March 1st 2014: Code Yellow

I found Stuart's opening to this episode very interesting and informative, as it delved into the history and importance of the Rideau canal. It seems that the storytelling of the Vinyl Cafe loves to concern itself with hidden nuggets of Canadian history. A few months ago we were given the lowdown on Kingston's historical and cultural significance, and two weeks ago we learned about the great hockey game that's been all but forgotten except by those who witnessed it. This week's history lesson is a bit more solemn, because it praises the achievements of the construction of the canal (one of the largest in North America) and it failures (never used for its intended purpose, neglected for much of the early 20th century, and more tragically its construction resulted in over one hundred deaths caused by malaria). It's another well-written piece delivered passionately by Stuart, and if you have even a passing interest in Canadian History I can see how the Vinyl Cafe might appeal to you.

Dave returns from his hiatus a fortnight ago in another humorous  adventure, this time set in a hospital. Dave wants to cheer up a friend of his who recently suffered a stroke, and doesn't want to embarrass him by wheeling him around for a walk, so he disguises himself as a patient to make his friend feel less self-conscious. Like many (all?) of Dave's schemes, this one ends as poorly as possible, with Dave mistaken as an actual patient, strapped to a gurney flipped upside-down, inching his way towards a door to escape from an unnecessary endoscopy. When Stuart got to this part I found myself thinking: "Why oh why does Murphy let him out of the house unsupervised?"

This led me think more pertinent questions about Dave's essential nature. He screws up like this constantly, so why does Murphy put up with him? Why do I, or any Vinyl Cafe listener, put up with him? It's because Dave isn't some generic, bumbling sitcom dad: he doesn't into messes out of stupidity, or greed, or pettiness, or for the sake of poetic justice due to some wrongdoing: Dave almost always hatches these hair-brained schemes because he's trying to help someone.

Remember the first episode I reviewed? He crashes through the grocery store in his cart because he wanted to help Murphy with chores. He walked across Northern Ontario for a day because he wanted to quit smoking for Murphy. Almost every story is like this: Rode a toboggan in the middle of the night? He was trying to cheer up his neighbour! Wore a rabbit costume to a Bar-Mitzvah? He thought someone asked him to! Dave's always trying to cheer up the people around him, and even though his attempts occasionally end in bodily harm, he's usually succeeds, and it's both his intentions and his success that make him like-able instead of annoying.

Feb 15th 2014: Hockey

The Vinyl Cafe writers clearly have winter on their minds for the cold, cold month of February. Two weeks ago we were treated to a story about tobogganing, and now we have an episode dedicated entirely to that great Canadian pastime of hockey. The show even mixes up the format a little by featuring no Dave & Morley story. Instead, Stuart spends the better part of the episode recounting the greatest game of hockey ever played, the final game of an international European tournament held in 1945 between Canada and Czechoslovakia.

The Canadian team was fairly overwhelmed by the tournament, the biggest any of them had entered (they were all members of the Big Narrows Coal Miners, hailing from Cape Breton, NS and winners of the Allan Cup) but managed to scrape their way to the final game. By the end of three scoreless periods however, both teams realized that they didn't want to win if it meant that the other team had to lose. The spectre of the war still looming over both teams' heads: every player on both sides of the rink had been affected by it in some way, and neither had the will to inflict another "great loss" onto the the other team. So they did something that caused the officials to strike the game from the history books: they mixed their rosters together for the overtime period, and as a result they played a great game where neither side won.

Here's what I like about Vinyl Cafe: the message is always told in a very obvious way, but never in a way that feels preachy or condescending. The message that peace is more powerful than war is a simple, powerful message and it feels fresh here because of the presentation of the story: there's a small dash of whimsy to this tale that makes it feel like something your grandfather would tell you.

And in this case, it sort of is. Stuart frames the story as it was described to him: by three old men still living in Big Narrows, recounting their somewhat conflicting interpretations of the game. This episode makes a nice companion piece to the episode form a fortnight ago: three old men recount a story that seems to fantastic to be true, yet is, while the previous episode had a fictional old man recount a more down-to-earth yet fictional story. I don't have much more to add to this other than to say that I like these winter stories that the Vinyl Cafe has been favouring, and I hope it keeps things up because there's very little weather where I currently am and it's nice to be reminded of winter without actually having to live through it for 5 months of every year.

February 1st 2014 - The Greatest Toboggan Run Ever

For a while now, I've had the feeling that Vinyl Cafe's audience is catered primariliy towards baby boomers, and I think this episode all but confirms it, because it focuses on the two things I assume boomers love: nostalgia and national pride.

The national pride comes first, as Stuart begins the program with a monologue describing why he thinks Kingston, Ontario (the show this episode was taped in) is the most quintessentially Canadian city in the country. It's my favourite part of the show, and Stuart's description of this “Canadian” quality is very sweet and almost poetic at times. At one point he describes Kingston as a beautiful oil painting, and he compares a frozen river to a rolling field of wheat. I can't it it justice, so go listen to it if you haven't already! His monologue is also quite meta, since Vinyl Cafe is broadcast from CBC Radio, the most quintessentially Canadian Radio broadcaster, and it is performed at a time when the Vinyl Cafe performing live shows in towns stretching across the country.

He gives a few superficial reasons for Kingston's Canadian-ness, like being the birthplace of Don Cherry (boo), but his primary reasons have to do with Kingston's importance in Canadian History and, of course, nostalgia. Its home to the oldest hockey rivalry in Canada (Queen's vs. RMC, a game still played in an old fashioned way, on a bay of frozen ice), five railroad companies originated here (and are all sadly gone), and John A. MacDonald was born here. He was also buried here, and Stuart recommends that everyone sit by his grave for a while if they're ever in town. The message here is plain: Kingston is quintessentially Canadian because it's a reminder of where we, as Canadians, have come from. That's a message I can get behind, but I think it resonates especially well with older folks, hence my conclusion that this show is quite appealing to baby boomers.

I don't have much to say about the rest of the show this week, except that it helps to reinforce the dual messages of Canadian pride and nostalgia. The story exchange this week is about a trip to Canadian Tire on a weekend, i.e. the most Canadian thing ever. The musical guest this week sings a never-before-recorded song about pick-up hockey. The Dave story is especially endearing this week, as his older next door neighbour describes a time when he went on an exhilarating and dangerous toboggan ride as a child. It ends with the two of them tobogganing down the hill in the middle of the night, during a snowfall, simultaneously joyous and terrified, remembering what it was like to be young. Nostalgia, everybody!

Jan 25th 2014: The Flu

This week Stuart's doing his show from Halifax.  He starts out with the story of Ruth Goldbloom.  I always like this type of story. It's the type of story people tell at funerals: they're always positive, a little inspirational, a little funny, perhaps the best example of the oral tradition we have today.  I like in this type of story that the focus is more on the character and the narrative rather than truth content.  Now I'm not proposing that truth isn't important at all, but maybe sometimes the story based on the history is better than the history itself.  I still have some mixed feelings about that, but I suppose it was all covered in the Jebidiah Springfield episode of the Simpsons.

As for the musical guest, this week it's Joel Plaskett I'm going to go with the liked/disliked format for this part. I liked: he plays along and addresses Dave in the audience, a bit weird but I like that he's a good-sport.  I did look it up, and apparently the lyric in the song talks about 'Davey' even when he's not playing to the Vinyl Cafe crowd, which I was much relieved about; he's trying hard, but not too hard.  I didn't like: the songs were a bit repetitive, but I can see how that would be a positive when you're trying to get people to sing along, which are fun if you're there.  This is one of the few times I've noticed the difference between the studio and live recordings.  The last song he plays though really picks up and was a good way to end it, it was by far my favourite of the three he played.

The Story Exchange this week is about this guy Ray who helps his neighbour put his dog down without the neighbour's wife knowing.  While I can understand where he's coming from (the dog was quite old and sick) the whole thing seemed a little sneaky to me.  I feel like the last couple weeks the Story Exchange has been kind of a downer, maybe I'll have to think of one to send in that's more positive.

Continuing on with the sneaky theme is the Dave and Morely story.  I'm sure I've heard this one before I don't know why I would have though, maybe it was on the radio when they taped it, and are now just playing the podcast of the recording.  The story starts out with our weekly grocery store reference, Dave has just done the shopping and is standing at the door, trying to decide if it's irrational to treat his flu-ridden family and neighbours as if they have the plague.  Dave goes on to do a lot of nice things for a lot of sick people, he shovels several neighbours' snow, runs some errands for them, cooks a variety of family members a variety of meals and at the end comes home understandably exhausted.  This exhaustion finally wears down the defences that Dave has put up against the Plague, eats Sam's leftover spaghetti and realizes that it's a lot more work taking care of everyone with the flu than having the flu itself.  The next week Dave "mysteriously" gets the flu for a couple days, conveniently though he has stocked up on supplies before this unforeseen illness.

I liked this story, although is does fit with the theme of deception that works its way through this post.  The best part, as usual are Dave's antics.  I really like how Stuart makes him really believable, in a cartoon-character type way.  By that I mean that all his decisions are arrived at in a way that a real person would, with a cartoonish quality comes from the frequency and extent that they escalate.  Where it wouldn't be unusual to think that perhaps this new strain of the flu was the start of a plague, what makes Dave, what Morley would call a "hysterical lunatic" is that he acts on this thought, or that he actually takes the motorized grocery cart, or that he rents a blue rabbit costume, or that he decides to walk from one northern Ontario town to the next, but mostly because he does all of them.

The underlying thread of this story seems to be deception.  While no one would say that it's better to lie than not to lie, the episode brings to light some situations where a bit of deceit might be for the best.

Jan 18th 2014: Murphy's Bar Mitzvah

Hi, I'm back again to write about this week's episode of Vinyl cafe. This week's episode is an hour long, which I guess is the norm for this show? It's a bit daunting to review this one, but I'll give it a try.

This episode opens with Stuart in front of a live studio audience in Vancouver. The end of the program reveals that he'll be touring with live shows across several Canadian towns over the next few months, which I am totally cool with, because the audience's laughter and applause feel like a good fit for this show, and I think it would lose a bit of its charm without them.

I'm not sure if this is the normal format of the show, but this episode opens with Stuart telling an anecdote about himself on his last trip to Vancouver (only half of this episode focuses on Dave & co. Again, this may or may not be the norm for this show).

Stuart begins by saying how much he likes Vancouver grocery stores (again with grocery stores! That's three episodes in a row!) but segues quickly into a loving description of his three favourite Vancouver restaurants: a Sushi place, a German bakery, and an Indian restaurant, all founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants.

I don't need to follow the canned synopsis/moral format of my previous review to break down this story, because Stuart helpfully states the moral of the story at the end: this country is made richer by its inclusiveness towards immigrants, like a many-folded croissant (his analogy, not mine). It's the kind of feel-good message I expect from this show. Stuart describes the owners and atmospheres of these restaurants with loving detail, which really helps to get the message across. It helps to establish a warm, friendly tone at the beginning of the episode.

Unfortunately, this tone only lasts past the musical interlude that immediately follows this story(with musical guest Veda Hille). It stops once we reach the vinyl cafe story exchange, where listeners can send in their true stories to be selectively read by Stuart on the show.

This week's story concerns a woman riding the Skytrain (Vancouver public transit). She describes it as a scene familiar to anyone who has taken public transportation: strangers sitting and standing in silence, doing their best to ignore one other. This silence stops when an older gentleman requests that a young man remove a knapsack from a seat so that he can sit down. He is met not with courtesy, but insults and foul language. The other passengers are stunned, and do nothing, until a third man demands that the younger man apologize. When this is also met with derision, he activates the train intercom and requests that security arrest this young man because he "threatened another rider". "Also" he adds, "he's ugly". This prompts the young man to leave the train at the next stop. The other riders are relieved and begin exchanging knowing glances with each other, bonding over this experience. Another woman tells the third man that there is a button that can be pushed to summon transit police, which can be used instead of the intercom. "I know", the third man replies, "I wanted to humiliate him".

Sorry for the long description of an otherwise brief portion of the show, but I really didn't like this story! It felt tonally dissonant following Stuart's anecdote about the importance of being accepting towards everyone. Now, let me start by saying that the young man's behaviour in this story was unacceptable. This does not give the other man in this story carte blanche to insult him! And all of the passengers on the train are happy that this reprisal took place and they all bond over their collective schadenfreude!? The message of this story is like a twisted version of the message of Stuart's restaurant tale: strangers can be brought closer together through the collective enjoyment of a deserved public humiliation.

Well, I disagree with that message! Responding to bullies with bullying never solves anything! If someone on a train is threatening someone, just push the emergency button, there's no need to throw insults at the person causing trouble. In fact, it could escalate things and make the situation worse! The woman who submitted this story adds at the end that that young man will think twice before refusing his seat on the Skytrain again (paraphrase). No, he won't, because the insult he received from the third man and the collective silent acceptance of this by the rest of the passengers will only further embitter him to his fellow passengers in the future, and that's assuming this incident doesn't dissuade him from ever taking the train again.

What happened, Vinyl Cafe? Why did you completely flip the tone of this program from light-hearted to mean in five minutes flat? I thought this was supposed to be a feel-good program. I tried to stay positive anyway, since a Dave story was coming up after another musical interlude(an aside: I'm going to avoid commenting on the musical parts of this show too much because I don't feel qualified to analyze music, but suffice to say the music from this week's episode was good. It was Veda Hille again).

Anyway, the last half of the episode featured another Dave story. Did it help fix the show after the tonal dissonance of the previous two segments? Sorta.

I won't go into a lot of detail about this story, but it's another "Dave does something silly" story that I mostly enjoyed. Murphy (A friend of Dave's teenage son, Sam) is having a Bar Mitzvah, and Dave mishears a phone call inviting him to the event, so he assumes that he needs to dress as a rabbit for the after-party, instead of a Rabbi. So Dave attends with his son in full costume (the costume is blue for some reason, a funny detail for which no explanation is given), and of course his son is extremely embarrassed. Dave also has to pee while at the synagogue, and naturally he can't unzip the costume and ends up freaking a kid out in the bathroom, and it's all as funny as you would expect, up to and including when the Rabbi himself enters the bathroom, sees Dave, and momentarily believes that he's hallucinating.

Unfortunately, it's at this point that the story goes off the rails a bit. You see, the Rabbi is being pressured by the Cantor to retire, but it's in the Cantor's own interest that this happens since the Rabbi will be replaced by a relative. However, with Dave's help the Rabbi is able to trick the Cantor into believing that he is hallucinating and seeing a giant blue rabbit that isn't there, during the ceremony, in front of everyone. The Cantor doesn't attend the after-party and everyone there learns of the prank and they all have a good laugh, and Dave takes a bow.

Normally I would consider this ending fairly harmless fun, but following the previous Skytrain story, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. In this story, Dave & co. humiliate a bully in public then laugh about it afterward. That's a bit mean-spirited, Dave.

Maybe I'm just too sensitive, but please, fictional & non-fictional people in these stories, try to be a bit more understanding of mean people. Treating intolerance with intolerance should not be the first resort when it comes to dealing with unruly people.

I know I'm sounding a bit harsh, but I did mostly like this episode. Stuart's story was good, Dave's story was mostly good and had some touching father-son bonding moments. But there were some mixed messages that put me off a bit. Hopefully this is not something that frequently occurs on this program.

Jan 11th 2014: Boy Wanted

This episode of the vinyl cafe begins, like most picture dictionaries, with apples.  Stuart starts off telling us about a chapter that didn't make it into his book about small towns.  Now I've never read the book, but from the podcast a lot of the things I've noticed about small towns seems to be confirmed.  People who grow up in the city share a community with other people who have grown up in the same city, they're all from the same place, and thus share common experiences, the counter side to this isn't that people from small towns have less people in their community, it's that people from small towns in general have as much in common as people from the same city.  This is a theory I'd like to develop more, but for now Stewart McLean has added confirmation to the similarities between small towns, they usually have a theme, frequently food-based.  Beeton has honey, Alliston has potatoes, Wellesley has apple-butter, and the town in the story, Williamsburg has Mcintosh apples, and if I know small towns, at some point in the year, they have a festival dedicated to the apple, where the same carnival travels through that travels to all the other festivals in small towns.

I think my favourite part of this episode was the listener story.  It's about a guy who goes to help his mom and sister with an injured animal, that ends up being an empty paint can.  In addition to the humour of the story, I liked that the listener identified that his story was similar to a Dave and Morley story.  This reminded me of something said in the last post, about the characters being designed to make people think of other people they know.  Maybe this is related to the what I wrote about earlier about feeling a connection to other small-town folk, even from other towns, maybe people just are all pretty much the same.

As for the Dave and Morley story this week, this one was about their son Sam, and like the last episode, this one takes place in a grocery store.  A coming of age story about working in a grocery store.  In the story Sam revels in the feeling of grown-up-ness he gets from the responsibility of opening up the store he works at when his boss is away.  While like other Dave and Morley-style stories the attraction is from the universality, every kid feels this way at some point. This universal theme though got me thinking about the feeling I get as an adult the "playing house" feeling, where you feel like you're just a kid pretending to be an adult.  I wonder when this feeling goes away, or if everyone is just pretending.

Jan 4th 2014: Self Improvement

Hello! I and one other person will be cataloging our thoughts on every episode of Vinyl Cafe that is released this year, alternating every week.

Vinyl Cafe is an ongoing radio program hosted by Stuart McLean, and if you wish to follow along with these articles, you can listen to it on Sundays at noon EST on CBC Radio One or Saturdays at 9am EST on CBC Radio 2. If you're like me and don't own a radio, you can grab the most recent episode off of iTunes, which is where I found this convenient description of the show: “CBC Radio presents the stories and misadventures of Dave, the owner of the 'Vinyl Cafe', the World's smallest record store, where the motto is 'We may not be big, but we're small.' The show also features Dave's wife, Morley, their two children, Sam and Stephanie and assorted friends and neighbours.”

Expectations

I would have ended the previous paragraph by recommending that you give Vinyl Cafe a try, but I can't do that in good faith because I haven't listened to this program in many, many years (15?). Mostly what I remember are the smooth, pitch perfect tones of Stuart McLean's voice as he narrates some minor episode of Dave's life. I remember the show being fairly folksy and entertaining, so that’s what I’m hoping for as I dive into these episodes. I'm returning to this show (and writing about it) on a whim, because it's a new year, and the perfect time to try something different, which conveniently segues me into this week's episode:

Jan 4^th 2014: Self Improvement

Stuart introduces us to this week's program by announcing that it consists of two re-broadcast stories related to the concept of the New Year’s resolutions. Both were originally performed around the early 00's, but it's all new to me so let's begin:

The Cart

Synopsis: Driven by a child-like curiosity and sense of adventure, Dave decides to use one of the motorized scooters available to customers at his local grocery store to improve his typically abysmal shopping time. Things escalate quickly as his scooter malfunctions, leading to a series of Mr Magoo-esque accidents that end with him getting pinched in the nuts by a lobster and mistaken as a mentally handicapped man by a free-samples grocery store employee. Morley nearly dies from embarrassment but Dave makes it up to her by cleaning the toilets in the house (upstairs and down!).

Things I liked:

• Stuart's impeccable voice and perfect delivery as he describes Dave's erroneous grocery trip with excellent comedic timing. You can tell he's been doing this for years: judging by their laughter the members of the audience was digging it, and so was I (this story and the next one were recorded with a live audience; I don't know how common that is). His voice is the definition of easy listening: he could read excerpts from the phone book for 30 minutes and I don't think I would mind.

• Related to the above point: this is a pretty funny program when it wants to be.

• This will likely be the first of many times that I say this: Dave and Morley remind me of my parents. I assume this is intentional, and that Stuart has managed to create characters that remind almost everyone of their friends/relatives/significant others. This week's similarity: an equal and permanent separation of chores (i.e. Dave always does the shopping).

• Dave sometimes steals peoples' grocery carts before they can take them to checkout. I've always wondered if anyone actually did this. Would a store ban you if they caught you doing this?

The moral of the story:

This one seems like a bit of a downer as it presents itself as a cautionary tale against trying new things. Really though, it's highlighting an often-overlooked aspect of new years' resolutions: they often fail. And that isn't a bad thing! No one gets (permanently) hurt in this story, and it provides Dave & Morley with an amusing anecdote they can laugh about somewhere down the line. You try new things to gain new experiences, and even ones that end in disasters (like this blog?!?) can be rewarding in their own way.

Walking Man

Synopsis: Two stories from earlier in Dave’s life (1976-1977), chronicling two of his numerous attempts to quit smoking. In the first, he quits and relapses for nearly a month before giving in for good when his Czech musician roommate offers him a cigarette. In the second, he spontaneously decides to temporarily part ways with the band he is roadie-ing for to walk from northern Ontario (somewhere north of Sudbury) to Barrie. His rationale is that if he keeps moving, he won’t be tempted to smoke. Unfortunately the path of virtue is fraught with temptation, as a kid begs him for cigarettes, a chain-smoking truck driver offers him a ride, and a fisherwoman introduces him to chewing tobacco (with amusing results). After over a day and night of walking, he takes a bus to Toronto and proposes to Morley (he was trying to quit for her, how sweet). Her response is to say she’ll think about it and to ask for a cigarette. Stuart mentions, almost as an afterthought, that Dave spontaneously quit smoking for good 6 months later.

Things I liked:

• Dave’s attempts to quit smoking are practically biblical in nature. He describes his musician roommate as the anti-Christ, but for my money he skews closer to the devil: his offer of a cigarette to Dave might as well be as offer of an apple to Eve. His pack of cigarettes even has a picture of a snake on it. Symbolism! His 2 day journey in northern Ontario might as well be 40 days in a desert (a desert would have more interesting scenery, of course).

• Dave uses a drive-thru on foot, but I can confirm via a friend that drive-thru employees will refuse to serve you unless you’re in a vehicle. 1977 was a simpler time.

• I like walking as much as the next person, but walking all day and night along a northern Ontario highway is crazy. You’re crazy Dave.

The moral of the story:

New Year’s resolutions can be divided into two categories: ones that attempt to try new things and ones that attempt to quit old things. Walking Man relates to the latter category. Stuart gets at a truth that is often overlooked when it comes to dropping bad habits: you don’t just quit a habit one day; you quit it every following day, every time you feel the urge to relapse. Dave’s solution to this problem is to keep walking, because he knows that if he slows down he’ll feel the need to smoke again. When I try to kick a bad habit, I also find that keeping busy is the best way to keep my mind off of it. Perhaps this story can be generalized as advice to anyone kicking a habit on New Year’s: find a hobby to keep you busy. However, Walking Man acknowledges that this strategy doesn’t always work, as Dave manages to regress to smoking again when tempted by people close to him: the musician in ’76 (they’re roommates, that’s kinda close) and Morley in ’77.

So what causes Dave to ultimately quit smoking? Stuart says he did it on a whim 6 months later, but I think there’s more to it than that. In that 6 month span, Morley accepts his marriage proposal. Perhaps Dave’s lifestyle change from band roadie to fiancé had some affect on his final, successful attempt to quit. If so the lesson here is clear: the best way to quit a bad habit may be to change your life in a way that minimizes external influences that make you want to continue it.

That’s it for this week. I hope you didn’t mind my rambling. I may have fudged some details about the stories in this episode, as memory can be a fickle thing. I’m not sure I’m happy with the format I wrote this article in, so it may change over time. I’m definitely happy with the program itself. I wasn’t sure how I would find it years after I stopped listening to it but it’s very enjoyable, and I highly recommend checking it out. Check back next week as someone else reviews another episode!