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Back when I was seventeen, my girlfriend and I rented a little room in Newmarket in a house that we shared with our landlord John and his wife, his (not hers) son Mike and Mike’s uncle Sidney. Mike and Uncle Sidney were always together. Buoyed by our experiences seeing a couple of laser shows at the McLaughlin Planetarium we decided to go again, and this time Mike and his uncle came with us.
We took public transportation to get into downtown Toronto. From our house it was a short walk to the Newmarket local bus stop. That bus looped up to the Go Bus station behind the Upper Canada Mall where after an indeterminate wait a Go Bus could be taken to Finch Station on the TTC line. From there a bit of commuter savvy was all you needed to get anywhere in the city; jump on the subway to head south or on one of a thousand busses to travel east or west.
This was a route I had become very, very familiar with. It was my twice-a-day ritual; I left the house every morning at 5:30 so I could be at work in downtown Toronto by 8am and after a variable amount of hours moving furniture I’d hop the busses home for another two or more hours to get back to Newmarket.
As laborious as they were, it was these daily treks to employment that afforded me the luxury of this excursion to the Planetarium, and I lived it up! I remember splurging for a McChicken sandwich before we went in to the show. McChicken’s had been around for just a year or two and I had only tried them a few times (I hope it goes without saying that I had like no money back then, and $2.35 for a McChicken was a major decision, for realz). Mike and Sidney warned me not to order it, they told me it was going to taste like cardboard. Power of suggestion or not, that McChicken sandwich did indeed taste like cardboard to me, and in a shocking act of financial flippancy I threw the thing in the garbage, a move very much out of character for me.
I remember waiting to get in and chatting incessantly to the people around us in line. I was a huge over-talker back then and I was on fire, excited as I was to be down in the city with Uncle Sid for a Saturday night on the town with a twenty dollar bill burning a hole in my pocket.
Once we got inside we settled into the comfortable reclining chairs that circled the impressive star-projection device. As we lay there staring at the domed ceiling the lights went down revealing a stunning star array above us. The depth perception was so realistic it looked like the roof had just disappeared and we were staring at the actual sky.
Then the technicians showed off their celestial toy, shifting the Milky Way from one position to another, alternating both the perspective and the millennium of the star-scape with the most cutting edge technology available in the mid-80’s.
Soon the scientists put away their favourite toy and got on with the show that the predominantly long-haired, jean-jacket wearing rocker crowd (of which I was a proud member) had come for: ninety minutes of rudimentary straight-line laser patterns accompanied by popular hard rock hits of the day pumped through crispy loudspeakers.
And that’s what we got. AC/DC, Van Halen, Mötley Crüe, KISS and more, all of it intensified by flashing graphics reminiscent of such video game hits as Battlezone and Death Race 2000, and I was jaw-on-the-floor amazed. When the show ended I laid there stunned.
Woken from my reverie, soon enough we found ourselves commuting home. Our ride north coincided with the ending of a Ronnie James Dio concert at Maple Leaf Gardens and the subway was packed with headbangers even more amped up on ’80’s metal than we were. At Finch Station about a hundred of us packed into the final bus headed north; I mean this bus was packed.
The bus ended up stopping in Richmond Hill where we were to be divided up onto two busses to take care of the crazy overflow. The driver got out to wait for the other bus, leaving a young, rebellious crowd waiting on the idling bus.
My last memory of the evening occurred on that driverless bus. The driver poked his head in and told us we’d have to wait a while. There was a burst of grumbles and murmuring that dwindled to silence.
I don’t know what came over me, but in that vacuum of patient, Canadian quiet I piped up loud enough for all to hear.
”So, does anybody know how to drive a bus?”
Thank goodness my words called the bluff of youthful rebellion that was packed in all around me. After a quick uproar we all went back to politely waiting for the second bus to arrive.
What a trip that was.
Todd Man Out 