Page M12 August 1, 1990. This Week

HUMOR

Sea-to-sea bad taste after drinking
deeply from a lake called Meech

u noticed how
grim and grouchy
your fellow
Canucks are these

days? There’s a good
reason for it. We're all
living through a collective
“morning after.” Canada is
suffering a national hang-
Over.

We feel bad. Ernest
Hemingway once wrote some-
thing useful about feeling good
and feeling bad.“Whatis moral,”
he said “is what you feel good
after.” It follows that animmoral
act is something that makes you
feel lousy — which I believe is
the situation our country finds
itself in. Canadians have drunk
deeply at the Lake called Meech,
and we have a sea-to-sea bad
taste in our mouths.

Ah ah! Don’t turn that page. I
don’t intend to write about the
M-word. Too many Canadian
forests have already been
sacrificed to produce the paper
to describe that sleazy spectacle.
Suffice to say that when you've
got a Prime Minister who com-

pares statesmanship to a crap the temerity to appear in struck measaclass act, as does
shoot, that’s reason enough for television ads promoting the dapper, deft and deliciously

citizens to reach for the vegetarianism.

droll sports writer Trent Frayne.

Basie=-Blacle

By ARTHUR BLACK

Listerine.

But there’s more than
Meechophobia in Canada’s
hangover. We’ve witnessed
other un-classy acts. On our
TV’s we've watched cretinous
bigots shredding and burning
and trampling flags for the TV
cameras.

In both official languages.

Out in Alberta we’ve seen
other redneck yahoos smear and
deface the welcoming signs to
Consort, Alberta. Why? Because
country singer k.d. lang hails
from Consort. And k.d. has had

E

4

the pedal up and down.

wrote the book on.

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BHAT BEBE, DYKE reads the
splendidly witty message spray-
painted on the Welcome To Con-
sort sign. dj

Oh, make no mistake about it
— Canada is hurting. And over-
due for a class act or two.

So what is a Canadian class
act? Well, I've always thought
Gordie Howe qualified. Off ice,
that is. ’'ve never had the mis-
fortune to meet Mister Howe
cruising along the boards of a
hockey arena, which I'm told is
something like being
bludgeoned by a burlap sack full
of tire irons.

In politics, fd finger Dalton
Camp as a class act, ‘though I'd
never admit to it in downtown
Prince Albert. The Cape Breton
thrush Rita McNeil always

Of course in Frayne’s case, it
doesn’t hurt to be married to
writer June Callwood, one of the
classiest acts this country’s ever
dished up.

Wayne Gretzky ... the swim-
mer. Vicki Keith... Rick Hansen
... Elijah Harper. .. and that’s
about it for Canadian class acts
these days.

There's one other class act I
want to tell you about.

Kathleen Gooley doesn’t really
qualify for my short list, because
she’s not Canadian. She lives in
Connecticut. Last month. she
was going to marry a
psychologist at a fairly posh do.
They d rented a huge room at a
well-known catering hall. Then
they plunked down a little over
$6,000 just for the reception.

And that’s when the
psychologist got cold feet.

Hebacked out. Called the wed-
ding off. Panic stricken, broken-
hearted Kathleen Gooley called
to cancel the reception and get
her money refunded. No dice,
Ma’am. the caterers would only
refund a fraction of the fee.

Which is when Kathleen
Gooley unveiled her class act.
She went ahead with the recep-
tion. But instead of friends and
well-wishers and relatives and
would-be relatives, Kathleen in-
vited all the homeless people

from the greater Stamford area. @ —

So it was that on Kathleen
Gooley’s aborted wedding day,
150 outcasts and indigents came
to be sitting down at a feast of
stuffed chicken breast, string
beans amandine, cake and ice
cream.

So what, you say: A wedding
reception turned goodwill pot-
latch.

One of the guests put it into
perspective: “Even when you're
homeless, you try and maintain
some pride and dignity. At some-
thing like this, you can. This
woman did a wonderful thing.

‘She made us feel lixe real people

Only six thousand bucks?
Cheap at twice the price.

Mother of bride misses
her chance to get even

know why the mother of the
bride cries at the wedding. She’s
heartbroken because she has lost

her chance to get even.
In the pews behind her, friends are thinking
that she has been over-

to keep her sanity was to plot revenge. Some-
day, when the teenager fell off that dangerous
motorcycle, had her leg in a cast and was
immobilized, mother planned to play Wilf
Carter records at top volume all day long. No
chance of that now, so tears fall.

The bride acknowledges her

whelmed by memories. They
are right. She is recalling

mother’s presence with a lit-

tle smile. Her makeup is just

that this vision, gliding

gracefully up the aisle, was
once a three year old clump-
ing down the hall in
mother’s heels, wearing
mother’s pearls and hat.

The heels got scuffed and
were never the same again.
The pearls broke and rolled
all over the floor and down
the heating vent. “Poor
mommy,” she said, “Ill get
you more beads.”

Like-Thet

By JOAN MYLES

right. Lovely shade of
lipstick, after all those years
of pale pink and ghostly
white. Mother would like to
sit at the bride’s dressing
table, experimenting with all
the new makeup. It is only
fair, after the bride used
mother’s Avon to paint her
dolls.

The bride speaks her vows
in the same bell-like tones
she used when she an-

Twenty years have passed
and mother is still pearlless,
but the bride has a strand
glowing at her throat. Do you wonder that the
mother chokes back a sob?

“The music gets me every time,’ confides the
mother as she fumbles for a hanky.

It’s not just the wedding march. She’s remem-
bering that she paid for piano lessons for six
years and the bride could, if pressed, barely
manage to pick out the wedding march with
one finger. It is the lingering music of Ba, Ba
Black Sheep sung 10 times a day, with the Itsy,
Bitsy Spider sung as an encore. She used to
stuff tissue in her ears.

Mother went to camp with the Brownies and
got bug bitten while she taught them camp
songs. She was told “Mommy, you can sing at
my wedding.”

Later there was Meatball and Twisted Sister

played so loud and so often that the only way.

nounced at the Christmas
party that her mother had to
buy a new girdle because the
old one was too small. At the time, the child
was too young to be hit.

Mother .sobs aloud when she realizes that
mothers-of-the bride don’t make speeches at
the reception. She won't be able to embarrass
the kid in front of her new in-laws. She hopes
Uncle Joe makes a good job of it.

The little one she grew under her heart is
grown and going, without ever admitting that
she ate all the icing off the $20 cake Mom
bought for Dad’s 30th birthday.

It won’t happen to me. When it is my turn to
dress in beige lace and stand in the reception

a

line, they are going to have to pull me away ~

from the head table. I'll be stealing the sugar
roses off the cake. ie Se Se