Angels/Excerpt: Storm Meets His Future Mother-in-Law
Storm recalls that initial meeting with Janeen with amusement, although at the time he found the encounter to be anything but amusing. It was before he and Ali began cohabitating. One night he was at Ali’s cramped basement apartment in Swansea when Janeen unexpectedly dropped in. Rather, she entered the scene, Stage Right as it were, found her mark in what served as the living room, stood directly beside Storm, who had risen to introduce himself, and grasped his right hand between her hands. The hair. Good god, it was all Storm could do to rally his thoughts to rise above the hair. Flaming orange, untamed and piled high, as if it had been randomly styled by near lethal jolts of electricity.
"It's the latest 'windblown look', straight out of New York fashion magazines," she informed, answering the obvious but unasked question.
"A little too much wind, a little too blown," Ali opined.
Ignoring her daughter's barb, Janeen queried Storm in an affected, amplified voice. As she questioned him, her gaze intensified until she appeared to be staring right through him. Ali would later sheepishly explain her mother's tendency to play scenes in everyday life as though performing on stage. Naturally she did not simply speak to the actor opposite her, she addressed the entire audience. Projecting, always projecting.
"I'm assuming that you are the new beau," she said. "I've been versed, but I cannot for the life of me recall what it is that you do."
"I'm a columnist for the..." Before he could finish his sentence, Janeen interjected, grandly: "I'm a Thespian, a direct descendant of Thespis."
Storm glanced at Ali, his expression questioning: Who the hell is this woman? Seriously, who speaks like this? He was unable to discern whether Ali was smirking or cringing into her hand, which was cupped over her mouth. Thoughts tumbled into his head: had this woman been drinking? Was she high? What was he getting himself into? Considering his intense feelings for Ali, he knew that he had no choice but to cling to the hope that in the intricate design of genetic wiring, dottiness skips a generation. He turned back to his future mother-in-law.
"A Thespian," she repeated. “A daughter of Thespis."
In retrospect, Storm would think that perhaps this was one of the keys to unlocking Janeen. Unmarried -- unapologetically unmarried -- she held numerous odd jobs over the years. At various times she was a seamstress, a saleswoman (peddling aphrodisiacs, thinly disguised as "restoratives", door-to-door to lonely and, it goes without saying, concupiscent housewives), and even a bank teller, a vocation that lasted precisely three days, the number of shifts it took her male companion at the time to repeatedly visit her, case the joint, and then rob it (he was subsequently caught and she, an “unwitting accomplice,” was eventually exonerated).
Nevertheless, she never thought of herself as a common seamstress or a lowly product peddler, or a teller, but, rather, as an actress, a potential leading lady of the screen and stage (she never discriminated between the two) whose star had been inexplicably, unjustly overlooked. An actress simply mastering roles: seamstress, sales, teller, unwitting accomplice.
"A woman of theater. A true tragedienne," she said to Storm. From prior conversations with Ali, Storm knew it to be true, knew that Janeen had indeed performed for -- or starred in, to hear her version of events -- more Little Theater troupes in more small towns than either she or Ali could possibly recall.
In the early 1960s, she briefly resided in Toronto where she found the local theater scene to be a hard nut to crack. At the time there were only a handful of professional theaters in the entire sprawling metropolis. In subsequent return moves to Toronto -- the precise timing and duration of which have been lost in time (Ali and Janeen would spend considerable time debating to no firm conclusion precisely when they had been where, and for how long) -- she found the city blossoming into the third-largest theater center in the English-speaking world, behind only London and New York, with some two-hundred professional theater and dance companies performing nightly in nearly one-hundred venues.
By then there was ample work to be had in the theater.
"If you had a pulse, a voice, and the ability to memorize, you could find work,” Janeen would note. Granted, the pay was niggardly, if not outright insulting, particularly for the sort of gigs she tended to land. Chiefly secondary roles, performed primarily in the Annex Neighborhood and Bathurst Strip, a theater district that offered what were deemed to be "fringe and alternative productions.” Or "pretentious, obscure drivel," depending on whose opinion was sought and valued.
"It's true that I was, for the most part, denied by politics, pretensions, and petty jealousies the opportunities of the Downtown Theater District, or the East End Theater. They said, unjustly, that I was 'difficult'. Well, poo on them. I think my body of work speaks for itself.... Loudly. Proudly. Like a peacock's brilliant plumage. Like… oh rot, I’m fresh out of analogies. Regardless, in repertory, one summer up north in cottage country, Huntsville or Gravenhurst or some Port something-or-other backwater, I accomplished a Tennessee Williams' double bill. In one night, I played Maggie Pollitt in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, all palpable sensuality and butterfly neuroses, and Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, all delicate and mothlike precisely as Williams envisioned, only better... Over the course of my career on the boards, I played Juliet innumerable times... Heavens, I even had the theatrical cojones to play Romeo on one occasion, in a pinch..."
"You'll have to excuse my mother," Ali said. "She has an obvious flair for the dramatic and, apparently, a weakness for gin. By the way, the reason she and her theatrical cojones had to play Romeo in a pinch, even though she had originally been cast in some forgettable bit part, was because in dress rehearsals she stumbled and accidentally blind-sided the real Romeo, knocking him clear off the stage and out of fair Verona. Janeen was the only thespian around who knew all his lines by heart so, for one night while the poor man recuperated from his concussion, she was it. Romeo Montague."
"Oh poof! He was far too delicate a man to have been cast as Romeo in the first place. A Nancy-boy who couldn't stand up on his own two feet and, my, my, what a bleeder... And, yes, dutiful daughter of mine, I will have a gin, since you're up and pouring." As Ali went to mix drinks, Janeen continued.
"I played Jo March in Little Women and gave a performance that was sinfully delicious. Critics said that my body language was poetic and my face, and I quote, was 'a refulgent beacon of theatrical expression.' They understated. I made Louisa May Alcott bolt upright in her grave and express regret at not having written a sequel... I was that good!"
"Let me revise my last statement to read that my mother has an apparent weakness for both gin and hyperbole," Ali called out. Back in the room, the daughter then refreshed her mother's selective recall, reminding her that the ill-fated production in question closed in under two weeks, and if the ghost of Louisa May Alcott was doing any bolting it was doubtlessly to distance herself from the whole fiasco.
"All good plays alienate some part of the audience in some way," Janeen retorted, before dismissing Ali with a wave of her hand and an unspoken, but obviously implied: "Oh, poof."
Over the years, mother and daughter repeatedly relocated. Ali would insist that regardless of how often they moved, or where they resided, while she was growing up there was always an abundance of love and guidance and even a sense of security and home. Nevertheless, there was no denying that it was an odd, unstructured, nomadic existence, leaving infinite indelible impressions, but planting no roots.
Frequently they found themselves but one slippery step ahead of creditors. In matters of personal finance, Janeen was bankrupt. She had a knack, which she would slyly spin as being a "a gift,” for squandering every cent of her mystery money and her own earnings, oftentimes in advance of her actually being in receipt of that income. Impulsive, compulsive, she loved to shop, which she considered a genus of hunting, and she loved to purchase, which she likened to the kill. For Janeen Reynolds there was no such thing as window shopping, or, heaven forbid, placing an item on layaway. When she saw something, she liked she simply had to have it now, regardless of the status of her bank account, which more often than not was on life support.
"Fortunately for the Reynolds," she was fond of saying, "I have close friends high up in the banking industry."
“You dated a branch manager in some rustic outback,” Ali would remind, “for one or two dates, about one-hundred years ago. Not exactly close friends, or ‘high ups.” Facts for which she was mercilessly, ‘oh poofed’.
Other times mother and daughter were but one slippery step ahead of the law. Janeen was never discerning when it came to the character of the characters with whom she associated. For every upstanding man the likes of Pierre Elliot Trudeau there were two or three Wayne (Knuckles) Knight. She was hopelessly addicted to the adrenaline rush and she was not particular if that rush came from an ephemeral association with Frank You Know Who, or a slightly more protracted relationship with the likes of the infamous Knight, currently serving the second half of his quarter-century stint in Kingston Penitentiary for armed robbery, resisting arrest, and for ignominiously removing the pinky finger of his arresting police officer with his notoriously sharp, beaver-like teeth.
And the direct descendant of Thespis' greatest role, which she played time and time again, until her precocious daughter outgrew her part and made the whole overblown production superfluous, was the role of the brave, optimistic and comforting mother.
"Everything's going to be all right," she would say, with wrenching conviction that she was not particularly feeling. "Let's just get our things packed. We need to be out of here.”
“When?”
“Yesterday, if not sooner."
"Why? I don't understand. I've made friends here, you know. I finally have teachers who actually know my name. Mr. Meadows, the school librarian, lets me have first crack at the new books that come in. Mr. Gillespie says I'm a natural and wants me on his cross-country team..."
"It's like the milk the other day, sweetie. Life here has passed its prime. It's gone sour. Now be a dear and pack up..."
By nature, and necessity, thespians are chameleons. The day they allow themselves to be pigeonholed is the day they are typecast. Condemned to the hell that is playing the same role over and over and over.
