I searched for many hours this afternoon for a simple wooden stool. Leon’s. Home Hardware. Birt’s. Large’s. None of them had anything close. Finally, with my tail between my legs, I went to Wal-Mart, Charlottetown’s newest urban sprawl, which I had heretofore managed to avoid patronizing. I needn’t have bothered. I actually believed that, if one could set aside the evil mega-corporate ugliness of Wal-Mart one would find excellent, friendly service. I imagined that I would gallop through the door and be greeted by a helpful senior greeter who would guide me lovingly to the stool section. The reality, however, was as bleak as Zellers: no senior at the door, no directions to the furniture section, no staff in the furniture section, no stools in the furniture section. So I left. Never to return. I finally found a stool, nice but expensive, at Bass River Chairs. I bought it.

My old colleague Mavis works at Bass River Chairs in the Charlottetown Mall. She’s great. Too bad they have such a horrible website!

I can’t imagine a better person to run a dairy than Tom Cullen. We ran into Tom and his wife Beth tonight while wandering the streets of downtown Charlottetown and this feeling was only confirmed.

We first met Tom and Beth several years ago at a dinner party, and I spent a large chunk of that evening questioning Tom about various and sundry aspects of the dairy world; he seemed surprising unannoyed by this and, indeed, seemed to revel in talking about his world.

At that point in history, and probably still, (and sensibly so) Tom was quite unacquainted with the Internet; and so at the time in the evening when the fiddles would have been taken out were we more culturally capable, out came the laptop and a connection to the Internet, and a challenge to Tom to name a topic that he wanted to know something about. “How about John Prine,” he said daringly, “try and find out what he’s up to these days.” (Tom is a fan, you see.)

And so off we went. We were lucky enough to quickly stumble upon the official John Prine website and, on a lark, we sent a note of greetings to John Prine’s manager. Although not completely converted by this experience, Tom seemed a little more open at least to seeing some possibility in all of this newfangledness. And even more so when, a few days later, an email arrived from John Prine’s manager sending greetings back, wishing us well, and updating us on John’s life.

In any case, Tom runs Purity Dairy just around the corner and up the street a bit from us in Charlottetown. Purity is one of the last independent dairys on the Island. In the milk business it’s awfully hard to differentiate your product from the other guy’s — it’s “just milk” after all — and so it’s really a business built on service and personality.

Tom knows this, and you can see and feel the result in everything that Purity does. In jaunty design of their new delivery truck. In their new recyclable packaging (pictured above). And in the simple fact that they’re all very nice people, genuinely interested in what they do.

It’s heartening to know that in this world where everyone is amalgamating and merging and comglomerating you can still operate a small-scale, family-run business.

Purity Dairy products are available in stores across Prince Edward Island, including Eddie’s Lunch. You can hear Tom and Beth’s son Timothy on Island Morning on CBC Prince Edward Island. Remember: Parents Prefer Purity Products.

I decided to email Saturday Night magazine and ask them how it was exactly that a picture of my letter to the editor envelope ended up gracing this week’s issue. I got back a friendly response from an Assistant to the Editor; she wrote, in part:

We choose the envelopes on a rather random aesthetic basis. Basically, as letters come in, we set aside envelopes we like and then may or may not use them in an issue. It’s not very scientific but hopefully it satisifies your curiosity.

Way back in May when we visited New York City for the New Yorker Festival, I visited Fountain Pen Hospital and purchased a lovely Waterman Hemisphere fountain pen. My first formal act with this pen upon returning to the Island was to write a letter to Diana Symonds, Editor of Saturday Night magazine, complimenting her on the fact that the relaunched magazine doesn’t use jumps (i.e. “Continued on Page 45…”). Lo and behold, an image of the envelope I sent my letter in — with address penned with my new Waterman — appears in the middle of this week’s Saturday Night. My letter itself, oddly enough, wasn’t included. I wonder: what did the envelope do for the 3 months it lay dormant in their offices before this weekend?

Yesterday we spent with my parents touring the Island. Above are pictures taken in Victoria and Cape Tryon; between the two we toured the Wyatt House in Summerside, had ice cream at the Frosty Treat in Kensington, and visited the Yankee Hill Cemetery.

We had a wonderful meal at La Cave in Halifax last night. The food and atmosphere both were unique. Highly recommended.

I requested a catalogue from the Bass River Chairs website last week (see below for a critique of same). Today the catalog arrived, and it included a “wooden nickel” which is a $5.00 credit on a $25.00 purchase (everyone gets this, form letter suggests — not just people who think their website is horrible). So that was nice. But, alas, the catalogue itself has the actual prices of items included on a separate photocopied sheet rather than beside the pictures of the items themselves in the body. While this is probably cheaper, and gives them the flexibility to raise and lower prices without reprinting the catalogue, it’s user-hostile, and makes it difficult to browse the catalogue easily. Sigh.

Here are the opening lines to the song But I do Love You, popularized by its presence in the movie Coyote Ugly:

I don’t like to be alone at night
And I don’t like to hear I’m wrong when I’m right
And I don’t like to have the rain on my shoe
But I do love you.

I don’t like your fish,
I don’t like them one bit
I don’t like the way they look at me
I don’t like the way the shit [all over the place]
But I sure, yes I sure, do love you.

A CBC “Off the Beaten Track” episode in which I talk about Showboat and the history of the song Old Man River. Originally aired on August 20, 2000 on CBC Radio’s Mainstreet program in Prince Edward Island.

Ol’ Man River

Introduction: A brief history of the song “Ol’ Man River,” along with two very different interpretations by Canadian artists Curtis Driedger and Jane Siberry.

Show Boat

• In 1926, a book called “Show Boat” by Edna Ferber was published – she was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan who had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1924 for her book So Big.
• Show Boat follows the life of Magnolia, daughter of the captain of the riverboat The Cotton Blossom.
• Magnolia marries a gambler, Gaylord Ravenal.
• As a result of his gambling, they separate
• Magnolia moves to Chicago where she takes up life in musical comedy.
• Their daughter follows her mother into show business, and eventually Magnolia and Gaylord are reunited years later at a performance of their now internationally famous daughter.
• Woven throughout this plot is the sub-plot concerning the lives of the black workers on the riverboats, and marriage of Magnolia’s best friend Julie La Verne and her husband, which runs afoul of the law because it is discovered that Julie is of mixed black and white heritage, and this is against the law.
• In 1927, collaborators Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II adapted the book into a Broadway show.
• Show Boat the musical was groundbreaking when it premiered in 1927, as musicals up to that point hadn’t had a coherent plot or songs tied to the action.
• Show Boat is said in many circles to mark the beginning of American musical theatre.
• Show Boat originally played Broadway in 1927, was adapted into a movie in 1936 and again in 1951, and was revived on Broadway in 1946, and several times thereafter, most famously in recent years in 1994 by Garth Drabinsky.

Ol’ Man River

• The song Ol’ Man River is sung by Joe, one of the riverboat workers, several times throughout the musical.
• Edna Ferber said in her autobiography: “…Jerome Kern appeared at my apartment late one afternoon with a strange look of quiet exultation in his eyes. He sat down at the piano. He didn’t play the piano particularly well and his singing voice, though true, was negligible. He played and sang ‘Ol’ Man River.’ The music mounted, mounted, and I give you my word my hair stood on end, the tears came to my eyes, I breathed like a heroine in a melodrama. This was great music. This was music that would outlast Jerome Kern’s day and mine. I have never heard it since without that emotional surge. When SHOW BOAT was revived at the Casino Theater in New York just four years after its original production at the Ziegfeld I saw a New York first-night audience, after Paul Robeson’s singing of ‘Ol’ Man River,’ shout and cheer and behave generally as I’ve never seen an audience behave in any theater in all my years of playgoing…”
• The song is most closely associated with Paul Robeson, who played Joe in the Broadway production of Show Boat and in the 1936 movie.
• In the original 1927 lyrics, it’s written:

I gits weary and sick of tryin’;
I’m tired of livin’ and scared of dyin’
And Ol’ man river, he just keeps rollin’ along.

• Robeson later revised the lyrics to:

I keeps laffin’ instead of cryin’
I must keep fightin’ until I’m dyin’
And Ol’ man river, he just keeps rollin’ along.

• Roberson, who had been a football star and then an actor, went on to a life as a political activist.

Canadian Singers on Ol’ Man River

• Back on June 1, 1990, I was program director at Trent Radio, a community radio station in Peterborough, Ontario.
• We organized an evening of performances by local musicians at the Market Hall in downtown Peterborough.
• One of the performers was Curtis Driedger, formerly of the infamous Toronto band the CeeDees.
• Here’s some of his performance from that night, recorded live and originally broadcast on Trent Radio…

[clip from “Curtis Dreidger live at Artspace”, recorded June 1, 1990; on cassette tape, queued]

• Toronto singer/songwriter Jane Siberry, who has, in recent years, been running her musical career largely through her own Sheeba Records website – www.sheeba.ca — is about to release an album of Celtic and American spirituals called “Hush.”
• From that album, here is her own rendition of “Ol’ Man River,” which you will immediately see is quite different from Curtis’

[clip from “Hush” by Jane Siberry, track 9]

What with our first child scheduled to be born on September 22, I though I should find out what the weather for that day will bring. According to the Almanac.com forecast, it will be “rain, then warm.” Not bad weather to be born into, I think.