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Is it possible that July 1st, 2006 was the last of the 40 Main Canada Day parties?* This was just before I moved into what was then called mini-Main (also-known-as The Back 40), a small stand-alone house backing onto the parking lot that was shared by the legendary 40 Main house and a couple of others. I ended up living there for ten years before moving next door, where I am currently sitting in my backyard typing away on my little computer.
I sit out here all the time, staring at the home that used to house a notorious party-’til-tomorrow crew that I knew well and visited frequently. Back then 40 Main had a brown wooden shingle façade and a small forest in the backyard. The guys had built a roof over the back patio (specifically to provide a covered stage for Canada Day parties such as this one) and the place looked great in a beat-up, almost rustic sort of way.
That was back when there was an equally beat-up Sunoco gas station across the street. Now there’s a big, pricey condo there called The Glassworks. 40 Main now has ugly aluminium siding, the ‘forest’ was cleared several years ago for no good reason at all and is now a pile of overgrown ewwness. The surprisingly well-built roof the lads had erected above the back deck has also been dismantled for no observable good reason. The place has gone through about five or six different tenant-groupings (only one of which was appropriately friendly) and is now home for a nice young family that has absolutely no idea of the madness that used to regularly occur within their walls.
Anyways, on the Canada Day in question I had been booked to host the festivities so I showed up early, filled a red plastic cup with the first instalment of my day’s wages and surveyed the scene. The tin shed was home to about twenty-five kegs of beer from Steamwhistle brewery, a handful of rented porta-potties had been aligned to create a barrier to the street, and the area had been swept up and cleared in anticipation of a couple of hundred paying customers.
(I remember one of the guys asking me if I thought they had booked enough porta-potties. I replied that the math was very simple: would the porta-potties hold twenty-five kegs of Steamwhistle?)
Audience-wise, the pickins were sparse when Hux Pux started things off, and it’s fair to say that pretty much everyone in the crowd was a close personal friend and/or dating someone in the band. When they finished up I jumped onstage with a couple of jokes and probably a song or two before calling my good friend and former nero guitarist Dave Lauzon to the stage for one of his very early solo sets (or was this actually El Beejay, as it says on the ticket stub? El Beejay was Dave and nero drummer Jay McConnery, along with…was it Brendan Allistone? Who can say?**).
Unfortunately, I missed most of his set because as soon as I finished my introduction I scurried into the kitchen of 40 Main and began my running gag of the day, shaving off most of my beard and leaving myself with a bushy goatee when I introduced the next band, the great, great John Henry’s. After affording myself just a song or two from one of my favourite local bands I ducked back into the kitchen and trimmed the goatee down to a little jazz patch.
Clearly I was taking my hosting gig quite seriously. Not that anyone seemed to be noticing. I introduced Bullmoose and retreated back to the kitchen where I shaved my chin clean, leaving a thick biker moustache.
Then Lure came on and my moustache came off. Strangely, I don’t think it was until after I cut my long-ish hair down to a crewcut after introducing The Spades that most people started to catch on to my shaving shenanigans. I guess my witty banter and smattering of curtain-act novelty songs was distracting enough. Or it could have been that the audience had been numbed by the all-you-can-drink Steamwhistle beer.
Just like I did with The John Henry’s, I hung on as long as I could before leaving The Spades to escape again to the kitchen, where I shaved my head down to a Mohawk. After introducing the Real Gone Daddies I finished things off, leaving my former shaggy-haired, scraggle-bearded self completely clean-shaven and balder than Kojak when I called the last band of the day up to the makeshift stage. As planned, Vanderpark finished up around 9:30pm, giving people plenty of time to stagger over to the canal to watch the Parliament Hill fireworks display.
What wasn’t planned was the ambulance and police that showed up at the party around the same time that everyone started clearing out (coincidence?). Don’t worry, everyone was fine and nobody got into any trouble, but I do seem to recall someone who was wearing some sort of uniform suggesting that the era of the 40 Main Canada Day Party should come to a close, and it did.
Which was probably for the best. After all, how was I ever going to top my shaving gag?
*It wasn’t. A reliable source has corrected me into believing that the last 40 Main Canaday party was in fact the following year. Which means it was also in 2007 that the cops and paramedics showed up at the end of the party, not this one (which I suppose is a spoiler for those of you who read asterisks as-you-go).
This may also explain why I am dressed differently in the pictures, though the all-around weird facial hair tells me the photos are indeed from the same party***.
**No, wait…Larry was definitely in El Beejay; he was the “L”. And Jay was the J of course but hold on a second now…there ain’t no D or L left for Dave Lauzon. That’s because Brendan Allistone was the B in El Beejay! Brendan and Larry were in a bunch of bands together, like Pleather for example, and El Beejay (I think). Dave wasn’t in the band at all of course. This is so embarrassing.
***All the pics are definitely from the same party, different t-shirts bedamned, The proof is in the necklace. I don’t wear jewelry – particularly bracelets or necklaces – but I am wearing the same necklace in all of these photos. It was a handmade gift, and my appreciation for handmade gifts vastly outweighs my disinterest in necklaces.
Todd Man Out 