is a new term, at least to her.

I also have posted on my http://www.tighsolas.ca/ website, a bit from the 1910 New York Dramatic Mirror that claims that the motion picture is cutting into the theatre business, especially when it comes to the cheap seats, and so is another form of 1910 entertainment, automobile rides!!

“The moving picture show has come to stay. “The progress of the ‘silent drama’ has been on an unparalleled scale. “In fact,” writes Robert Grau in the Moving Picture Show and the Living Drama’ in the American Review of Reviews “some of the developments in this field in the last few months have utterly amazed the prominent theatrical managers and producers. As recently as two years ago, these gentlemen were inclined to regard the motion picture as a temporary fad; but when such offerings came as the Kinemacolor pictures of the English Coronation festivities, and it was observed that the public willingly paid regular theatre prices to see the wondrous spectacle, they marvelled. ( Editor: I wrote about this in a previous blog…Long Hot SUMMER 1911, I think)

One of the foremost of these, William Brady, thus expressed himself: “If the manufacturer of a photo-play can afford to spend 100,000 dollars for a single offering on screen, he has us beat many a mile, for that is just twice as much as it cost to produce Ben Hur, a play that has run 10 years.” …In Hartford, New Haven and Bridgeport, three cities of the first grade, theatrically-speaking, the one theatre in each still remaining to the theatrical syndicate is no longer available to travelling companies. All three, on the same date, January 29, 1812, reverted to William Fox, the moving picture magnate.

The amazing thing about the motion picture industry, is that even the most expensive productions are seen for only one day in the 10 thousand or more picture theatres. The only exception to the rule being when the pictures are exhibited in Vaudeville Theatres, where they are shown for at least a week or longer. ”

The Motion Picture Crowd – That would be everyone.

A still from an Edison film showing the crowd leaving The Claremont Theatre in New York where his motion pictures were being played.

The stuffier magazines and certain ministers may have been railing against the evil of the Nickelodeon, but this 1913 Edison video shows why the motion picture industry was there to stay.

Who’s leaving this motion picture house? Couples, mostly older, Grandparents and their grandchildren, fathers and their sons and daughters, older sisters and their younger brothers and vice versa, boys, mostly in pairs and sometimes alone, even a couple of moms with babies in large prams. I didn’t see too many young people in their twenties at this show, I’m guessing it was during working hours.

THOSE AWFUL SNOWBANKS! 34th installment

Scene from Those Awful Hats, a short played before the start of the main features to remind women to remove their big hats. At this Nickelodeon, people are seated at chairs, and the piano is on the right. The movie is up at left. (I imagine ‘the movie’ was not a motion picture, but real people for the purposes of this film.

The 1908-1913 era was the Nickelodeon Era in Toronto and Montreal and other big cities in North America. With the young middle class people like Marion and Edith moving to the city, there had to be suitable entertainment. Supply and demand.

According to the Cinemateque Quebecoise website, there were 180 entertainment venues in Montreal’s city center in the 1910 era, including two fancy theatres and many lesser establishments that played movies, (whoops, motion pictures. The term ‘movies’ seems to have been used by the Nicholsons only since 1917) or housed vaudeville acts, or cabaret acts, or musical acts and maybe all of the above within any given stretch of time. The first silent showing in Montreal was in 1897.

Movie halls were just plain rooms with small touches added to make them seem special, such as painted proscenium arches around the screen. Some venues were very steep, unlike the one in the Those Awful Hats. They would often have gawdy exteriors though, to attract viewers.

Flora was in the sitting room finishing her hat, trying out arrangements of ribbon and feathers, pieces of which were all lined out on the top of the piano. She had finished her practicing early.

Margaret came in to ask why she had stopped playing, for Margaret enjoyed Flora’s music each evening as she worked in the kitchen. Today she was scrubbing out the sink with salts of lemon.

“Why have you stopped? Flora,” she asked. “You were sounding so nice.”

“Oh, because I know the piece now and I thought I’d work on my hat, but I can’t decide where to put the orange wings, on the one side or at the top.

Margaret eyed the hat suspiciously. “Bella brought a Ladies’ Home Journal. She seems to think you will find some inspiration there,” she slyly said.

“No, I have been looking at Delineator Magazines for ideas. The hats are very big this year, in the city. Marion says. Did you read the letter she sent me? About her trip to see Man in the Box, at the Lyric Theatre? She said they started the evening’s entertainment with a short film asking women to remove their huge hats so other people could see the screen.

It was hilarious, she said. A big hook came down from the ceiling and grabbed the hat off the woman in the seats, or grabbed the woman, I’m not sure.”

Marion would find that amusing, Margaret replied. No, she only wrote me about coming home next weekend. And about the giant snowbanks lining every side street and how she fell in a snowbank running for the streetcar on her way to work and how she caught her heel in her hem, how she needs me to repair her skirt as it was a nasty tear.

Who did she go to the nickel with? asked Margaret, forgetting about Flora’s hat-making. You know, in some places in the States, these places are open on Sunday! It’s appalling.

Flora smiled up at her Mother, who was wiping a stain off the woodwork around the door with the cloth she kept thrown over her shoulder.

With the Clevelands. Dr and Mrs.

Ah, well that’s fine then. It must have been a proper establishment. It’s wonderful to have such good and respectable friends in Montreal. I wish they lived closer to her school, then Marion might be persuaded to board with them for the rest of the year.

The Dr. drives Marion crazy with his demands over his family, you know that. And Marion is far too independent.

Yes, I know, said Margaret, with a hardening expression.

But there are so few suitable places for young women to live in the city, even for workers with good salaries, and Marion was, finally, making a very good salary. She sent money home every month.

So it was an exchange, with one worry gone, another popped up elsewhere, like dandelions in the garden, in summer.

She decided to sit down and write Marion a letter and send it tomorrow along with her daily letter to Norman. She walked to the secretary, positioned her pad, picked up the pen and poked it into the inkwell.

“My, you are very gay, going to see Man in the Box, at the Nichol,” she wrote for her first line. Misspelling Nickel. Not thinking that the word reflected the 5 cents it cost to see a motion picture. But Marion would get the message anyway, that it would be nice if she kept her mother better informed about her social life in the city. Especially since Edith was keeping uncharacteristically silent, lately.

IF I DID GO, I COULDN’T SAY -7th installment

Norman, Margaret, Mrs. Montgomery, Edith and Marion.

I am simply famished, exclaimed Marion the minute they entered the house, by way of the summer kitchen.

Mae scampered up on her light feline feet and took Marion’s bag off her hands. “Welcome to Tighsolas,” she said ironically, as this wasn’t her home.

In stern instructress fashion Marion started doling out the duties: First things first: Flora pump some water at the sink for tea.

Mae, put some sticks in the wood stove and get it to a roar. Flora get some vegetables from the cold storage. Then set the table. How long has this tongue been marinating?

One hour, Flora admitted, because she found it hard to fib to Marion.

1 hour? I think we’ll boil it a bit and then put it in the oven. Fill the large saucepan with some hot water. I was hoping to get to church this evening. Apparently, Jimmy T. is in town for a few days, up from his work at a car factory in the US. I heard he hates the indoor work, being from a farm.

Is he back for good, then?

No,the money is too good. Five dollars a day. And he has no particular skill!

It was late, but still light, when they sat down to eat, a cabbage and onion concoction that was tolerable tasty. Marian said came from the Fannie Farmer Cookbook.

Marion asked Mae for news about her sister and all the Boston Watters and her cousin was happy to fill her in.

Flora, you’ve been rather untalkative this meal, Marion said.

Her little sister shrugged her shoulders. She’d been dreading questions from Marion about how she was doing at school.

But instead Marion said, “I have news. Big news. I have given my notice at Sherbrooke Academy and I will be going to the city in September to work for the Montreal board.

Do father and mother know? asked Flora.

Well, of course, but I wanted to tell you myself.

Mae began peppering Marion with questions.

Where will you be teaching?

At Royal Arthur in Little Burgundy.

Where’s that?

Near St. Henri, below Westmount.

Is it a new school?

Yes, spanking new

What grade will you be teaching?

The first.

And how many students will you have?

Perhaps as many as 50. Double the size of my class this year, but still elementary school

“When you go to Montreal in September, will you go to Dominion Park? Will you see Pauline? Will you go up on the stage and get hypnotized?

As a respectable city teacher, if I did, I could hardly tell you.

Well, you must invite us to a play His Majesty’s, added Flora, who loved sometimes dreamed of being an actress like Sarah Bernhart.
Or a motion picture show.

At a nickelodeon?

No, at the Ouimetoscope, which is a very grand, like His Majesty’s. And very proper.

What part of town is that in?

East, but not as far east as Dominion Park.

Is it near de Bullion Street? Mae asked.

Mae! Flora admonished. What a thing to say!

I don’t know where that street is, Marion answered.

Enough questions, Marion stood up, abruptly, leaned her body forward and pressed her thumbs against the table edge, for a moment she looked strict and imposing, like the school teacher she was.

Her voice, though, was all sisterly fun.

It’s getting dark. Let’s light some lamps and go into the parlour.I’d like to play you a new song I’ve learned. Bring along some of those ginger snaps, would you?