Sept. 9: September

September 1 should be New Year's Day.

Wouldn't that be awesome? We would celebrate New Year's Eve not by freezing our butts off but by having clambakes on the beach. On New Year's Day, we would bid farewell not just to another year but to another summer. We would wake on the morning of September 1 ready to start anew. More things start in September anyway.

School starts in September. The National Football League starts in September. The National Hockey League begins playing exhibition games in September. Even more awesome: we would start the new year with a long weekend.

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Sorry Christopher Hitchens, religion doesn't poison everything. The Greek Orthodox Church knew what it was doing when it decided September 1 should be New Year's Day. If you want to ring in a new year when it's cold enough to freeze your Auld Lang Syne off, be my guest. But I'll party with the Greeks if I have a say in it.

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In Vancouver, there is an outfit called Anvil Press that, every Labour Day Weekend, would do something called the three-day-novel competition. It is exactly what it purported to be. People around the world were challenged to write a novel in three days and then submit their work; first prize was a publishing contract. Hayden Trenholm, a Calgary writer who I had a very casual acquaintance with, won it in 1992 for his novel, A Circle of Birds. 

I entered that contest five years in a row. I never won. This does not surprise me. All five of the novels were garbage. One of them was so offensive that it cost me the respect of two of my friends. The best novel was probably the first, a hardboiled private detective novel that I wrote the Labour Day before I started my final year in high school. The novel was called Love is a Bullet and the only good thing about it was the title and the fact that it helped score me my very girlfriend who, as of this writing, has just moved into a condo - along with her boyfriend and daughter - in the very same city where Anvil Press is located.

That's right. She moved into her new combo in SEPTEMBER.

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About two blocks away from where I live, there is a tree that begins losing its leaves in August. Most of the trees I see right now are going from green to yellow and orange and brown, but that tree starts shedding its skin around the time of the August long weekend. I don't know what's wrong with that tree. Perhaps someone put a curse on it.

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This September has been the worst September of my life. I was laid off my job as editor of my community's newspaper. I was trying to think if I ever lost another job in September. I don't think I have. I was dismissed from two previous newspaper jobs - one in December and another in May. I was fired from Tom's House of Pizza in Calgary in November of 1990. I left a job in September, but was never dismissed or laid off from one.

This one hurts though.

 

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In September of 1991, I became a student at the Rosebud School of the Arts, which is a hybrid of a Bible college/theatre school on the outskirts of Drumheller. When I got there, the school was VERY conservative. So conservative was it that a man was not allowed to appear bare chested on the college's theatre stage, even if the scene took place at the beach. At the school's dinner theatre, there was a strict dress code. Women who worked there were allowed to wear skirts as long as they came down to an inch above the knees. They always had to wear pantyhose but bare legs were allowed in the summer. 

Back then, most of the plays were written locally. In fact, my arrival in Rosebud coincided with a fairly recent development - Rosebud would begin producing plays that had been written by people outside of the hamlet. They did JB Priestley's An Inspector Calls,  surely a classic of the mid-20th century theatre scene. Earlier, the school courted controversy with Cotton Patch Gospel, which dared to tell the gospel narrative through the lens of southern bluegrass music.

But it WAS conservative. It has since abandoned its conservatism and embraced a more commercial model. I don't think they'd ever do a full-fledged burlesque show, but they have done more modern fare like Anne of Green Gables, Godspell, Diary of Anne Frank, Spitfire Grill, and Barefoot in the Park.

I realize that I bring up Rosebud a lot on Rotating Pineapple. Weird, that I remember it so fondly seeing as how I was only there for eight months. During that time, I tried to alienate myself from everyone there. When I left, I don't think anyone was sad to see me go, but they welcomed me back, as a visitor, during my infrequent returns.

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And now I remember that the title for this note comes from Sue Dupuis, who I met in Rosebud and so anything she says will remind me of Rosebud.