The As It Happens Files Page 11

MB: No, it’s a manual chair.

  ML: This is your arms and shoulders doing the work.

  MB: I was using my arms the whole time. When I got to a snowdrift, the chair wouldn’t go through it. I couldn’t get going enough up the hill and through the drift, so I crawled through the snow and dragged my chair, and when I got through the drift, I’d get back in my chair and wheel.

  I went through two drifts—and they were anywhere from 20 to 30 feet long—and I looked at the third drift down at the bottom of the next hill that I was coming to, and it was at least 50 feet long.

  ML: You must have been crying with frustration.

  MB: Well, I was looking at it and I was looking at the hill, and I said, If the next one is the same as that one and I can’t see a house from the top of that hill, I’m going to go back to the van. I’m strong enough that I can make it back. And I’d just started down that hill—I was about halfway down—when a truck came up behind me.

  ML: And he was out looking for you?

  MB: He was out looking for me. He’d just started at one o’clock and this was around three, so he had just been out for two hours.

  ML: What did you say?

  MB: “Am I glad to see you!” I don’t know if I said it as much as I cried it.

  ML: Yes. Because then all the relief would have come flowing out.

  MB: That’s when the emotions kicked in that I was okay. I wasn’t sure at that time whether I was fully intact, because being a paraplegic, I can’t feel anything below my waist, and I wasn’t sure if my legs were frozen and my toes were frozen, because I expended all my energy on my upper body, keeping it warm and making sure that it was intact, because I couldn’t afford to lose a finger or an arm or anything. But if I was to lose a toe or a foot, to me it’s not a big thing, other than cosmetically—I would have an empty spot on my chair.

  ML: Were you okay?

  MB: I was totally fine. I had a scratch on my knee from when I got out of the van, and other than that—I think that the people who were looking for me and didn’t know I was okay had a harder go of it than I did.

  ML: Your dogs are okay, too?

  MB: My dogs are unbelievable. They’re here and they’re happy. They won’t leave me; they’re always laying at my feet. That was the hardest thing: when I was in the van and waiting and wasn’t sure if I would make it—

  ML: You were afraid for the dogs?

  MB: I was really afraid for the dogs. And I was in a dilemma: do you leave them locked in the van or do you leave the van door open so … they can come and go as they want, and at what point in time do you make that decision to open the door and leave it open or what?

  ML: Glad you didn’t have to.

  MB: You know what, there’s a lot of people glad and there’s no one gladder than this gentleman right here.

  ML: I hope you have a very good year.

  MB: You know what, they’ve all been good years.

  With that kind of spirit, you knew that Mike probably would have a good 2003, but still, I was surprised, when I had a chance to talk with him again five years later, to hear about all the good things that had happened to him directly as a result of driving into a ditch on a winter night in Saskatchewan. The first thing that happened was that he came into some money.

  MB: After I got lost, the [Regina] Leader Post did a follow-up story on my wheelchair basketball team, and a gentleman here in Regina phoned me up and gave me a cheque for ten grand.

  ML: A total stranger?

  MB: Never seen him before in my life. He just said, “These kids need it.” So with that ten thousand dollars, I kicked in seven thousand dollars of my own money and I bought eight brand-new wheelchairs, and that kicked off our wheelchair basketball programme. It got it into the next phase that it had to go, and now these kids that I started with are all in Grade 12 and just graduated.

  One of my kids was in Grade 10 and he had a 63 average—one of the smartest kids on my team. And I talked to him. He went from 63 in Grade 10 to 93 in Grade 11. He quit smoking and he’s looking at going to the University of Chicago. He did his SATs this weekend.

  ML: You must be so proud.

  MB: He’s looking at playing basketball for the University of Chicago and actually getting an education, from me getting lost in the snowbank. It’s such a stupid story; a stupid act on my part gave all these kids a whole different opportunity.

  ML: What’s your team called?

  MB: The Paratroopers. And they’re a really cool bunch of kids.… Way back when, three weeks after I got lost—I coached a young girls’ team and my Paratroopers—we played a basketball game between my able-bodied girls and my disabled kids. They had a great time and I thought, That was pretty cool—and then my phone started ringing.

  “I heard you played a game.… Will you play my team?”

  “Will you play my team?”

  We played seven weeks in a row!

  ML: How did your team do in those games?

  MB: I was the referee so I cheated a little bit, just because you want everyone involved to have fun. And I also wanted my kids to learn, so as their skills developed, I called it harder.

  But the head of the league—they found out that I was doing these exhibition games—he came to me and asked me to join the league the next year. A wheelchair team in an able-bodied league!

  ML: Really. Is that the first time that’s happened?

  MB: First time in the world.… We’re still playing. That programme is still going on six years later. Just three weeks ago, I went out and bought more new chairs, so I had ten good ones, five on each team.

  Now I go to schools with all these chairs and do talks. I talk about getting lost in the snowstorm.

  ML: You just never know, do you?

  I said to Mike that it seemed to me that he must have restored hope to a lot of broken lives, and I wondered what had happened in his life to restore hope after he got hurt.

  MB: I’ll probably cry here. I had huge family support, and that’s one thing that happened to me this year: my dad passed away. That’s why it’s hard …

  When I got hurt, my dad was almost the same age I am now, so he walked in and he was a brick. He never showed that it bothered him. I found out later he almost lost his business, he was so emotionally stressed. We were building a workshop and he had just installed the windows, and he ripped one out and lowered it so I’d be able to see.

  My coaching is my dad, too; he started me coaching. He said, “You’re going to coach your little brother.”

  And I did that as a 15-year-old. And my little brother, who was 12 when I got hurt, now works with the disabled community; that’s his job.

  ML: What a difference you’ve made.

  MB: The only way we can pass on a legacy to people is through our coaching, through our lifestyle, through our

  Living.… What kind of people did you help develop on

  your path through life? I’m passing on the legacy of my dad and my grandfather and his dad before him.… There’s two times in my life that I thought I was going to die. When I had my accident as a 20-year-old, and I hadn’t lived, I was scared about losing my life. When I got stuck in the snowbank and I left my van to wheel, I didn’t think I would make it when I left. But when I left that day, I wasn’t scared. I’d lived a life. I did all that I thought I was going to accomplish.

  Obviously, some higher power than me decided that these young kids needed someone to be their role model still.

  Seems to me that Mike Brady could be a role model for us all.

  When I’d first talked to Mike Brady, after he got rescued in the snowstorm back in 2003, the first words I actually spoke to him were, “Aren’t you the luckiest guy in the world.” This to a guy in a wheelchair! I wanted to cut my tongue out, I felt like such an idiot. I was referring to the rescue, of course, but still.

  But now I think, okay, maybe not the luckiest guy in the world—no denying he’s had some bad luck here and there—but here’s a man who knows who he is an
d what he can do and what life’s all about, and as he says, he has a great family and good friends, and he’s made a difference … that’s pretty lucky, don’t you think?

  ELEVEN

  This Is the Dance Portion

  Radio with a good beat

  Like any team effort, As It Happens is at its best when the team are all pulling in the same direction, but it’s just as vital to have people whose tastes and skills complement each other. It’s very useful, for instance, to have people with good musical taste in your midst, as well as interviewers, writers and chase producers. And we did, though you wouldn’t always think so if you heard some of the stuff we played—I’m thinking disco, techno, hip hop, ABBA and almost anything that makes it into the annual Eurovision music competition, which is notable not only for its, ahem, music but also for the fact that the winning song one year was performed by an Israeli transsexual.

  Mainly, though, we liked to play blues, jazz, rock, country, swing or something glorious from the classical repertoire. Barbara Budd fancies that she has a good singing voice and likes to sing along when the occasion calls for it, but as I mentioned earlier, she thinks I’m tone-deaf and she always greatly preferred that I not join her. I will admit to being somewhat underdeveloped, musically speaking, but I like to think I can spot great talent when it comes along—Feist, for example. She swept the Juno Awards in 2008 and high time, too.

  Also, I can tell when a composer is insane.

  After suffering through hours and hours of Olympic skating on TV the year that everyone was dancing to Bolero, I was pretty sure that Ravel must have been suffering from something himself when he wrote it. As it turns out, British psychologist Eve Sobolska had come to the same conclusion. In 1997 she decided to look into the matter, and we were eager to hear the result of her research.

  ML: Dr. Sobolska, I’m going to go way out on a limb here and say that it comes as no surprise to me that Bolero may be the product of a diseased mind. Is that how you got connected to this story?

  ES: Yes. I used to get very irritated by the piece, and I wondered why. And at the time, I had my niece who is a musicologist, who studies theory of music. She was staying with me and I asked her, “Monica, why is it so irritating? So repetitive. I can’t stand it.”

  And then we acquired a score, and she produced some evidence that actually the very same theme is repeated, almost without any alteration, I think it’s 18 times in 17 minutes.

  …

  ML: I guess that’s what it is that drives everyone crazy.

  ES: Absolutely.

  ML: So you got to thinking, why would a talented musician produce such a work?

  ES: Yes.

  ML: And what did you learn?

  ES: Well, I then started to read his biographies, and I had remembered that he had dementia. But I didn’t know until I started to study this particular piece of music in relation to his other [work], and I started to study the pattern of his creativity—I didn’t realize it was one of his last pieces. And I didn’t realize that a year before he composed Bolero, he already showed signs of disorientation and, one might say, dementia.

  ML: What signs?

  ES: A year before he composed Bolero, he became disoriented during a performance of his music—unusually so.

  ML: And what happened?

  ES: He just got lost while conducting a piece of music.

  ML: And there were other episodes later on?

  ES: Yes, later on. And then he somehow collected himself and then he composed Bolero in summer 1928, and then there were some further episodes of confusion, and then, amazingly, he managed to produce his two masterpieces, the Concerto in G Major and the Concerto for the Left Hand.

  ML: So what do you think the problem was? Alzheimer’s?

  ES: No, no. Alzheimer’s is unlikely to go hand in hand with creativity; it’s a very uncreative condition. I think he had influx in his brain, and this condition can fluctuate indeed.

  ML: Can you explain that to me?

  ES: Well, for instance, somebody who has blood pressure—and he may have had high blood pressure. He had an enlarged heart, for instance, and on this account, he was protected from military service—somebody who has high blood pressure can have small hemorrhages in his brain. Small ones, not necessarily large ones. And there is usually a swelling around the hemorrhage, which can then subside, and therefore the whole picture can fluctuate, and the person can improve, and he did.

  ML: So you just get these episodes, during one of which we assume he composed Bolero.

  ES: Yes. During his lighter moments, yes, absolutely. But on the other hand, this is my hypothesis and it might be completely wrong. But I think already some damage to his brain must have been done, and the Bolero, I argue, is a piece of musical perseveration, which means repetitiveness.

  ML: What did your musical niece think of your theory?

  ES: Well, she disowned me a bit. She said, “Well, I’m not having anything to do with you.” But on the other hand, she agreed with me that it was extremely repetitive and very unusual in classical music.

  ML: Is it true that Ravel himself didn’t like Bolero?

  ES: That’s what I have read. He was quite irritated [about] how instantly famous it became.

  ML: Poor man!

  ES: Yes. Well, I think, no doubt he was a genius, and like many geniuses, they have great emotional insight into their conditions, and I think this is the tragedy almost. I think he somehow knew; he knew something was amiss.

  So there you have it, I thought. Mystery solved. Bolero is the product of a diseased mind.

  Our audience, I have to say, were not of one mind about Dr. Sobolska’s theory.

  Hello, this is Emmanuel from London, Ontario. This is my diagnosis: the good doctor seems to be suffering from a condition peculiar to psychiatrists, I think—namely, an irrepressible desire to construct psychological profiles of people who are long dead or whom they’ve never met. The only known treatment is a strong dose of ridicule.

  This is another Eva calling from Toronto.… Ultimately, the reason why he wrote it was so that Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean could perform it on ice. I saw them do that at the Montreal Forum many years ago. It was an event of such magic as I will never forget.

  Hi. This is Brian Murrow calling from Brampton. There’s a story about the first performance of Ravel’s Bolero. At the end of the performance, a woman in the audience supposedly yelled out, “He’s mad! He’s mad!”

  To which Ravel replied, “She’s the only one who understands.”

  My name is Gilles Losier. I’m calling from Montreal. Now, about Ravel’s Bolero: I think it’s a misunderstood piece of music. It’s a musician’s piece of music. It’s a mantra, and I really feel that only people that have good ears can understand this music, and I pooh-pooh the psychiatrist.

  This is Edith Matheson calling from Alberta. Thank God someone has finally attempted to explain the frenzied phenomenon of Ravel’s Bolero. I must admit that, not only does it irritate me, but it makes me feel absolutely unhinged. If it’s played when I’m at the symphony, the first thing I want to do is plug my ears and run screaming out of the auditorium.

  This is Ben Metcalfe at Shawnigan Lake. Somewhere in there one of you mentioned that Ravel was reputed to have disliked Bolero after he wrote it. I can give you his exact quote about that. He said, “I only made two serious mistakes in my life: one was a woman in the south of France and the other was Bolero.”

  We had a lot of fun with the Bolero brouhaha, which happened during my first month of hosting, and for me it was an early indication of how easy it would be to weave the lighter stories in amongst the more serious ones on As It Happens—and how much the audience loved it when we did. I was determined to make the most of it, and in this ambition, I found that Barbara was always a ready ally. Indeed, she was usually the first to become aware of the situation when we crammed the show too full of serious or depressing stuff and forgot to sprinkle a bit of fun around.

 
Barbara Budd, in case you don’t know, is also an actor of some repute, having trod the boards at Stratford with people like William Hutt and Maggie Smith. So she was well equipped to carry on the fine storytelling traditions begun by Al Maitland. Her readings of How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Bone Button Borscht, among others, have become as much a part of the show’s seasonal fare as Al’s Shepherd and The Gift of the Magi. Combine this with her own flair for writing, and you have someone who can and does frequently take an unremarkable script and bring it to life on the air. Barbara’s talents weren’t always sufficiently appreciated, though; we did take her for granted at times. And then she would go away for a while, and we’d become aware that the show wasn’t sounding quite the way it ought to—like the time she fractured her leg during March Break.

  She was showing her son and a friend around the Brock Monument on the Niagara Escarpment, the site of the Battle of Queenston Heights during the War of 1812, when a piece of ice sent her crashing to the ground. Heroically, she managed to get them all back to the car and then back to Toronto before taking herself off to Emergency to have her bones set. None of this was public knowledge, though, and when she didn’t come back to the show as expected, some of our listeners began to get a bit agitated. “Where is Barbara?” they wanted to know.

  So one fine day, we rang her up.

  ML: Barbara!

  BB: Mary Lou, how are you?

  ML: I’m fine. How are you?

  BB: It’s so nice to talk to you on the phone. I listen to you every night.

  ML: More to the point, where are you? Because, you know, people have been asking. I mean, they think, okay, so you went away on March Break—that’s been over for weeks. All I’ve been able to tell them is we haven’t seen you.

  BB: I think it’s so nice people even care that I’m away. I’m in …

  Where do you think any As It Happens girl would be when you called her?

  ML: Well, you’d be in Reading, of course.

  BB: That’s exactly where I am.