Some Things We Have To Be Honest About Even Though You Might Rather We Not Be

Condos are not housing.

They are investments. Housing is affordable; investments are designed to make the maximum profit for a corporation. Houses are built to live in; condos are built to make a profit.  Statistics Canada tells us that more than 16% of Toronto’s condominiums are owned by people who have several other residences. (I expect the percentage is higher!). Macleans tells us that “most condominiums have been turned into corporations with their own shareholders and boards of directors responsible for multi-million-dollar budgets.” So even if you own your own condo and live in it, your living space has now become a business. Is this a good thing? No. 

It’s inhuman.

2. Donald Trump’s candidacy has nothing to do with economics.

The only reason people are devoted to Donald Trump is because they are racist and sexist. That’s what ‘Let’s Make America Great Again’ means. Trump and his followers like to pretend that it’s all about raising the standard of living for the working classes. It’s not. Not only do Trumps economic plans not make sense, but like Adolph Hitler and Rob Ford, Trump’s appeal to the ‘old days’ is an appeal to a gut affection for racism and misogyny. And please stop thinking it’s a contradiction that people of colour and women support Trump. Many learn to love their oppressors; it’s called the Stokholm Syndrome.

3. There are no plays with intermissions anymore.

Yes I’m going to go on about this again. I had to sit through a play recently where they announced beforehand ‘The play is two hours without an intermission.’ What are they, some sort of sadists? The human body and mind are not equipped to sit for more than hour and a half in a play without an intermission. Sure, we can sit thought a two or three hour movie — because movies do not require our participation — the actors don’t know we are there. Our laughter and clapping and listening and crying, our getting up and leaving — is all noticed by the actors in a play. This saps the audience. At the hour and a half mark of the two-hour-with-no-intermission play my friend and I simultaneously looked at our cellphones, because the body knows that an hour and a half is all it can take. You can’t do this to people. Stop doing it.  It hurts the work.

4. GO doesn’t get you there faster than a car.

I have a four hour round trip commute to work. This is unacceptable. Coach Canada and Greyhound are for-profit corporations that only now run routes to make money so GO is the only choice for most of us. If you complain to GO about your four hour commute they will say ‘We are not an express bus service, we are a commuter service.’ Right. Then why don’t you have washrooms on your buses for my 2 hour commute? We are paying for GO with are taxes and it’s criminal. Period.

5. You think gay is over? That’s just pretend.

You think Gay men are just like straight men, same rights, privileges and lifestyle? Well let me ask you a couple of questions. Do straight men have GRINDR? Do straight men like watching porn about guys fisting other guys in bars? Do straight men spend a lot of time trying to figure out when to start their AIDs drugs? Is it likely straight men will be arrested for spreading HIV if they are not black? Are straight men worried they are too fat or too feminine to get laid? No? I didn’t think so. We are not anything like straight guys. Gay men would like you to think we are. But take it from me; we’re not.

6. All those movies that say they are based on a true story are trying to convince you that what you are watching is more important because it’s true but take my word for it: just because something is based on a true story (like all movies seem to be these days) does not mean that it’s more relevant, meaningful, honest— because it’s all just the same lie which is the lie that is all entertainment and art, okay, so stop fooling yourself, okay?

&. And finally…

Your Facebook friends are not your friends. Friends are people who you meet with, hold and touch. You have to be able to look in their eyes and see their faces. You have to hug them when it’s cold and feel their tears on your shoulder when they cry. You have to be nervous about

their disapproval in real time (you can’t wait to deal with their emotions at another time; they are sitting right in front of you). It’s called love.

I’m just telling you cuz I think you should know….

The Girl on the Train

I am the girl on the train

I am played by Emily Blunt who is a much better actress in this movie even than she is usually because she has been allowed by the director and producer to retain her British accent.

I don’t exactly know why they call me a girl. As I am a woman.

Oh well.

I have a problem.

It is difficult for me to talk about the problem because, well, it’s difficult for me to talk about pretty well anything as I am an alcoholic.

You can tell I am an alcoholic because my hair has not been washed recently and I speak slowly and with difficulty and I walk down roads in the rain looking lonely and I gaze at you pitifully looking for some sort of pity because I am so pitiful

Every day I ride on the train and you think I’m going to work at first but it is revealed at a later point that in actual fact I am just traveling on the train every day for no reason because my life is hopeless

And every day I see a beautiful young woman with slanted eyes named Megan Hipwell who is much more beautiful than I am and who has a handsome boyfriend with an extremely well-toned body who is constantly having sex with her

I know this because they often have sex with all the windows open or on the deck of their lovely Dutch Colonial house

I wish I had her life, I wish I was blonde and had slanted eyes and a boyfriend who screwed me constantly in front of other people

I wish for what any woman would want because I am just that, I am any woman, no pardon me every woman

I want to have a baby like every woman does but I cannot have one and because of that and because I am a nasty drunk my husband dumped me like an old sack of potatoes which is what I look like and feel like every day when I ride the train

Emily Blunt who plays me aspires in fact, to embody the mood and general demeanour of a sack of potatoes when she plays me

And let me say she completely succeeds.

And then one fateful morning I wake up and I discover as I slowly open my bleary eyes that oh no I blacked out the night before and I actually have no idea at all what I did

Wow.

Can you imagine such a thing?

Let me tell you Amy Schumer the feminist comedian made a movie about the same thing called Trainwreck  i.e. alcoholism in women — only she treated it in a lighthearted manner

But I, the girl on the train do not think that a woman getting drunk is a laughing matter

For I know that being drunk is a very bad thing, nay tragic, and I know this ever since I woke up on that fateful morning and I had blood on me (why? why blood? whose blood was it?) and there was an empty liquor bottle that happened to be lying near my face so it made a great closeup shot and my hair was even dirtier than usual which as you can imagine was nearly impossible and then my roommate yelled at me

And then a mean detective played by Allison Janney accused me of killing the blonde girl with the perfect life and the slanted eyes named Megan Hipwell

Did I kill her? is it possible that I killed the girl with the perfect life in my drunken blackout just because I was so jealous of her? Could I be that evil?

This is certainly my darkest night of the soul that I am experiencing now.

Experience it with me. 

I think I will stagger down another alley and perhaps fall down and you will pity me and someone will call me a slut.

But then just when you think things couldn’t get any worse, lo and behold, they don’t.

All of a sudden I meet Lisa Kudrow who is being very brave in this movie for showing her wrinkles for the first time on screen. (Wow, a closeup! Wow what wrinkles! Even TV stars get old. At least some of them do. Jennifer Anniston doesn’t. I guess it must be the fabulous wrinkle cream she uses.)

Anyway Lisa Kudrow tells me not to worry and reveals to me that in fact to my surprise and chagrin I never got drunk at her party and never embarrassed my husband and I am not a messy drunk at all

Lisa Kudrow changes my life, just as she changed the lives of so many on the TV show Friends, by just being her cheery empathetic self but in this case specifically suddenly revealing to me in the nick of time that I am a good person and that my husband is the evil one and everyone knows that he is evil because he can’t keep his dick in his pants

So, ergo, therefore, his new wife and I — she is another blonde woman I forgot to mention who I am also very jealous of — well I bury my jealously and we act — two women — as one, and we stab him to death with a corkscrew

It’s lots of fun but what else can you do with a man who can’t keep his dick in his pants?

Wow this is a feminist movie after all!

Now it’s the end of the movie and I have finally washed my hair and bought my self a new white coat.

I am going to visit the grave of my husband who I killed with a corkscrew but of course he deserved it and I am also visiting the grave of Megan Hipwell the girl with the blonde hair and slanted eyes who I was very jealous of but that’s okay because I didn’t kill her

You are allowed to imagine that I will probably hook up with Megan’s boyfriend who used to screw her with all the windows open on the deck of the Dutch Colonial House

even though he is a little violent

You probably shouldn’t imagine I will end up with him, but I know you will.

I mean, come on who cares if he’s violent and throws glasses against the wall — I mean all men are violent, aren’t they?

And isn’t that kind of sexy?

Where are you going to meet a guy who is not abusive? I mean isn’t that just after all, part of what it means to be a sexy man? So don’t you usually just pick the least abusive guy and hope for the best?

But I probably shouldn’t say this or even think this 

And in the movie I don’t actually get together with Megan’s ex, but you can imagine that I might

That is your right as a woman

It is also your right as a woman, to watch this movie

We’ve come a long way, baby, from Joan Crawford starring in Mildred Pierce in 1945

Unlike Mildred Pierce I don’t have a job, or struggle as a waitress, or pinch pennies

We’ve gone way beyond that

And anyway you’ll be glad to hear

I’m not a bitch like Joan Crawford.

Homophobic Hosanna

Imagine what it must have been like to be a person of colour, living in North York back in fall of 1993, watching the pre-Broadway run of Harold Prince’s production of Showboat. You’d see a black ‘stevedore’ in the racist American south happily singing about ‘ol’ man river,’ and a mixed-race woman moaning about her forbidden love for a white man. Well of course you’d be pissed off! As modern day person of colour in Canada, you were being forced to be a witness to ancient images of yourself and your community that simply have no relevance in the present. And it was all the more offensive because there were many racial issues brewing in Toronto’s Jane/Finch community at the time that really demanded attention.

So imagine what I must have felt like sitting in the audience at Soulpepper last week watching a brilliant pair of actors (Jason Cadieux and Damien Atkins) tackle Hosanna — a Canadian masterpiece written in the 70s by Michel Tremblay. I should have enjoyed it — I wanted to enjoy it. But the antique representation of gay men and their ‘plight’ was almost unbearable for me to see.

A masterpiece of magical realism, Hosanna rivals Streetcar Named Desire with the power of its poetic storytelling. But Hosanna is also a play about a homosexual whose tragedy is that he’s just not quite masculine enough.

One can’t blame Tremblay. Hosanna was first produced in 1973, just after gay liberation. Gay liberation was created by gender outcasts -  dykes, sex trade workers, drag queens and nelly boys. And it was all about being proud to be a pansy.  But soon after, gay men were intimidated by the patriarchy into being afraid of what they had achieved. The Village People were lurking around the corner spreading the notion that gay men could be as masculine as construction workers, cowboys and cops. Then came the 80s gay clones  in their plaid shirts, workbooks and moustaches. Tremblay was writing in the shadow of a particularly oppressive paradigm that consumed the gay community in the late 70s. Some gays said simply -- and quite rightly -- that it's okay for gay men to be masculine. But others decreed that we shouldn’t be feminine anymore.

In the meantime our wider culture broached some pretty major theoretical changes that moved us in opposite direction. Judith Butler discovered that gender is an illusion, stating that it’s okay for men to be feminine and women to be masculine. And more recently, we’ve learned from the transgender community that the sexual equipment you are born with doesn’t necessarily define who you are.

So at the end of Hosanna — when Claude stands before us naked, repeating over and over again ‘I’m a man, I’m a man, I’m a man’ — I know I’m supposed to feel triumphant. But I just can’t. I just  feel sad, hurt or worse yet — deeply wounded for gender outlaws everywhere.

Because the fact that  Hosanna has a penis doesn’t mean he can’t wear a dress.

Or am I wrong?