He won’t know what hit him or where the car came from. When shoppers come running, he won’t see too clearly who look on him kindly to soften the blow.
In the half-minute left he’ll drop down through his years to revisit his genesis, down a dark street to a gel-lighted premises, sit himself down in a mouth-open attitude.
Shushed by a shadow he’ll sit and be good and he’ll see a one-acter—not bad, more than fair—and his dream will kick back to his twenty-first year when sooner than some he rose to his crest; yes he didn’t do badly we clearly attest.
And with whatever time in his suitable prime that he had on his timepiece in rhythm and rhyme, he made himself proud in his many personas for praisers and panners with old fading manners while playing the crowd.
And now send him off to his green room aloft. Have him look for a place with a lotta dead actors mouthing their lines who will mean him no harm. He’ll be scared to bejesus he’ll have to audition while bearing contrition as long as his arm.
Have him look for a place with a lotta dead actors learnin’ their words from plays full of morals—some heroes, some meanies with make-believe swords—and they’ll hear his old stories as stale as the hills—they might just as well—how he’d had some success since the time they were there but it wasn’t the same as it was with your peers when a story had heart in a sensitive year, and compassion, and yes, even devil-may-care, before he, let us say, kinda called it a day from a broadside on Bloor not far from the Bay.
GORDON PINSENT 