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On March 9th, 1985 I went to my first laser show, Laser Drive at the McLaughlin Planetarium in Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum. My girlfriend and I had up and decided to leave New Brunswick and throw our hats into the ring in Toronto. We barely had a nickel to rub together and at first we were each living in our own gender-mandated hostels north of the city. I eventually got a job as a janitor in a car-rim factory in Newmarket and we rented a room together.
And though I put in a lot of hours we were still pretty consistently broke, but I’ve always been a sucker for big city entertainment so I scrimped and saved up enough spare cash for the two $4 tickets plus bus fare into the city.
The McLaughlin Planetarium (now closed) was a star-tracking facility that featured a round theatre with a domed roof onto which their large, bulbous, cutting edge (for the 1980’s) star-casting machine could project our galaxy from any angle at any point in time, past or future.
It was an amazing scientific machine that provided valuable information and stellar predictions to a legion of astronomers and other lab-coated professionals laden with cosmic questions and clipboards at the ready.
Plus, it made cool lasers.
And someone figured if they programmed these cool lasers and projected them onto the ceiling roughly in sync with loud rock music recorded on metal cassettes pumping out of state-of-the-art speakers that people would line up to see it, and of course they were right.
As primitive as they were, at the time lasers were still quite novel. Only bands with the most up-to-date lighting rigs had lasers back then, groups like Genesis or Triumph who were specifically known for their legendary light shows. The world was still a decade or more from packaging this 21st century wonder into a personal, handheld device perfect for tormenting cats or ruining arena light shows so ROM had no problem filling the planetarium night after night with customers eager to pay four dollars of their hard-earned money (each!) for the chance to watch the vague outline of David Lee Roth spinning to the music of Jump or the rough characterization of a pair of birds while When Doves Cry peals from the speakers.
The planetarium had shows called Heavy Laser, Laser Floyd, Laser Zeppelin…you get the idea. Laser Drive was more of a top-40 sort of thing, leaning less on the droopy-eyed set and keeping to a more family-friendly mix of CHUM-AM-style pop rock. I can’t recall the songs exactly (though Jump was certainly one of them); think Girls Just Want To Have Fun, Take On Me, Sunglasses At Night, that sort of thing.
I’d love to say that the young lady and I went out for a lovely dinner and a night of dancing after the laser show but I’m sure even something as humble as splitting a six pack of McNuggets would have stretched our financial capabilities, especially after a day of such reckless splurging.
My hours at work eventually increased and we ended up going to a few more laser shows and even a couple of concerts before finally packing it in and moving back to Moncton, but money was tight enough during our stay in Ontario that I only afforded myself the luxury of buying one, single six pack of beer in the entire year or more that we lived there. Pretty surprising for a hard-working seventeen-year-old who was renting his own place.
Todd Man Out 