The As It Happens Files (15 page)
Read The As It Happens Files Online
Authors: Mary Lou Finlay
Seems to me that Mike Brady could be a role model for us all.
When I’d first talked to Mike Brady, after he got rescued in the snowstorm back in 2003, the first words I actually spoke to him were, “Aren’t
you
the luckiest guy in the world.” This to a guy in a wheelchair! I wanted to cut my tongue out, I felt like such an idiot. I was referring to the rescue, of course, but
still.
But now I think, okay, maybe not
the
luckiest guy in the world—no denying he’s had some bad luck here and there—but here’s a man who knows who he is and what he can do and what life’s all about, and as he says, he has a great family and good friends, and he’s made a difference … that’s pretty lucky, don’t you think?
This Is the Dance Portion
Radio with a good beat
L
ike any team effort,
As It Happens
is at its best when the team are all pulling in the same direction, but it’s just as vital to have people whose tastes and skills complement each other. It’s very useful, for instance, to have people with good musical taste in your midst, as well as interviewers, writers and chase producers. And we did, though you wouldn’t always think so if you heard some of the stuff we played—I’m thinking disco, techno, hip hop, ABBA and almost anything that makes it into the annual Eurovision music competition, which is notable not only for its, ahem, music but also for the fact that the winning song one year was performed by an Israeli transsexual.
Mainly, though, we liked to play blues, jazz, rock, country, swing or something glorious from the classical repertoire. Barbara Budd fancies that she has a good singing voice and likes to sing along when the occasion calls for it, but as I mentioned earlier, she thinks I’m tone-deaf and she always greatly preferred that I not join her. I will admit to being somewhat underdeveloped, musically speaking, but I like to think I can spot great talent when it comes along—Feist, for example. She swept the Juno Awards in 2008 and high time, too.
Also, I can tell when a composer is insane.
After suffering through hours and hours of Olympic skating on TV the year that everyone was dancing to
Bolero,
I was
pretty sure that Ravel must have been suffering from something himself when he wrote it. As it turns out, British psychologist Eve Sobolska had come to the same conclusion. In 1997 she decided to look into the matter, and we were eager to hear the result of her research.
ML: Dr. Sobolska, I’m going to go way out on a limb here and say that it comes as no surprise to me that
Bolero
may be the product of a diseased mind. Is that how you got connected to this story?
ES: Yes. I used to get very irritated by the piece, and I wondered why. And at the time, I had my niece who is a musicologist, who studies theory of music. She was staying with me and I asked her, “Monica, why is it so irritating? So repetitive. I can’t stand it.”
And then we acquired a score, and she produced some evidence that actually the very same theme is repeated, almost without any alteration, I think it’s
18
times in
17
minutes.
…
ML: I guess that’s what it is that drives everyone crazy.
ES: Absolutely.
ML: So you got to thinking, why would a talented musician produce such a work?
ES: Yes.
ML: And what did you learn?
ES: Well, I then started to read his biographies, and I had remembered that he had dementia. But I didn’t know until I started to study this particular piece of music in relation to his other [work], and I started to
study the pattern of his creativity—I didn’t realize it was one of his last pieces. And I didn’t realize that a year before he composed
Bolero,
he already showed signs of disorientation and, one might say, dementia.
ML: What signs?
ES: A year before he composed
Bolero,
he became disoriented during a performance of his music—unusually so.
ML: And what happened?
ES: He just got lost while conducting a piece of music.
ML: And there were other episodes later on?
ES: Yes, later on. And then he somehow collected himself and then he composed
Bolero
in summer
1928,
and then there were some further episodes of confusion, and then, amazingly, he managed to produce his two masterpieces, the Concerto in G Major and the Concerto for the Left Hand.
ML: So what do you think the problem was? Alzheimer’s?
ES: No, no. Alzheimer’s is unlikely to go hand in hand with creativity; it’s a very uncreative condition. I think he had influx in his brain, and this condition can fluctuate indeed.
ML: Can you explain that to me?
ES: Well, for instance, somebody who has blood pressure—and he may have had high blood pressure. He had an enlarged heart, for instance, and on this account, he was protected from military service—somebody who has high blood pressure can have small hemorrhages in his brain. Small ones, not necessarily large ones. And
there is usually a swelling around the hemorrhage, which can then subside, and therefore the whole picture can fluctuate, and the person can improve, and he did.
ML: So you just get these episodes, during one of which we assume he composed
Bolero.
ES: Yes. During his lighter moments, yes, absolutely. But on the other hand, this is my hypothesis and it might be completely wrong. But I think already some damage to his brain must have been done, and the
Bolero,
I argue, is a piece of musical perseveration, which means repetitiveness.
ML: What did your musical niece think of your theory?
ES: Well, she disowned me a bit. She said, “Well, I’m not having anything to do with you.” But on the other hand, she agreed with me that it was extremely repetitive and very unusual in classical music.
ML: Is it true that Ravel himself didn’t like
Bolero?
ES: That’s what I have read. He was quite irritated [about] how instantly famous it became.
ML: Poor man!
ES: Yes. Well, I think, no doubt he was a genius, and like many geniuses, they have great emotional insight into their conditions, and I think this is the tragedy almost. I think he somehow knew; he knew something was amiss.
So there you have it,
I thought.
Mystery solved.
Bolero
is the product of a diseased mind.
Our audience, I have to say, were not of one mind about Dr. Sobolska’s theory.
Hello, this is Emmanuel from London, Ontario. This is my diagnosis: the good doctor seems to be suffering from a condition peculiar to psychiatrists, I think—namely, an irrepressible desire to construct psychological profiles of people who are long dead or whom they’ve never met. The only known treatment is a strong dose of ridicule.
This is another Eva calling from Toronto.… Ultimately, the reason why he wrote it was so that Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean could perform it on ice. I saw them do that at the Montreal Forum many years ago. It was an event of such magic as I will never forget.
Hi. This is Brian Murrow calling from Brampton. There’s a story about the first performance of Ravel’s
Bolero.
At the end of the performance, a woman in the audience supposedly yelled out, “He’s mad! He’s mad!”
To which Ravel replied, “She’s the only one who understands.”
My name is Gilles Losier. I’m calling from Montreal. Now, about Ravel’s
Bolero:
I think it’s a misunderstood piece of music. It’s a musician’s piece of music. It’s a mantra, and I really feel that only people that have good ears can understand this music, and I pooh-pooh the psychiatrist.
This is Edith Matheson calling from Alberta. Thank God someone has finally attempted to explain the frenzied phenomenon of Ravel’s
Bolero.
I must admit that, not only does it irritate me, but it makes me feel absolutely unhinged. If it’s played when I’m at the symphony, the first thing I want to do is plug my ears and run screaming out of the auditorium.
This is Ben Metcalfe at Shawnigan Lake. Somewhere in there one of you mentioned that Ravel was reputed to have disliked
Bolero
after he wrote it. I can give you his exact quote about that. He said, “I only made two serious mistakes in my life: one was a woman in the south of France and the other was
Bolero.”
We had a lot of fun with the
Bolero
brouhaha, which happened during my first month of hosting, and for me it was an early indication of how easy it would be to weave the lighter stories in amongst the more serious ones on
As It Happens—
and how much the audience loved it when we did. I was determined to make the most of it, and in this ambition, I found that Barbara was always a ready ally. Indeed, she was usually the first to become aware of the situation when we crammed the show too full of serious or depressing stuff and forgot to sprinkle a bit of fun around.
Barbara Budd, in case you don’t know, is also an actor of some repute, having trod the boards at Stratford with people like William Hutt and Maggie Smith. So she was well equipped to carry on the fine storytelling traditions begun by Al Maitland. Her readings of
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
and
Bone Button Borscht,
among others, have become as much a part of the show’s seasonal fare as Al’s
Shepherd
and
The Gift of the Magi.
Combine this with her own flair for writing, and you have someone who can and does frequently take an unremarkable script and bring it to life on the air. Barbara’s talents weren’t always sufficiently appreciated, though; we did take her for granted at times. And then she would go away for a while, and we’d become aware that the show wasn’t sounding quite the way it ought to—like the time she fractured her leg during March Break.
She was showing her son and a friend around the Brock Monument on the Niagara Escarpment, the site of the Battle of Queenston Heights during the War of 1812, when a piece of ice sent her crashing to the ground. Heroically, she managed to get them all back to the car and then back to Toronto before taking herself off to Emergency to have her bones set. None of this was public knowledge, though, and when she didn’t come back to the show as expected, some of our listeners began to get a bit agitated. “Where is Barbara?” they wanted to know.
So one fine day, we rang her up.
ML: Barbara!
BB: Mary Lou, how are you?
ML: I’m fine. How are you?
BB: It’s so nice to talk to you on the phone. I listen to you every night.
ML: More to the point,
where
are you? Because, you know, people have been asking. I mean, they think, okay, so you went away on March Break—that’s been over for weeks. All I’ve been able to tell them is we haven’t seen you.
BB: I think it’s so nice people even care that I’m away. I’m in …
Where do you think any
As It Happens
girl would be when you called her?
ML: Well, you’d be in Reading, of course.
BB: That’s exactly where I am.
ML: You’re not! What are you doing in Reading?
BB: You know what, I’m on a Canada Council grant and I’m travelling around to all the places—now, Reading, of
course, is very special, and actually, it doesn’t quite fit into my proposal with the Canada Council—but what they gave me licence to do was to go to a lot of the places where I’ve mispronounced the name.
ML: You never mispronounce a name.
BB: Yeah, right.
ML: Well, there was Nyack [New York]. But you know—
BB: You know what? Unfortunately, I have to end my trip in Nyack, because just before I went on this trip, I called Nyack
gnakk
[sounding like one syllable].
But it’s really sort of a Canadian goodwill thing, so I thought,
I’ll start in Canada.
I’ll start on the west coast and—remember that time we did the interview about the whale songs?
ML: Yes.
BB: And you know, I’m not from B.C.… I mispronounced Juan de Fuca.
ML: What did you call it?
BB: Well, I don’t want to say it again—I’ll just get into more trouble—but it was close to being very bad, and I got letters from people upbraiding me for not knowing how to pronounce it, that I should really put the
FEW-kah
in it.…
So I started out in Sidney, British Columbia. You know, other people have mispronounced their names, I guess, but people on the west coast are pretty possessive about the Strait of Juan de Fuca. They got het up about that. I’m here now in Reading. But I’m going on to Wales.
ML: Is Reading lovely?
BB: Ye-es.
ML: There was a little hesitation in there. Just a bit.
BB: Well, you know, it was a very, very famous industrial
Town.… But you know what? It’s lovelier because of us,
I’m told. Because they love the fact that Canadian broadcasters talk about Reading frequently, and they’ve had a lot of tourism because of
As It Happens.
ML: How did you get a Canada Council grant to do this? I mean, is it a sort of art thing? Are you going to put a CD out when you’re finished or weave the names into a tapestry or something?
BB: Well … a quilt, perhaps. Including the Welsh names.…
ML: Look, nobody can pronounce any name in Wales except the Welsh. It’s their revenge on the rest of the world.
BB: True enough. I’m just sorry I never mispronounced the name Prague. I’d love to go to Prague but I have no reason to.…
The Canada Council does marvellous work, though. They do artists-in-residence and writing plays and writing music but they also—over the years, I’ve noticed they give out grants to some pretty wacky projects.…
And I thought,
Well, I’m going to apply. I’m going to just see whether or not I can do some good work, spreading goodwill from Canada to some of these far-off places.
And, by George, I got a Canada Council, Mary Lou.
ML: Well, that’s fantastic.
BB: And I’ll be a better pronouncer when I come back, I’m sure.…
ML: You’re great on radio, and I can’t wait to hear you again, right here beside me.
BB: Well, aren’t we lucky that when I am away on something as wonderful as this—what a lucky
break
for me, eh?
ML: It
is
a lucky break—
