1982 (29 page)

man speaking to talking hand

man intensely shaking like a vibrator

As you can see from this list, there was no shortage of physical gestures in David Byrne’s action repertoire. It was captivating. Wendy and I were now fully immersed in the Talking Heads experience. It felt like the whole stadium was moving under the influence of the music and sermons of David Byrne. The songs were magical. And the music was infectious. But well beyond the intoxicating sound emanating from the stage, it was clear that Talking Heads and Byrne were also about something else: theatre. Between the band members’ animated performance and David Byrne’s actions, it all felt like a real stage show. And this was not just any regular theatre … it was experimental theatre. I’d found another element to draw me to my new favourite band. And I’d found it with Wendy at my side.

9

“DO YOU REALLY WANT TO HURT ME” – CULTURE CLUB

W
endy and I were no longer simply at a rock concert. By the middle of the Talking Heads set in August of 1982, we were witnessing a theatrical stage show. And it was brilliant. Really. You might think this is misty-eyed nostalgia. It’s not. A band of New York City art school graduates had elevated the Police Picnic and the entire CNE Grandstand into a wild performance space.

The first rule of achieving cool is to position oneself in proximity to cool. And I had Wendy. Wendy had already known about Talking Heads. She’d been a fan. She had specifically mentioned them as the group to see when I first asked her to the Police Picnic as we stood in the second-floor hallway at Thornlea. That was back in June. I had been scared to talk to Wendy then. But I did. And here we were, two months later. I thought about how young I had been in June. I’d been naïve. I didn’t even know anything about Talking Heads back then, except for identifying them with that song at a party that sounded like they were saying “fuck” in it, even though they
weren’t really saying “fuck” in it. I hadn’t put it together that I’d seen the “Once in a Lifetime” video and been captivated. Talking Heads were more sophisticated than the standard band that might end up on a Grade 9 New Wave mix tape. I’d missed out on them until now. But Wendy had known all along. She’d been spot-on. That part was no surprise.

It made sense that Wendy would’ve already discovered David Byrne and his magical crew in Talking Heads. She was older. She was cool. She was the female Bowie. But with Talking Heads now onstage, I had little time for embarrassment about my former ignorance. I wanted ownership. I’d found my new favourite band and they validated my own curious mixture of interests. They were alternative but still popular. They were rhythmic but melodic. They were strange, but proof that strange didn’t mean bad. They were like Bowie. Especially David Byrne. Just like Bowie, David Byrne would have had trouble fitting in on any given day in Thornhill. He was artsy and odd. And Bowie was odd. And knowing this gave me confidence. Their existence meant I wasn’t weird. Or rather, that I might be weird, but that it was okay. Or that it was acceptable to want to be weird.

Wendy and I kept stealing glances at each other and smiling as Talking Heads powered through their set, gaining strength with each new song. It was as if we were sharing something very personal, even if we happened to be sharing it with forty-five thousand others as well. The dramatic flair of Talking Heads was tapping into our mutual interests. Theatre was something Wendy and I had in common. We were both involved in 213 at school. Theatre had become a big part of my life and had led to a challenging test of my identity only one month earlier.
I had experienced something of a true theatre debut. It hadn’t exactly been pretty. And I still wasn’t sure how much Wendy really knew.

MY TWO MAIN PASSIONS
in the early ’80s were music and theatre. Well, I also liked politics. And I liked Persian food. And history. And hockey. And girls. And maps. And soccer. But my main passions were music and theatre. It was the theatrical nature of much of New Wave music that brought those interests together. It’s no surprise that I gravitated towards it. And no one embodied that creative blend more than Bowie. Bowie, in his chameleonlike style as a performer, practically
was
theatre. But when Talking Heads hit the stage at the Police Picnic, I learned that David Byrne and his bandmates were ambassadors of theatre and much more, too. This wasn’t just rock. It was art.

In the summer of 1982, I celebrated my first foray into professional theatre. Okay, maybe that’s a bit of a lie. It was professional inasmuch as performing for fewer than seventyfive people a night in the outdoors and having only eight lines might be considered a professional theatre gig. But people had to pay to see the show. They had to pay five dollars. Or something. And when people pay for anything, it’s professional. Right? And anyway, no matter how professional you might’ve thought it was or it wasn’t, it was an important experience. I’d concluded that theatre was in my bones. And this was a major step up-market from performing the role of the pharaoh in
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
at Woodland Junior High in Grade 8. This was my real stage debut.

In the spring of ’82, my Grade 9 schooling became
devoted entirely to the Theatre Troupe program based out of Room 213. This elective was a full trimester of theatre and music that was part of Thornlea Secondary School’s fine-arts focus. It was quite revolutionary. Or at least we considered it to be. In Theatre Troupe, students spent all day every day doing acting exercises, reading plays, creating docudrama scenarios, and listening to New Wave music and Neil Young. We would do this for three months straight. Only this. In retrospect, it couldn’t be anything but a formative experience.

The lights were kept low in 213. Even in the morning, when students first arrived. You might wonder why. But this was a no-brainer. Dim lighting was theatrical and demonstrated depth. In Theatre Troupe, each day was an adventure in drama and introspection. Everyone was very serious and eager to illustrate their passion. Between workshops and rehearsals, important things would be muttered amongst the Theatre Troupe students. Things like, “The world is totally fucked.” This was a necessary demonstration of emoting, because the inhabitants of 213 were so artistic. And as well, the students were all very deep and cared a great deal about the world. That is, everyone cared about the world except when they didn’t care about the world because things were just too heavy and “totally fucked” to spend time caring about it.

Also, as part of a worldly outlook in 1982, everyone in 213 hated Thatcher and Reagan. It was important to hate them. I wasn’t entirely sure why. Neither of them was Canadian. But I knew that cool 213 students said Thatcher and Reagan had contributed to the world being fucked. So we all hated them. This was obligatory. On a personal level, I did remember that Margaret Thatcher had taken the milk away from school-children
when I was a little kid in England. One year in the ’70s, we arrived at school to find there was no more free milk, which had been a staple of English education. Then everyone started saying, “Thatcher took our milk away!” I was unsure how this one woman had single-handedly taken all the milk. And I may also have thought her first name was Thatcher. But as I grew older, I understood that she’d taken our milk away because she was a Conservative. That’s what Conservatives in Britain did. I knew she was not very nice to school students. And there was no more free milk. And she probably wouldn’t have liked the artsy types who hated her in 213.

One other essential tenet of the Theatre Troupe experience was sex. That came with the territory, too. Sexual cross-pollination seemed to be part of the burden of being a dedicated theatre student in 213. This was not mandated by the teachers, of course, but developed quite naturally amongst those enrolled in the program. Almost all of the students dutifully obliged in the sex part. I was a novice in this area, but eager to learn. The truth was, I was generally too intimidated to act on anything with the older Troupe members. Not yet. That was all way beyond me at this point.

Despite my insecurities and confusion, I knew I wanted to be part of the Thornlea theatre scene. I knew music and theatre were my passions. And that Troupe was cool. And I knew that my sister had done theatre, and she was cool. And so I had angled to convince my parents to let me enroll in Theatre Troupe by getting through the full list of my obligatory math and science and history course requirements in the first two-thirds of the school year. Despite covering the educational bases, I knew my father would still be unhappy with
the academic diversion of a full trimester of only theatre and music. He’d made his position clear. But I remained resolute. My father never really understood Theatre Troupe.

“You are going to be playing weeth only thees acting all day?” he said.

“It’s more than that, Dad. We’re learning about the world and life and struggles. We’re doing docudramas, too.” My replies were generally delivered in a patronizing tone. That was important. It demonstrated that I was ridiculing his mistaken ideas.

“The world? You are learning all of thees by doing thees acting?”

My father was never convinced.

You see, to my father, Theatre Troupe sounded unproductive and even destructive. My sister had done theatre at Thornlea, and she had managed to be a brilliant academic student in addition to her foray into fine arts. But my father still didn’t get it. And he had been much harder on her when it came to 213. She had broken ground by mounting the first artsy insurrection in the Ghomeshi family. By the time I was angling for acting roles, my father had resigned himself to accepting it, but he still wasn’t very pleased. In his eyes, Theatre Troupe was tantamount to kids spending their school days in a playground or the mall. It was heretical. This was not how strong vocational futures were built for middle-class Iranian boys. But he was wrong. Theatre Troupe was not akin to hanging out in a playground. It was more about
imagining
hanging out in a playground (or maybe the mall). I was going to be an actor.

The thing is, my father simply wasn’t as deep as the introspective theatre students of 213. Theatre Troupe students
understood hardship and worried about the world being fucked, and also what to wear when worrying about the world being fucked. Oh sure, my father may have gone through some tough times himself. He may have lost his own dad at fifteen and raised his six younger siblings with my grandmother in Iran. He may have single-handedly carried on the family business while putting himself through school and university in Tehran. He may have struggled to become a top engineer and make a good life with his wife and kids in England and then Canada, where he had a heavy accent and was sometimes treated with disdain. He may have lived through all of that. But what did he know about real hardship? He didn’t understand a difficult life the way middle-class teenage theatre students at Thornlea did. We had perspective. And we had songs by the Cure. And we listened to music by bands that didn’t smile. We knew no one had it as tough as us. Maybe that’s what heavy New Wave eyeliner ultimately meant: life is hard.

Finally, my father and my mother reluctantly agreed to let me enter the Theatre Troupe program.

Mind you, that was not the end of the debate about my future career with my parents. It took a couple more decades for my father to truly accept my artistic interests. In university, I formed a band with Murray and Mike Ford and Dave Matheson, also former Thornlea theatre students. We called ourselves Moxy Früvous and started out as street buskers, performing in zany costumes. We would put on mini-shows on street corners and pass a hat around for tips, in the tradition of jugglers or fire-breathers. I would try to explain the concept to my father.

“Dad, it’s called busking. It’s street performance. There is a
long and distinguished tradition of busking around the world. People love buskers. We’re making art!”

“Yes,” my father replied. “We have a name for thees in Iran as well. Eet is called begging.”

You see, my parents really wanted me to be a doctor or an engineer. Don’t blame them. It’s not their fault. It’s in the manual for immigrant Persian parents. It took many years for my mother and father to accept that such vocational aspirations would not be realized when it came to their son. It was near devastating for them. Middle-class Iranians believe there is nothing more honourable than for their kids to become engineers. Somewhere, sometime back in the old country, there was a decree that engineering was the noble profession. I can’t tell you when this happened. I wasn’t there. But I know many brown families that seem to adhere to the same handbook.