FICTION

A Crew of Misfits and Wannabes    -     Weebly.com                              

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O CANADA! O "LONELY BOY"!  - 
YOU SHALL BE LONELY NO MORE!
by Don Plansky

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Disclaimer:  Prefatory Warning to the Unwary Reader

This is a period piece, the first draft of which was written when the United States was assumed to be the leading nation of the world. Unfortunately, at this writing, in the midst of the Covid Era, our “supremacy,” in countless ways, is doubtful.

Furthermore, the two parts don’t quite fit together. The first part sounds like it might be the beginning of a passable story about some misfits from the Sixties, but is only used as a set-up for a bunch of lame “jokes” of questionable taste in the second part. Now that you’ve been warned, you may wish not to subject yourself to this “hybrid” form, which the author himself considers a failure. On the other hand, by passing over it altogether, you might miss out on a few stray chuckles, which are in short supply in these dire times. An Editorial Postscript has been appended in an attempt to stitch together the two disparate parts. [D.P.]   

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( I )
The Circus of Soul

Our motley crew of misfits and wannabe cinema verité guerilla filmmakers had yet to make our mark. Looking back more than half-a-century later, I guess we never made much headway as “independent filmmakers,” as we thought of ourselves back in that Age of Innocence. I’m the only one left from those wild days. So here’s the lowdown: We were a veritable Who’s Who of “Who Are They?”

Ah yes, the sole survivor of that scruffy band of outlaw bohemians—and I’m slowing down Big Time. I attended Marlene’s funeral last week. She was the hottest thing on wheels back in the day, but had long since passed into her, shall I say, “matronly” phase. Those dim, dissolute days of endlessly scrounging for food, scrambling for shelter, searching for meaning, imbibing booze, inhaling weed, and having sex—not necessarily in that order—seem a long way off. There’s simply no remedy for this fatal disease of Life.
            
I’m old. Death draws nigh.

Oh, don’t worry. I’m not going all gallows on you. As a matter of fact, we were about to step into film history. This is how our story begins . . .
​
Time: Mid-Sixties. Place: The City by the Bay:

Actually, there were some 75 steps, all told, as you clambered up four rickety flights of stairs on Grant Avenue in San Francisco’s North Beach district, until, at last, you came upon the threshold of our tiny venue: The Circus of Soul. A cheap decal on the faded green door let you know that you were about to enter the Age of Aquarius under the sign of the youthful Water-Bearer, Ganymede. Once inside, if you were able to disentangle yourself from a tacky entrance of hanging, multicolored beads, you entered a yellowish, stale, dimly-lit, claustrophobic van Goghian space crammed with beat-up, ratty sofas and chipped folding chairs. The stained red carpet was not inviting​.

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For two bucks, you earned the dubious privilege of watching our homemade flicks, or whatever crappy independent films we could lay our grubby hands on. An additional fifty cents got you a tub of greasy popcorn that tasted like Styrofoam. A Coke from our soda machine was on the house, but gave you more syrup than fizz. 
​                                                                                                                                                   
At first, I couldn’t have cared less about our “experimental” films and “provocateur” docudramas. Truthfully, I had hoped to catch Marlene Henderson with her guard down during one of our frequent midnight showings of Louis Gasnier’s execrable propaganda film, Reefer Madness (1938, B&W, 67 minutes). Maybe make a grab for a boob in the dark.

[Hmmm. Note to self: Boobs in the Dark, working title for a noir sex-thriller comedy. Social message: the dangers of marijuana addiction. The lead? Put out feelers to Eugene Levy’s agent. Director? See if Atom Egoyan has forgiven me for calling him a “Bergman Wannabe.” Work up a scenario around idea of a sexually repressed blonde bombshell hooked on weed abandoning herself to a talentless, broke, guerrilla filmmaker. Needs a hook: 25 words or less.]

Well, anyway, Marlene had told me “I’m very fond of you” late one night at the Circus of Soul, around 2 a.m., probably under the influence of a joint. But soon after these sweet words of promise, she was going steady with Eddie Morisette, our “leader.” At the time, Eddie was the only one of us who knew a damn thing about making films. Maybe that’s why she liked him and left me on the cutting room floor. Oh yeah, I guess I should mention that he was an Adonis with shoulder-length flowing light-brown hair, piercing blue eyes, stood 6 foot 4 inches, could recite whole stanzas of Lord Byron’s poems by heart, and oozed charisma. Naturally, he never saw his 30th birthday.

It was Eddie who’d got his hands on that pirated 16mm copy of Koenig and Kroitor’s Lonely Boy (National Film Board of Canada, 1962, B&W, 27 minutes). It was a Thursday night, 18 August 1966. Showtime always began around 8:00 p.m., except for the midnight specials on weekends. Film history was about to take a detour to the North.

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I was stunned by this masterpiece of cinema verite, which had perhaps been deliberately suppressed by officials of the United States government. It must have been a blow to our national pride to witness a nineteen-year-old wunderkind from our Neighbor to the North—in a blink of an eye—climb from utter obscurity to stardom in America’s multimedia entertainment industry. Imagine a teenager playing the Copacabana in the Big Apple! The kid was an idol to his adoring fans in the Lower Forty-Eight.

“He’s just so wonderful. He’s so cute. I love him.” These words came pouring out of my mouth as the poignant story of a fat ugly duckling transformed into a young prince unfolded before me on the grainy black and white print. Just imagine what those excitable, nubile teenage girls must be screaming!

This warts-and-all portrait of singer-songwriter Paul Anka, “Lonely Boy,” was a revelation. It was our first taste of Canadian Genius, but would not be our last.

I was mesmerized when Anka’s then-personal manager, Irvin Feld, the head of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, said, “I told him, ‘Paul, you no longer belong to yourself. You belong to the world. God gave you something that He hasn’t given to anyone in the past 500 years. But He’s given it to you to make other people throughout the world happy.’” Then, boldly breaking the 4th Wall, Feld stared unblinkingly at the camera, and added, “I truthfully believe that Paul will be the biggest star with an overall career that this world has ever known.”

I found myself nodding in assent to Feld’s glittering song of praise, especially when, moments later, Lonely Boy sashayed to the edge of the stage at the Copa, gazed into the eyes of a star-struck teenybopper [extreme close-up of her ecstatic, tearful face], and began to croon, “I love you with all my heart and I hope we will never part. Oh, please stay by me, Diana!”

The Circus of Soul had at last found its raison d’etre. Lonely Boy was our collective rite of passage into the heretofore unknown world of British North America, the Socialist Dreamland of the North, the Peoples Republic of Canada, the Great White North, the New World’s Siberia, the Elysium of Breweries—America’s Hat! Call it what you will, we wanted a piece of the action.

I’d had my fill of the Lower Forty-Eight. The Vietnam War sickened me. (Fortunately, my left-leaning upper-middle-class parents got me a phony deferment for bone spurs in my heels.) I could no longer stand Johnson’s lies. But the Establishment would no longer keep me down. Canada, or “Canuckistan,” as I sometimes called her to set our group apart, became a beacon of inspiration, a New Destiny, our North Star.

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Before year’s end we’d formed American Confederates of the Igloo Dwellers of an Independent Canuckistan (ACIDIC) (I came up with the acronym!) as an act of solidarity with our Neighbor to the North. Morisette was the titular President of ACIDIC, I was Treasurer, and Marlene was Secretary, by which I mean she served the instant coffee at our monthly meetings (those were still Mad Men days). Even as ACIDIC ascended, our country was descending into chaos. Nixon’s Silent Majority was soon to come, followed by the final death knell, the defeat of McGovern in 1972. By then, Morisette’s Subversion: A Definitive History of Guerilla Filmmaking had appeared (1970). (Out of print in 1971.) Subversion was our Bible.

The defeat of McGovern in 1972 was somewhat softened when, just before the end of that doleful year, ACIDIC became a fully incorporated nonprofit and wholly-owned subsidiary of Circus of Soul, a limited partnership.

Truthfully, not everyone was on board the Canada Train. Morisette liked Lonely Boy, but was more interested in his pamphleteering against the war and producing his own films. I could make neither head nor tails out of his efforts to transform the traditional documentary with his “fractured” narratives, “high-speed montages” of found footage, and superimposed “collages” from mass media images, often including old images from cigarette commercials, porn films, and 1950s science fiction flicks. I guess his films were supposed to offer “alternate histories” to official views of everything from intellectual property rights to consumerism. But I never really got them.

As to Marlene, she was interested in anything Eddie was into. By the beginning of the Seventies, the couple was shacking up in Marin. Shortly after McGovern’s defeat, Eddie overdosed on heroin—and died. Marlene drifted away from the Circus of Soul, eventually moving to L.A., where she got a law degree, specializing in business; she married, and raised three kids. We kept in touch, on and off, during the ensuing years, mostly reminiscing about the crazy old days in North Beach. Still, I was surprised that I was invited to her funeral.

*   *   *

On that fateful, foggy August evening of 1966, the veil had been forever lifted. The Truth was out. Our little ragtag band of malcontents who had borne witness to Lonely Boy felt an immediate duty to spread the word. And we did. But that work, alas, is now mine alone.                                                                                                                                                               
I am the keeper of the flame, the only survivor of those bygone days of youthful exuberance as the second decade of the New Millennium comes to a close—President, CEO, Executive Secretary, Treasurer, Minister of Propaganda, Advance Man, sole shareholder and sole member of the American Confederates of the Igloo Dwellers of an Independent Canuckistan.
​
As my last will and testament, before these unstable molecules deliquesce into eternal quiescence, I pen the following words as the summation of a life’s work.

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( II )
The Soul of a Nation: Final Canuckistanian Reflections

I’d like to think that I may have played a modest role in attenuating the surfeit of prejudice that poisons our world, often directed to our Neighbor to the North, where many of my brother revolutionaries often vacationed during the war years.

My lifelong ambition to tell my own story, The Circus of Soul: The Unknown Story of a Sixties Counterculture Revolutionary, and the story of our work together, The Soul of Canada, lies all about me in a profusion of old personal journals, faded posters, deteriorating film stock, uncorrected drafts, rejected manuscripts, correspondence from Canadian luminaries, and fifty boxes of unsorted research on 4 by 6 inch index cards.
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In my 80th year my hands are a tad unsteady, my mind wanders . . . It now seems certain that my work will never be completed. So I offer these few words in the hope that they might somehow survive me.

​*   *   *

Until our movement emerged on that historic evening in San Francisco’s North Beach more than a half-century ago, Canadian artists—most especially, actors—had been shamed into concealing their national identity, usually by trying to pass themselves off as faux Americans. I now offer a solemn roll call of some of them—famous and obscure, living and dead—along with my musings about their unrecognized contributions to American culture.

*William “Tiberius” Shatner (born 1931, Montreal, Quebec, Canada), “the greatest actor of his generation,” in the words of the great Charles Nelson Reilly, has, for example, owed his middling success (in no way proportionate to his outsized talents as a thespian) to a deliberate concealment of his “lowly” origins. Like his fellow countryman, Paul “Lonely Boy” Anka, Mr. Shatner has proven equally adept as a vocalist. Once heard, who could ever forget his moving rendition of “Rocket Man?” The tears streamed from my eyes when I witnessed Shatner’s live rendition of his biggest hit many years ago at the Hollywood Bowl. In that moment, “Rocket Man” became something of a personal anthem for me.
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I now call upon you, Mr. Shatner, to come out of the shadows and to declare yourself! Do not let your Golden Raspberry nomination as “Worst Actor of the Century” cow you into submission. Do you really want to be remembered for all eternity as “Captain Kirk” from a cheesy science fiction show from the 1960s with its Styrofoam rocks and clunky special effects? You are now of a rather advanced age and (may I add) an ample girth to give us a Falstaff for the ages—or perhaps even a King Lear?

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*I submit further that Captain Kirk’s sidekick, the irrepressible Montgomery Scott, played by James Doohan (born 1920, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), very likely was prematurely beamed up to Heaven (2005) due to the unbearable stress caused by trying to live the lie that he was a “Scotsman” rather than a Canadian. One may only hope that in his Heavenly Home he no longer has to adopt that stupid accent. Rest in peace, “Scotty.” May the Force be with you.

*Eugene Levy (born 1946, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada), heretofore typecast in such demeaning roles as “Jim’s Dad” in American Pie (1999) (note the cruel irony of the title!), could, I believe, show himself to be an actor of enormous dramatic range if it were not for the persistent stereotyping of Canadians as incompetents, buffoons and clowns. The nadir of Mr. Levy’s career no doubt came when he was typecast as a mentally defective folksinger in Christopher Guest’s A Mighty Wind (2003). Have you no shame, Mr. Guest?

*Jiminy Glick, perhaps better known to my American readership by his alter ego, Martin Short (born 1950, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada), is, for all intents and purposes, the inventor of the modern talk show format. After a long period of apprenticeship, he became the star of Primetime Glick. Those who followed—Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Carson, and Letterman—were merely orbiting his star.
                        
Yet, instead of being lauded for his substantial contribution to television history, he has been ridiculed for his morbid obesity and unusual vocal inflections, both of which were, after all, inherited conditions. Unfortunately, his checkered career nosedived when his only movie, Jiminy Glick in Lalawood (2004), received a 22% Rotten Tomatoes rating, capped by Richard Roeper’s career-ending, “It didn’t work. There’s not a movie here.” Glick has spent the last sixteen years on a fat farm.

*And yet these brutal attempts to suppress the native genius of the Canadian soul have not been altogether successful. I’m thinking, of course, of the Naked Gun Trilogy (1988, 1991, 1994)—a slice of cinematic history that eclipses in imaginative scope and near flawless execution the more highly regarded “Apu” (Ray), “Color” (Kieslowski), and “Faith” (Bergman) trilogies of world cinema. It can only be sheer prejudice against star Leslie Nielsen’s Canadian roots (born 1926, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, died 2010) that could possibly explain why Mr. Nielsen’s suave and debonair Lieutenant Frank Drebin is not spoken of in the same breath as the patently inferior performances of Bogart as Sam Spade and Mitchum as Philip Marlowe.

One is drawn inevitably to the centerpiece of the daringly conceived triptych, Naked Gun 2 ½: The Smell of Fear (1991), called by no less an authority than the peerless Charles Nelson Reilly “the most astonishing sequel since Coppola’s Godfather II.” The estimable Mr. Reilly goes on to say, “It is upon this fulcrum [i.e., Naked Gun 2 ½] that the meticulously and, how shall I put it, architectonically constructed narrative [of the trilogy] pivots, as it were, toward its almost unendurably sustained, nuanced, nearly unwatchable climax in the brilliant Academy Award sequence of Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Assault.”  

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I must note, in passing, the stellar work in all three films by non-Canadian O. J. Simpson as the unforgettable “Norberg.” I’m informed that Mr. Simpson is no longer incarcerated. Perhaps he might wish to reprise his signature role in the long-awaited Naked Gun IV: The Search for More Money.

*As I faintly hear the soft tolling of a bell, I know that Time will not permit an examination, in depth, of that other brilliant trilogy (Austin Powers--1997, 1999, 2002), conceived, written, directed and starring Sir Michael Myers (born 1963, Scarborough, Ontario, Canada) in the dual roles of Austin Powers, “International Man of Mystery,” and his arch-nemesis, Dr. Evil. How can one actor play with equal effectiveness two such diametrically opposed characters? The critical faculty is utterly defeated by an artistic achievement of this magnitude.                                                                                                           
True, Sir Alec Guinness played nine roles in Robert Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), but Sir Alec himself confided to me shortly before his death that “Sir Michael’s performance, alas, is beyond my range.” And then followed the following poignant death-bed confession: “Whenever I see [the Austin Powers Trilogy] I begin to doubt whether I made the right career choice. You know, I won an Academy Award for The Bridge on the River Kwai [1957] and was once considered a pretty fair Shakespearean actor. You don’t think I’ll only be remembered for that stupid role in the Space movie? My God! My God! I did it for the money! I did it for the money!”

Shortly after this Cri du Coeur, Sir Alec breathed his last. I gently touched the great man’s brow, and whispered, “May the Force be with you, Obi-Wan. Requiescat in pace.”

Sir Alec was not the only actor to be adversely affected by Sir Michael’s astonishing gifts. The true cognoscenti have already reevaluated the received wisdom that Sean Connery was the definitive James Bond. Connery’s reputation is only partially saved by the fortunate detail that Sir Michael’s thoroughgoing re-imagination of the Bond character is rather thinly disguised as “Austin Powers,” saving Connery from invidious comparisons that would surely have left his reputation as the ultimate, suave “lady’s man” in ruins. One critic put the matter bluntly: “Powers is Bond on steroids” (Charles Nelson Reilly).

Admittedly, Sir Michael’s scatological humor leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of his critics. It must always be so when the staid “guardians of conventional morality” encounter the sheer untamable adventurousness of a Wild Genius. Yet who knew before he struggled to open up the Way that so much could be squeezed out of this fundamental vein of human experience? His efforts in this area have proven to be a loadstone of prodigious size for all who have dared to follow him down the narrow passage which he—with great difficulty—has opened up to our great and lasting benefit and, yes, relief. Indeed, Sir Michael has left us all far, far behind.

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Let me conclude this brief sketch of the Canadian soul with a few general remarks about our sisters and brothers to the North who have been so deeply misunderstood.

We call them out of the deepening shadows of self-loathing and despondency into the Light. We proclaim to the world that Canadians are not buffoons, fools, and second-class citizens; nor are they “talentless hacks,” as some would have you believe. No, they have as much right to human dignity and respect as we do—even if ours is, admittedly, an immeasurably greater nation.

If we diminish them, surely we diminish ourselves. If we can raise the consciousness of the American public, make our fellow countrymen see that our northerly brethren are as worthy of respect as ourselves, then Lonely Boy need be lonely no more.

O Canada! O Canada! O Lonely Boy! You shall be lonely no more!

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Postscript

Our unnamed narrator passed away shortly after completing the above manuscript. We’ve been requested by the executors of the family estate to withhold his name from the public and to destroy all documents relating to his life’s work. This means, of course, that his unpublished autobiography, The Circus of Soul: The Unknown Story of a Sixties Counterculture Revolutionary, will remain unknown. And the same must now be said for his projected ten volume masterwork, The Soul of Canada, which was to be crowned with the magisterial Sir Michael Myers: The Biography of a Wild Genius (with Charles Nelson Reilly).

As can be gathered from the foregoing manuscript, Mr. Reilly was the primary intellectual inspiration for our narrator. Unfortunately, work began to stall on their collaborative enterprise, The Soul of Canada, when Reilly, on 25 May 2007, created the funniest joke ever written and, upon reading it, began to laugh uncontrollably until he, quite literally, according to an official autopsy report, died laughing.

It might be noted here that Paul “Lonely Boy” Anka was born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, on July 30 1941 to parents of Lebanese Christian descent. On September 6, 1990, Mr. Anka became a naturalized citizen of the United States of America. Today he’s a multimillionaire who owns a personal jet.

Finally, it can now be definitively stated that the Canada First Movement (CFM), which began with such fervor more than a half-century ago, died quietly in the midst of the Covid Era.
 

​The Editors

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Don Plansky has participated in many OLLI at SF State writer workshops. In a former incarnation, he worked as a freelance journalist, contributing more than 200 articles to The Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, as well as book reviews for The Pacific World: Journal of the Institute of Buddhist Studies. Don has been a member of the Vistas & Byways Editorial Board since 2015.

Other Works in this Issue
Focus
An Editorial Note

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