Opening I: Speak Memory [v1]

Start as close to the end as possible

Looking through old birthday cards, and came across one from Sanjida - she wrote 4 pages of memories from high school and University! Lovely to relive that. We still keep in touch, though not with such lengthy cards! #lifelongfriends” - Dorothy's Facebook, April 22, 2022

“Repeat stuff. Repeat stuff. Repeat stuff. Repeat stuff. Repeat stuff. Repeat stuff.”

-Bo Burnham

“I really appreciated "visiting" the JJNC for the re-opening ceremony today, and showing it off to Dan and my family. Technology can do so much these days!” - Dorothy's Facebook status, April 13, 2022

I remember the moment I knew I loved Dorothy. We were driving through the town of Calmar on the way back from her mom's cabin near Pigeon Lake. The Alberta sky was cloudless and blue and wide open. Weezer's ‘Africa.’ played on the radio. She  glanced over and smiled and my heart filled with light and warmth. I curled my hand around hers and we looked out the windshield together at a road which stretched straight and true into the future. 

Lol. Just kidding.

I don't remember falling in love with Dorothy. There might not have been a single moment. My entry into love was less a falling and more a gradual immersion, a slow motion baptism. Love took over my body the way hope spreads through a prison camp or the way cancer spread through hers…cell by cell. Falling in love wasn’t one moment, but many, iindividually unremarkable abacus beads  sliding together on the same thin string to add up to something much larger.

It was kind of boring.

It was the most sublime boredom I've ever known

***

April 25, 2023. Contest night. The Comic Strip's 16th Funniest Person With A Day Job.

The host, a disinterested DJ for a local radio station, reads my info directly from a piece of paper.

“This next guy is…that can't be right. His day job is…widower?” The host shakes his head, confused. “Anyway, here’s Dan Brodribb.”

I take the stage.

I don’t know how to start.

I say the first thing that enters my mind.

“So…I'm single…”

The crowd roars with laughter.

To this day, it's one of the best openings I've ever done.

***

You may never have heard of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, but it’s a fine place. Not on the too-hot days when the air is choked with wildfire smoke. And certainly not on days when it is dark and freezing, when snow is blowing and the wind flays flesh and cars barely creep along–assuming they start at all–tires spinning beneath  going-nowhere vehicles, or worse, brake-locked beneath uncontrollably sliding ones, steel skating through intersections heedless of traffic light color or feet on brakes.

But sometimes…sometimes it's perfect.

Cities aren't monoliths. They're an interweaving of communities, interdependent, but often invisible to each other. Some of these ecosystems are everywhere, touching almost everybody; others are mostly solitary. Some are small, some are large, some shrink and sell depending on the time of year: the local professional hockey team, the Oilers, is little more than organization staff and diehard followers throughout the summer, but swells during the playoffs to touch nearly every business in the city. Even non-hockey fans are wearing Oilers caps and jerseys, while hockey haters are involuntarily drawn into the mix, forced to plan around games.

Because urban centres don't occur naturally, it's easy to forget how much nature they contain. Humans of course–hundreds of thousands of little lives kept apart by time, space or economic and demographics, going on behind apartment walls and townhouse doors, playing out in hospitals and office towers, banks and strip mall salons, or out on the streets and transit centres as addicts and the mentally ill carve lives out of a place that feels as though it were built for everybody except them.

But there are others. Trees and plants. Ants and wasps and spiders. Squirrels. I frequently see rabbits chasing each other through the park. The occasional coyote in the river valley.

And so many birds.

Gulls in a grocery store parking lot. Crows and magpies in the trees. Ducks and geese in the park ponds and on the river. And other ones. For me, mostly background noise, indistinguishable chirps and tiny feathered balls of brown and grey.

Dorothy would know them all. 

Birds were her specialty: Birds and bugs and small things. We’d walk to Paul Kane Park and she'd look at the places where weeds met water, scanning for water striders in the cattails.

There are less than a hundred active stand-up comedians in Edmonton. Maybe even fewer than seventy-five. Once you get down to fifty it might be more debatable…what counts as active?...but in an urban area of a million and a half people, fifty or seventy five or even a hundred isn't a lot.

There's one more now, and it's my friend Jason's fault.

 ***

Here's everything I know about writing jokes.

1. Put the funny part at the end.

2. Start as close to the end as possible.

Buddhism doesn't fuck with endings. Or beginnings for that matter.  When I sit to write about the intersection of Dorothy's life and mine I get what they're talking about. The word circling my head is beginninglessness: It's almost too much to deal with. Every decision you make affects every facet of every other thing, and in the end, you're completely alone with it all.

My memories aren't a story. They're cars in long term parking, dim rows of occupied and empty spaces. They're the details of  Dorothy's condo unbound by beginning and end, connected instead by their relationship to each other.

They're the rainforest light switch cover and puppy dog tail towel hooks on the back of the bathroom door. They're the  guest bedroom's giant desk and shelves of camping equipment and the laundry drying rack. They're her striped apron and her green spatula–be a good cookie. 

 They're her jewelry board by the bedroom sink, covered with earrings and name tags from various jobs and volunteer organizations.

They're a very large handmade doll on a very small, child-sized wood and wicker chair next to the frog humidifier under her bedroom window.

They're her clothes in the walk in closet. A purple top. Her black open front sweater.  A shirt with raccoons wearing bow ties. One t-shirt with a dinosaur on it, another marking her participation in a zombie run. Her Born to be Wild pyjamas: pink top, olive green bottoms decorated with animals.

They're the wrappers from Ricola cough drops. Originally confined to the bedside table, they spread through her space.like an occupying army, colonizing her purse, her car, her bedsheets and couch cushions. 

They're a blue pillow featuring a puppy and the words ‘DK, Lets Play!’

Towards the end I'll bring that pillow to her in act of spontaneity, hoping to give her a little piece of home. On the walk to the hospice I'll pass some mostly retired comedian friends having brunch on a patio: Welly Santos and Shawn Gramiak and  Nathan Semenyna and James Ross. 

I haven't seen them in years. I catch up for twenty minutes before walking to the hospice carrying the pillow and a bag of things from the condo.

Did that trigger the idea of returning to comedy? Is that the part closest to the end? 

There are two parts to a joke. There's the funny part, and there's the part that makes the funny part possible.

Everything works like this.

Set up and playoffs. Tension and release. Parasympathetic and sympathetic. The principle--Chekov’s phaser–stays the same.

Breathing out needs breathing in.

Music builds and resolves in chord cadences or bass drops. The burlesque dancer draws attention to an article of clothing until we demand its removal. The wrestler takes his time looking under the ring for the audience to wonder what it is. When he pulls out the chair and holds it aloft, the audience can anticipate whats going to happen. Sometimes relief comes when he uses it…or in a stunning reversal has it used against him.

Performance is about satisfying desire... hopefully without anyone noticing how sneakily we implanted that desire in the first place.

The Buddha would not approve.

There are two parts to a joke, and while the funny part gets the glory, its the part before that where the sorcery happens. The real magic is over long before the audience even realizes the trick is happening.

Jokes live where surprise meets recognition. It's the unexpected, inevitable in hindsight. It's the obvious, surprising by its invisibility in open view. The elephant has always been in the room.

I love elephants.

But I didn't know I loved them until Dorothy reminded me they existed.

Start as close to the end as possible.

I don't want to talk about the end. There's no funny part there, not that I can see.

The sun is coming through my basement suite window.

I hear birds.

I'm alone with it all, but I'm not by myself. The beginninglessness makes writing difficult but loneliness impossible. She's still here, she's still everywhere, all through time,  and so is everyone and everything else.

***

Jason and I met as Distress Line volunteers in the mid-2000s. I joined his crew of bar hopping friends, and sometimes he joined mine. Late nights at clubs turned to early afternoon barbecues as barhopping turned into pairing off and children. The same pandemic that brought Dorothy and I closer triggered the end of his relationship. Both newly single–me through death, Jason through divorce–we ended up spending more time together bonding over sports and social commentary.

It was his idea to watch some local comedy. He was the one who found River City Revival and their Rough Cut Monday night comedy night.

We checked it out. We were the only two audience members there. There were twelve comedians.

I didn't intend to go onstage.

I was very clear about that.

I’m done with comedy, I told Jason, and many others, many times. That door is closed, and I’m at peace with that.

I was just coming  to watch.

***

Edmonton is not New York or Los Angeles. It's not even Vancouver and Toronto. A person serious about making it in show biz would have to go elsewhere, but to me the idea of leaving has never really felt possible. This is where I am.  

And through sheer dumb fortunate karmic circumstances, where I am is one of Canada's best comedy cities, thanks to a low cost of living and lots of shows. Its a small enough community that it's easy to get to know other comics, but there’s also not enough industry to fight over. There is stage time enough for everyone, and since stage tome is comedy's lifeblood, having an abundance of it reduces backstabbing and bitterness. There are road gigs like the Great Northern Casino in Grande Prairie, four hours north. Some of these shows ask comics to do longer amounts of time, which gives them  the opportunity to develop more material. In addition to bar and corporate shows, there are three comedy clubs: Canada's largest mall, West Edmonton mall houses the Comic Strip. Yuk Yuks is in a casino by the railyard in the Northeast, the remains of a once mighty comedy empire that stretched across the country. Near Mill Woods hidden in a bowling alley, the Comedy Factory and its owner are still holding on. 

The money sucks, but that’s true everywhere. The prospect of sustained financial stability in stand-up–bad to begin with–has gotten worse. But Edmonton remains one of the better areas to find paid work.

Standup comedy is a cheap hobby, but an expensive career.

Fortunately, I'm not looking to make a living at it, although my heart aches for those who are.

And so now I'm up all night writing jokes.

Now I'm bombing at Revival with its Nirvana poster, and bombing at Blakbar, with its dinosaur skull above the bar and cool cult movies on the TV and 90s metal–Sevendust and Tool and Load-era Metallica, and bombing at the comic-heavy, audience-light  Grindstone with its stacks of decorative VHS movies to the left of the bistro stage.

Now I'm thinking of my set walking across the bridge to and from shows. I'm talking to Dorothy as I walk past the hospice on the way to or from the bridge that will take across the river to Whyte Avenue. I’m watching Leo Langford or Will Hannigan headline Underdog and thinking, I will never be that good.

I’m entering draws, milling shoulder to shoulder with other comedy hopefuls as I write my name on hand-torn scraps of paper from a bartop receipt printer, dropping it into an empty water pitcher or pint glass, and hoping for the best.

“It's all in the fold,” Harshaun Gill tells me, a gangly, two-months-in comedy veteran passing on wisdom, as he contorts his slip of paper in a series of elaborate creases.  

 I nod, thinking, I bet Ryan Short told him that. Nobody knows me so I occasionally hear second hand stories from a past that I was actually there for. It makes me feel like my own grandpaw.

Progress is slow and painful. Never mind television. The idea of even being asked to be the opener at the Grande Prairie show seems far away

It feels good.

It feels bad.

It feels like purpose.

***

Dorothy was born and raised in Edmonton; I arrived from Ottawa when I was two. We grew up in the same city, but in separate worlds. Dorothy's childhood unspooled in Lendrum, on the South Side, just a few blocks from where my sister lives now; she went to the same schools as my nephews. My life has mostly played out across a crooked barbell shaped patch of the northwest with the older neighbourhoods of St. Albert on one end and the west central section of Edmonton on the other, linked by the thin tight line of St. Albert Trail. By the time we met,  we were livingl less than ten blocks apart.

Still we knew two different versions of the same city. Hers was ski-trails and symphonies, museums and zoos, nature centres, and the river valley, North America's longest stretch of urban parkland;  mine was back alleys, bars, and bus stops. She was a back country mouse; I was an urban rat. She worked at a zoo; my life was a circus.

As a man with a weakness for bad girls, I'm used to drama. My relationship with Dorothy was quieter. Our love story was all love, no story.

Narratives need drama. But introducing those elements goes against the core of what made Dorothy and me work in the first place. 

From a writing perspective, that's a problem.

How do you dramatize a relationship built on no drama?

***

There are a million and a half people in the Edmonton metropolitan area, making it the northernmost million-plus population centre in North America. As far as the comedy community is concerned,  all but sixty or so of those people may as well not exist. The world of local comedy is small but intense. From the inside you'd think these dramas involving an immeasurably small fraction of a percentage point are the biggest and most important thing in the world. While the city goes about its business, looking to the future, learning from the past,  we are bobbing on a sea of now: who’s beefing, who's bombing, who's being booked. 

Unlike pro wrestling, which is deeply rooted in its own past, stand up comedy has little sense of its own history. And why should it? Comedy lives in the immediate moment. Anything that isn't now is immaterial.

We exist in an endless, masticating present, a roiling churn of comics starting and stopping, moving away and returning, shows changing hands, venues opening and closing their doors.  Individual careers peak, plateau, or plunge constantly rewriting a landscape that is always changing but never different.

Standup comedy is a descent into the depths of an ocean, drowning, coming up for air, and plunging underwater again. Going deeper means less competition, but also more pressure. Survival isn't about swimming; it's about how long you can hold your breath.

So many come and go and so few are remembered.

I suppose that’s true of everything.

***

I began this story onstage, lonely and isolated and grieving. In doing so, I made a promise.

A first step towards fulfilling that promise would be to flash back to happier times. I need to connect you to Dorothy and me. I need you to understand what I've lost and how it motivates my character. And it needs to tickle your brain enough to keep you reading.

If my first step is showing you one thing, my second is to introduce–and heighten–contrast.

We'll turn the volume up, purifying any mixed feelings and then raising the emotional intensity. We'll remove ambiguity, making it clear who we're supposed to be rooting for, and how we're supposed to feel about it. Later we might subvert your expectations, but we have to establish a pattern before breaking it. 

The car scene is an okay first draft, but can I do better? I could replace the Weezer cover song with Billy Idol's “Cradle of Love,” a subtle and thematically appropriate allusion to the opening line of a Nabokov book I've never actually read.

Is the car an effective juxtaposition? Should I tweak the memory again? A walk in the wilderness, the wind rustling the trees of Elk Island National Park? A backyard with friends and family? I shuffle the deck of memory, seeking a playable card.

And if I don't find it? 

I'll have to create my own, a coat of false colors stitched together from real ones. And if the facts get left behind in the process, well, story doesn't care about truth. It only cares about making you feel what you’re supposed to.

I once read that telling the story of an event changes how we remember  it.  Within a few repetitions, we're no longer recalling what happened. Instead, we’re remembering our story.

That's terrifying. Stand-up comedy is not just storytelling  but storytelling built on repetition. An unfinished joke is like generational trauma: You repeat it until you figure it out.

And in the process, you make changes.

 You repeat and record and listen and edit and repeat.  You shift lines about until you find the exact funniest ones, trimming a detail here, tweaking a memory there until you have something that speaks to everyone. And then you tell this changed story again and again until it's a part of you…whether or not it still has any relation to what actually happened.

I don't want that.

 I don't want to overwrite my most precious memories with jokes. My memories with Dorothy are treasures in my brain that occasionally delight me by re-emerging on their own, and I want thrm to stay that way. I want Dorothy to live unstained in my heart, free to come and go as she pleases. I don't want to touch them out of fear that in trying to keep Dorothy's memory alive, I will degrade it.

And so I hesitate to dig too deeply. Instead I wait, shovel in hand, reluctant to touch blade to soil for fear of disturbing something important. Trying not to create the thing I most want to avoid.

Scared of telling the story too often, even to myself, lest I end up remembering the stories better than the actual girl.