Tag Audrey Sprenger

Entries 19 Total

When Sociology Was Cool, 2

Oct 12, ’11 7:29 PM

When Pete Seeger was sociology major at Harvard University, Thomas and Znaneicki’s The Polish Peasant had been published but Talcott Parson’s The Social System had not. Parsons was on the faculty, however, and so was Robert Merton, though they weren’t the reason Pete dropped out of Harvard after one year. He wanted to play the banjo, be a journalist and study art — all subjects not viewed as relevant by the department.

This didn’t stop him from reading, studying and practicing sociology, however, and he ended up doing pretty okay (see image above of Pete performing in California in the 1950s, © The Weinstein Company). An earlier post about when sociology was cool, as well as the sociological definition of cool is right here.

End Note: I shot this candid footage of Pete Seeger and composer and musician David Amram at a backyard bar-b-que in Beacon, New York, the week after Pete Seeger’s 90th Birthday party at Madison Square Garden in May of 2009. Right before I took it, Pete ate a piece of cherry pie as if it were an apple and washed down with a beer and David, (who was 79 at the time), three hot dogs on a stick followed by a diet ginger ale. “No bun,” he said. “I’m watching carbs.” Some more beautiful, candid footage of Pete and David from the summer of 2010 is here.

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A Biography Like A Match

Oct 9, ’11 4:02 PM

The very best sociological biography I ever read was Kate Moses’ Wintering. In it, she takes Sylvia Plath’s collection of poetry Ariel and then re-orders each poem so they are laid out in the way Plath left them with/as her suicide note. Somehow, through Ted Hughes’ editing and the book’s posthumous publication the poems got ordered in a way that forever cast Plath’s greatest writing into a portrait of despair. In Moses’ reordering of the poems, Plath’s life become soaring, triumphant, the diary of woman unafraid of being so desperately sad.

When we consider a life, Moses’ biography teaches us, especially one heavily documented and fabled, we must remember that every isolated moment of that life, every incident, every happening, flickers with light, like the beating of a heart and that no one moment or incident is more important than any other. She also teaches us that we can choose the life moments we want to rest on, to rely upon as our first memory, our first talking point. For her the life of Sylvia not the sum of her sorrow and anger at her husband’s philandering and lying, but rather the poet’s own steady burning lust.

There are two other sociological biographies worth noting here alongside Moses’ work, both cinematic bio-pics: Mark Rappaport’s From The Journals of Jean Seberg and Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There. In Rappaport’s work Mary Beth Hurt plays actress and icon Jean Seberg and spends most of the film talking back to her celluloid image; and in Haynes’, several actors play Bob Dylan-like characters, but the actual subject of the film, Bob Dylan, is never there.

Like Moses’ novel about Sylvia Plath, both of these films teach us the same rule about reading into and telling stories about other peoples’ lives: That such work is by definition subjective, unaccountable, untrue and uncertain, and that we always need to leave room for interpretation or what novelist, playwright and ethnographer Zora Neal Hurston called the real truth of little lies.

End Note: For another excellent sociological interpretation of Sylvia Plath’s life, see Karen Nystrom’s new play about Plath, archived at the Reorb.it Project.

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The Traces We Leave Behind

Oct 8, ’11 3:15 PM

For years I wrote about small communities of people who were not famous, but were, at least, breathing, that is, alive. Now I mostly write about one famous, (or, perhaps to some, infamous), man, who, though an internationally recognized, (not to mentioned economically valuable) icon (and commodity), has been, for over forty years, long dead.

And what I have learned from this switch in sociological subject matter is that the very best, most compelling evidence I’ve ever come across, (to tell either kind of sociological story, really), are actual, tangible images or writings or sounds that are both familiar and surprising at the same time.

Like this small fragment of a documentary told by poet Laura Hope Gill about her grandmother, Grace Meadows, who was held in a detainment camp in China during World War II. Or this recently found film footage of diarist Anne Frank, a girl, who, until this moment, most people have only known as a black and white photograph, forever stilled (see image above). As sociologist Avery Gordon would say, some very ghostly matter indeed.

End Note: I have written about the places marked in the world to commemorate the life and work of Jack Kerouac and Anne Frank before. You can find a quick excerpt right here.

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Books Like Sociology

Sep 17, ’11 3:36 AM

The idea of studying modern social problems in a methodical way emerges in the late 19th, early 20th century through the writings of scholars such as Karl Marx, Max Weber, Sigmund Freud and especially, Emile Durkheim and W.E.B. Du Bois. It’s not difficult to imagine why. This was, after all, a time, when the dark side of modernity was starting to become more apparent. People were poor and ragged and often left homeless in the streets, upward mobility through education was reserved mostly for rich, white women and working class men, and the rural, small town edges of the great, new 20th century cities seemed to be finally wearing off.

I learned all this not from the writings of Marx and Weber and Freud and all the rest, but rather, the writings of Betty Smith, an American novelist and playwright, whose classic 1943 book, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, I read, for the first time, when I was nine. Tree is all about the life and times of Francie Nolan, an Irish-American girl growing up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn just after the turn of the century, who made observations about the world like this: “‘It was as if this could be a whole life,’ Francie thought. ‘You work eight hours a day covering wires to earn money to buy food and to pay for a place to sleep so that you can keep living to come back to this place and cover more wires. Some people are born and kept living just to come to this … Maybe she’d never have more education than she had at that moment. Maybe all her life she’d have to cover wires.”

Or, even better, observations like this, Francie’s ideas about a man she sees sleeping on the street outside of Losher’s Bread Factory: “He is old. He must be past seventy. He was born about the time Abraham Lincoln was living and getting himself ready to be president. Williamsburg must have been a little country place then and maybe Indians were still living in Flatbush. That was so long ago … He was a baby once. He must have been sweet and clean and his mother kissed his little pink toes. Maybe when it thundered at night she came to his crib and fixed his blanket better and whispered that he mustn’t be afraid, that mother was there. Then she picked him up and put her cheek on his head and said that he was her own sweet baby. He might have been a boy like my brother, running in and out of the house and slamming the door. And while his mother scolded him she was thinking that maybe he’ll be president some day. Then he was a young man, strong and happy. When he walked down the street, the girls smiled and maybe he winked at the prettiest one.”

Though Smith didn’t use these exact words, Francie, was what sociologist Charles Lemert would call a practical sociologist, someone who sees in the everyday workings of life the larger social scene. As Smith herself wrote, “Francie stared (out at the world and) played her favorite game: Figuring out about people.” And Smith with her fictional stories about a very real Brooklyn has always been for me the very best kind of what, (again what Lemert would call), academic, scientific sociologist: Emotional, soulful and geographically sensitive. In other words, a careful and artful documentarian of place.

One last passage from Tree: “Losher’s bread factory supplied the neighborhood stores. The bread was not wrapped in wax paper and grew stale quickly. Losher’s redeemed the stale bread from the dealers and sold it half price to the poor. The outlet store adjoined the bakery. Its long narrow counter filled one side and long narrow benches ran along the other two sides. A huge double door opened behind the counter. The bakery wagons backed up to it and unloaded the bread right to the counter. They sold two loaves for a nickel, and when it was dumped out, a pushing crowd fought for the privilege of buying it. There was never enough bread and some waited until three or four wagons had reported before they could buy bread. At that price, the cutomers had to supply their own wrappings. Most of the purchasers were children. Some kids tucked the bread under their arms and walked home brazenly letting all the world know that they were poor. The proud ones wrapped up the bread, some in old newspapers, others in clean or dirty flour sacks. Francie brought along a large paper bag.”

It’s hard to say whether I would have cared or not about the ideas of the first academic, scientific sociologists had I not read Betty Smith, for she was the one who introduced the social problem of modernity to me. And so I think of her every semester when it comes time to teach the pillars of the sociological canon and think about all the core ideas and concepts it protects. Ideas and concepts, which emerged from the minds of men living so long ago they are difficult to verify and, perhaps even more importantly, difficult to imagine, let alone see.

End Note 1: The image above is the movie poster from Elia Kazen’s cinematic version of “Tree” made in 1945.

End Note 2: Here is a little list of all the things I learned from “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn,” very useful for these economically dark times: 1) Salvage and save everything, but always be prepared to let it go (from Tree’s heroine, Francie Nolan, who made money gleaning tin and other valuable trash from the street and trading it for money from the neighborhood junkie, i.e., garbage man); 2) When you spend money on something to eat or drink pick something that lasts (from Francie’s selection of peppermint wafer candies over all other candies and her mother, Katie’s, recipes for cooking with stale bread); 3) Take your fair share and do with it what you truly wish (from Katie, who allowed Francie one hot cup of strong black coffee a day even though Francie chose not to drink it); 4) Proceed through life steadily and methodically, but allow yourself to regularly stray from your self imposed routines (from Francie’s weekly ritual of checking out two books a week from the public library, one by moving alphabetically through the stacks and another by selecting one book purely by chance or for pleasure; 5) Try and love your brother no matter how many unearned privileges from your family and society he receives (from Francie’s enduring love for her brother Nealy, who, is allowed to attend high school when Francie is not); 6) Never be afraid to leave home, (from Francie, when she decides to leave Brooklyn and attend university in the mid-west)

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With Ten Dollars

Sep 16, ’11 4:27 AM

I couldn’t have invented an ethnographic field site more perfect than the Winnipeg River. With Clark’s Corner at its center, it was every bit as iconic as William Foote Whyte’s Cornerville, Elliott Liebow’s Tally’s corner or Elijah Anderson’s a place on the corner. However, as perfect an ethnographic field site, as the Winnipeg River happened to be, ethnographic field research was not remotely the reason I wanted to live there, even if that’s what I said I wanted, and perhaps even more importantly, what people were expecting of me.

I wanted to live on the Winnipeg River for one reason and one reason alone, and that was to look for Manawaka, the fictional Manitoba Township beautifully and painstakingly created by the novelist Margaret Laurence through a series of five distinct but interlocking novels, The Stone Angel, A Jest of God, The Fire Dwellers, A Bird in the House, and The Diviners. I knew Manawaka wasn’t a real town. That is, I knew it didn’t exist on any landscapes or appear on any maps. And perhaps even more importantly, I also knew that Manawaka was inspired by the very real town of Neepawa, Manitoba, the landscape town, the map town of Margaret Laurence’s childhood and growing up.

Which was precisely why I was looking for it on the Winnipeg River, a place close enough to the source of its inspiration, but far away enough, to not be reminded of its author and its artifice. There wasn’t any space for Manawaka to exist in Neepawa, with its honorary plaques and museums, celebrating itself as the birthplace of Margaret Laurence, and of course, the series of novels she wrote that forever scrambled its good name. But there was space, however, along the Winnipeg River, where, from the very first time I set foot there, in the summer of 1995, I became haunted by the seemingly impossible suspicion, that Manawaka had somehow, suddenly, become alive. I kept finding myself coming face to face with whole characters and walking in on entire scenes, people’s voices and accents turning into dialogues and story lines, and every stop along the road some fictional setting I had already been. It was unnerving. Like finding the place where all of my readings and re-readings of these novels had been packed and stored away, waiting for me to make my entrance there, as if a stage set for a play.

I was first introduced to Manawaka in The Diviners, Laurence’s fifth and final novel about the town. My mother gave it to me as a gift for my twenty-fifth birthday. This is who we are, she wrote inside the front cover, and by we she meant her and me. It was a particularly appropriate inscription, since The Diviners is a book about the stories people tell to make a place for themselves in the world, and even more specifically, the stories a mother, Morag Gunn, tells herself and her only daughter, Pique. My mother loved The Diviners. The very first time she ever read it, the year it came out in 1974, she finished it in one sitting, and was so sad to reach its end, that she seriously considered getting into her car, driving over to Margaret Laurence’s house, and knocking on the author’s front door. Just so she could stave off the book’s ending a little while longer. Just so she could see if the story could go on a little more.

She never actually did this, of course, but it wasn’t such a far-fetched idea. At the time, we were living in Peterborough, Ontario, less than forty kilometers south of Lakefield, Ontario, the small, one-street town where Margaret Laurence had settled in the early 1970s. Laurence had actually written the entire text as well as set several key passages of The Diviners there, a fact, which for my mother was almost too amazing and wonderful to bear. Further proof, she thought, of something of which she was already quite sure. That this novel about a woman from the backwoods of Manitoba, Morag Gunn from Manawaka, Margaret Laurence from Neepawa, was not just a story she could read and love, but also an ancestry she could share.

My mother wasn’t alone in her passion for The Diviners. In Canada at the time it was a highly anticipated novel, the latest installment of an already nationally adored and internationally known literary series, and within Canadian literary and academic circles, Margaret Laurence herself was already something of a celebrity. She was known for her inventive, sometimes experimental and always politically provocative writing; her talent for blurring the lines between past and present, fact and fiction, biography and autobiography; her deeply complex and flawed characters; her poetic riffs on the joys and sorrows of writing; and, perhaps most famously, for selling an earlier Manawaka novel, A Jest of God, to movie star couple Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, who turned it into the critically acclaimed Hollywood movie Rachel, Rachel. In her forward to the University of Chicago re-release of The Diviners, another internationally renowned Canadian novelist, as well as poet, Margaret Atwood, wrote of her profound respect and awe for Margaret Laurence, calling her work an important part of the national pride and feminist fervor that swept Canada in the early 1970s. A pride and fervor, Atwood explains, that for many Canadian women, Laurence later came to symbolize.

So it makes sense to me why my mother loved The Diviners the way she did. She had only been a Canadian citizen a few years in the early 1970s, having emigrated there all by herself from the very small town of Frankenholz, Germany, when she was barely eighteen, with ten dollars in her pocket, so the story goes. She had come there partly for the adventure, but mostly for the chance to shed her identity as her parent’s daughter and her boyfriend’s prospective wife. Which was precisely what she did, finding in Canada a new, young nation, itself struggling towards it’s first few decades of self-actualization and cultural autonomy.

I have a photograph of her from those days. She stands on a stark winter day all buttoned up in a corduroy coat. She looks like that girl in that Canadian painting Julie and the Universe, that painting by Jean Paul Lemieux (see image at the top of this essay). They were, you could say, the perfect match, my mother and Canada in those days. And The Diviners, with its bold and unapologetic Canadian content, fearless independent heroine and brilliant female author articulated all of this, forever sealing into words and sentences everything my mother ever wanted her life in Canada to be: Self-directed. Self-sufficient. Self-governing.

She never wavered, working towards this wanting. Even as the early 1970s slowly faded into new decades and circumstances caused her to leave Canada and immigrate again, this time, to the United States, with my father, brother and me, she still held on to The Diviner’s as the truest statement of who she thought she was, and what she believed was the best and most important piece of herself to pass down, as if a family heirloom, to me. This is who we are, she wrote inside the book’s front cover.

I had never known my mother to make such a definitive statement about her own, let alone our shared identity. Her life, our life, simply never lent itself to such simplicity. My mother and I share many things, of course, like blood and physical traits and all the years of my youth. But we also share a lot of differences, like the countries of our birth, our first languages and accents, our educational backgrounds. So even though I always knew and thought of us as being a family, I never knew or thought of us of as being socially the same, at least not until she gave me The Diviners and in this novel staked for us a common heritage, a common name. This is who we are, she wrote inside the book’s front cover.

I took both the novel and her inscription seriously, which was easy, since just as my mother had twenty years before, I fell in love with The Diviners, too. So much so that when the chance arose to do ethnographic field research on and around Clark’s Corner I took it, unable to resist making a pilgrimage to the one place in the world I was certain Manawaka could be, the Manitoba backwoods.

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Bringing The People (Magazine) Back In

Sep 9, ’11 2:58 PM

The American tabloid People Weekly was first published in 1974. Mia Farrow, who was starring as Daisy Buchanan in the film The Great Gatsby at the time, was its first cover girl, gazing vacantly out into the world, her hair all done up in 1920s curls instead of the short crop that, in the late 1950s, made her a famous gamine. This was nearly eighty years after Emile Dukheim’s Les Règles De La Méthode Sociologique was first published.

Still, like so many of the practical and narrative sociologies, which came before it, the work of statistical societies and rhetoricians for example, or the work of novelists and poets, People Weekly had all the markings of a classic sociological work.

You can tell by just looking at the cover. It offered analyses of modern social problems, (like the everyday struggles of the modern, nuclear family or the persistent sorrow of the modern, everyday wife), while at the same time celebrating all of the great promise of the modern American dream (Palm Beach Whirl, The Parties, Pets and Personalities or springtime fashion that lets you find your true inner self). It attempted to explain how these problems affected us in both big ways and small (unjust arrests made in Russia or how a fourth marriage can really work) and offered evidence and proof to its well-reasoned claims.

It was, you could say, canonically perfect, right down to its masthead and its celebration of fame, for unlike Les Règles, People Weekly magazine was and continues to be a sociological work where the bodies out of which it is made are clearly acknowledged by its name.

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Mi Vida Sin Mi

Sep 8, ’11 11:24 PM

Once, years ago, the man who lived in the apartment below mine committed suicide. The police came pounding on my door in the middle of night to ask questions: Did I know him? When was the last time I saw him? Did I notice anything strange?

I hadn’t. I told them that I didn’t know my neighbor’s name, except for what was on the mailbox, and that I barely knew his face. That in the past eight months or so that I had lived here I only saw him two or three times, his back to me as he clattered into the building, collecting his mail, tangled up with his dog, then disappearing into his apartment quickly, shutting his front door behind him and leaving the stairwell without a trace.

“Wow,” I remarked to the Officer. “This is just like Durkheim said,” referencing the French sociologist who in the late 19th century famously studied suicide. “Who?” the Officer asked. “Does he live in this building? Did he know the deceased?”

For days after the police left there was a enormous lock on my neighbor’s door and stray police tape still tied to the banister from when the apartment had to be protected as a crime scene. About a week later the enormous lock was gone and the smell of ammonia and lemon wax seeped out into the hallway as my neighbor’s mother packed and cleaned her dead son’s apartment, his dog still alive and well snuffling at her feet.

I peeked through the crack of the front door and saw scuffed and scratched wood floors, laundry stacked in a basket, an opened cereal box and felt the tears roll down my cheeks, thinking for a moment of what my own life upstairs would look like without me, especially to some stranger passing by who looked in and only knew me from the stairwell or the street.

End Note: The title for this post is borrowed from the unbelievably great Isabel Coixet film My Life Without Me .

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American Cowboys Played By Girls

Sep 4, ’11 9:57 PM

My two very favourite American Cowboys are Brandon Teena and Calamity Jane, who were, I realize, quite different from one another.

Brandon, born Teena Renae Brandon in 1972, was a gas station attendant, petty thief and ladies’ man who spent most of his life in Lincoln, Nebraska. Jane, born Martha Jane Canary in 1852, was a sometimes-married frontierswoman and professional scout, who eventually settled in the small town of Deadwood, South Dakota. Brandon became an icon of the contemporary lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender movement after he was raped and killed in 1993 and Jane, has been a mainstay of American history books and museums, since the late 1940s.

Still, despite these differences, both were born and raised as girls, who, upon adolescence decided to dress and live as boys and both have been immortalized by Hollywood actresses in Hollywood films as soulful, heartsick cowboys, brave enough to defy the strict social rules of their small hometowns in the American Mid-West.

In pictures taken just weeks before his rape and murder, Brandon Teena looks like a young Matt Damon (at left in image below), his thin girl-body obscured and made thicker by layers of thermal underwear and flannel shirts. Set alongside his celluloid counterpart played by Hilary Swank, (an actress, who before her Academy-Award winning turn as Brandon was most famously known as a the new Karate Kid or maybe Carly Reynolds, the single mother who dated Ian Ziering’s character Steve on the nineties teen soap opera Beverly Hills 90210, at right in image below), his story seems utterly ordinary and, perhaps even more importantly, unsensationalistic.

He was, quite simply, a boy from a trailer park in Lincoln, Nebraska, just out of high school and out in the world looking for friends and love at the roller rink, in the parking lot of the local 7-11, in the blue-collar town of Falls City, just outside of Lincoln, where he moved and settled in for a short period of time after meeting and falling in love with Lana Tisdel, the prettiest girl in town.

And it’s the same for Calamity Jane, staring out from old black and white photographs or dancing across the movie screen, her cinematic counterpart as sunny and bright as the real Martha Jane Canary looks dark and composed.

In the Hollywood version of her life, Calamity Jane played by Doris Day (see image at the very top) even sings. And why shouldn’t she? Unlike all the other girls in this 1953 movie, dressed in the petticoats and dresses that most women were obliged to wear during Calamity Jane’s time, the Cowboy-upped Doris Day looks as sexy and free as my third favourite American Cowboy Played By A Girl, The L Word’s profoundly beguiling Shane (played by Katherine Moening).

End Note: An earlier Rocket Science post on sexuality is right here.

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Boys Named Kip, Not Kim

Aug 26, ’11 12:39 PM

There’s an episode of the American television show Seinfeld where Elaine has to hide from everyone the fact that she hated the Academy Award winning movie The English Patient. You can watch a clip from this episode here.

For me, its been the same scenario since I walked out of Slumdog Millionaire several years ago. People (and especially students) always ask me what I think about it because in the early nineties I lived and worked in India and have spent much of my adult life teaching and loving all stories Indian, whether realist or fantastical, tabloid or literary, Indian made or not. But I hated Slumdog Millionaire.

I hated it for its relentless and gratuitous violence; for portraying the poverty of Mumbai like some exotic side show oddity, like the photographs American soldiers took of the abuse of Muslim prisoners in the Abu Gharib Prison; for completely obscuring the teller behind the story (a white guy based in London); for all the endless story about the hard and ugly lives of its real life slumdog stars and their one week respite in Hollywood and in Disneyland (where photographs of Slumdog’s adorable street urchins, all dressed up in Kid Gap and gazing at the singing puppets of the It’s a Small World ride at Disney World, were published practically everywhere).

So to everyone who asks me: No, I didn’t see Slumdog Millionaire and for what its worth, if you want to know how tough going it is for some children in India, I suggest watching Zana Brinski’s Born Into Brothels. Because, as filmmaker Trihn T. Mihn-Ha might say, more important than who or what a story is, is making clear where, when and how its from (what I call the ethnographic back-story), Brothels makes it clear:

End Note: Like “Seinfeld’s” Elaine, I also hated the movie version of “The English Patient,” except for the scenes that had Kip (played by a rope-y haired Naveen Andrews) in them. See Naveen, with actress Juliette Binoche in the movie still above.

End Note 2: For an excellent article about how the Abu Gharib Prison photographs can be read as “tourist snapshots,” click here. It was written by the art critic, (or, what we would call in our disciplinary circles, visual sociologist), Sarah Boxer.

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Communities Are Social

Aug 13, ’11 12:06 AM

Note: All the names in this story have been changed. But the photograph above gives a clue to the identity of one of the towns mentioned.

No matter how hard we labor to make our homes more permanent, more stable, we never can truly achieve this goal. Land claims and buildings and borders may bind us to the earth, but they only do so, precariously. Deeds change hands, architecture crumbles, territories expand and contract and the stories and maps we make of these things can easily be distorted or ignored. This doesn’t mean that our homes are something vulnerable or fragile, prone to destruction or easy to break, but rather, that they are something dynamic, something mobile, something temporary, something alive.

It is perhaps this fact of home’s transience, of home’s mortality, that draws us to other people, that binds us into what social scientists call a community, a common way of living, a common way of life, that works to starve or sustain us whenever our homes prove unable to provide. Communities emerge out of the everyday routines of our homes, what sociologist Robert Park would have called its social ecology, those parts of the earth where people have settled in so deep that that their presence there seems almost natural.

I learned this the winter backwoods of Manitoba doing ethnographic field research for the Canadian Forest Service. Here was where I was actually able to bear witness to the ideas of Robert Park happening. For it was in this place where people would gather together for a community social every time there was some significant shift in their home’s passing, like a wedding or a retirement party, a birth or a graduation or perhaps even more importantly, some kind of emergency or crisis.

That was the reason behind the community social I saw happen there. Money was needed after a house caught fire in Forêt Bleu. Maurice Normandin’s old place. Nobody was really sure how the fire started. Some thought that it was arson. That Yves Bernard was to blame. But it was hard say for sure. The house was old and weathered, long abandoned by its owner and marked condemned by the state so it just as easily could have caught fire by accident.

“You never know,” Berthelette Hiebert said to me the morning after it happened. We had both pulled off the road to see what was left of the half charred house. “It could have been the wood stove or a bad wire,” she said. “But it sure looks more like a lover’s quarrel to me.”

However it happened, it left Crystal Wannemaker without a chimney, without a stove, and only part of her living room floor. That’s what it said on the flyers anyway, the ones posted to every telephone pole between St. Marc’s and Fort McVey. Meet Your Friends! Help Your Neighbors! Come To This Winter’s First Community Social! Cheap Drinks! Dancing! More! The flyers were photocopied on yellow paper and pasted under the handwritten plea were three small faces, the school photographs of each one of Crystal Wannemaker’s three young boys.

The Women’s Guild of St. Margaret’s Church was sponsoring the social. Nancy Chambers, Dorothy Frank, Marjorie O’Keefe. The Women’s Guild of St. Margaret’s Church was always sponsoring some social. They had to. As long as they were raising money to help the needy or the poor, they could bully the Mill into employing a part-time priest. And as long as they employed a part-time priest, they didn’t have to attend the Eucharist in Falls Bridge, the only other place along the Ozhaa River where you could attend a Catholic Mass in English, rather than Latin or French.

So the house fire in Forêt Bleu served The Women’s Guild of St. Margaret’s well. They would rent out the Falls Bridge Hockey Arena, have their husbands cart over kegs of beer and cases of rye and vodka bought cut-rate from the Liquor Store in Poplar Falls, hire the arena’s hockey referee Buckle McGee to hire a few others to sell the alcohol and spin the records and unlock and lock the arena’s front door, and consider their good deed done. None of the women ever actually went to any of the socials they sponsored. The kind of people who actually attended such things weren’t exactly their kind.

Which meant practically everyone else living in or around Falls Bridge. Most forest dwellers wouldn’t miss a community social. Especially in the dead of winter, on a night when there wasn’t a high school or Junior League hockey game. Some drove in from as far as two hundred miles away, through very heavy snow. Truckers and cutters working out in the northern bush camps; kids off attending university in the city; relatives and friends from neighboring townships and Indian territories, so small they were marked by numbers instead of names. They’d all venture out to the hockey arena in Falls Bridge, arriving from every possible direction, entering the traffic of people who traveled much shorter distances. Six miles. Four miles. Two miles. From Fort McVey, from Bunk Town, from Poplar Falls; from St. Marc’s, from the Moor, from Forêt Bleu; a steady stream of logging trucks and pick-ups, making the dark of the early night bright with light.

By seven the traffic slowed and the parking lot of the arena became full, then overflowing, and by nine someone from one of the houses across the street called in the police, since skirmishes between boys from rival high schools kept brewing. Some were students at the public high school located right next door to the hockey arena; others were students at nearby private schools, L’École de St. Marc’s and Mitag Industrial and Collegiate. Insults were shouted in Mitagwa or English and then returned in French, and punches were thrown between cousins who attended different schools.

The two police constables who arrived didn’t have to do too much to stop the fights. Just make their way through the crowds and beam their flashlights onto faces, threatening to call the offender’s parents, a punishment, they assured them, far worse than arrest. They made several laps around the parking lot, ignoring the swarms of people huddled around Len Charles’ pick-up, as well as Len Charles himself, who sold zip lock bags filled with cheap marijuana and very expensive hash oil doled out in old Coke bottle caps. “Janet bringing the kids over tonight?” one constable asked the other, pulling off his gloves, then tucking them along with his flashlight under his arm so he could dig for a cigarette.

“Yeah,” the other constable answered walking towards one of the parking lot garbage cans that some kids were using to stoke a small bon fire. “You going to put that out when you’re done?” he asked them, leaning forward slightly to see what they were burning to make the flames. “Yeah, we’re watching it,” one of the kids answered. He held a cigarette between his second and third fingers and a bottle of beer between his second finger and his thumb.

Eight dollars bought admission into the community social, where alcohol tickets were sold at a table away from a makeshift bar, temporarily set up in the arena’s concession stand. One dollar bought a beer, two dollars a shot of whiskey, and for an extra fifty cents you could mix your beer or whiskey with Orange Fanta or ginger ale. You could also buy coffee at the bar and hot chocolate, slices of banana bread wrapped in plastic and hot peanuts sold in paper coffee cups. A line of people stretched out all along the length of the concession stand, five and six bodies deep, and every so often someone would ask Joss McAdams or Carmen McClean, the two young women working the stand for Buckle McGee that night, if they were going to plug in the hot dog grill or popcorn machine.

“You two going to be making hot dogs tonight,” a voice would ask every so often, more often then the time it took for the song coming over the arena’s sound system to change. “Grill’s broken,” Joss or Carmen would shout back, and then sometimes you’d hear one of them ask the other, “Did Terry ever go and get that marker so we could write-up a sign?” “You two making popcorn tonight,” the next voice would rise up. “Machine’s broken,” Joss or Carmen would shout back, and then again, “Where the hell is Terry?”

The arena became packed. People filled the Home Side and the Away Side. They leaned up against the scuffed up walls of the covered ice rink or sat on them with their legs dangling over the walls worn out ledge. They crammed the bleachers and the dance floor, teenage girls and young couples, fathers and their daughters, old marrieds and the occasional ten-year old boy, who would try to break dance or slam dance or slide on his snow-panted knees across the entire length of plywood dance floor.

Mothers gathered in the empty penalty boxes to chat and nurse their babies. Some old men got Buckle to open up the Coaches Office so they could smoke and play cards. And all through the night little kids chased each other in and out of the locker rooms, their screeches slowly subsiding around eleven, when their parents called it night, rounded them up, and then ushered them, bright-eyed and exhausted, out the arena’s front doors.

With every family’s exit, the social grew more raucous and the air more thick with hash smoke, especially after the Rob Roy and Queen’s Crowne Local closed and the hockey arena in Falls Bridge suddenly became the only place along the Ozhaa River that night where you could come in from the cold and get a whiskey or a beer. But by three o’clock all of the alcohol was sold, so again there was another exodus of revelers and for a few minutes people’s shouts and laughter echoed through Falls Bridge, which was dark and quiet with the sleepiness of night.

But by two o’clock every last one of them was rounded up as their parents packed up their belongings to leave, the bleachers and covered hockey rink slowly emptying. With every family’s exit, the social grew more raucous, and the air, more thick with hash smoke. By three o’clock all of the alcohol was sold, so there was another exodus of revelers, and by four o’clock Buckle McGee turned the music off and the lights up, a signal to the very last few people who remained, mostly young women in vinyl miniskirts and men in dark green bush boots who, even without the music and the darkness, lingered on the covered hockey rink to make out, where, just moments before, they had been dancing.

End Note: I have also written of the Canadian backwoods here.

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