File this under diary entry.

that was one heck of a weekend. just the fact that I’m saying that on Wednesday points to it being a heck of a weekend.

Saturday was one of those saturdays. one of those saturdays when you wake up old enough to be proud of yourself for waking up with a hangover on a saturday morning. One of those saturdays when you wake up with a proud hangover but don’t have the opportunity to savour it, because you have to get up and dressed and walk into town in the dark little rainy winter saturday morning in search of a cup of bakery coffee and an early meeting at work. you know, one of those saturdays.

But then it was even more kinds of Saturday. The meeting wasn’t too bad and afterwards I was chatting with my sysadmin and he asked what I thought of Squamish and I said that it was great but I was having trouble getting into a local scene. He asked what sort of scene I had in mind and I stumbled through a few bad ideas for getting into a local scene – it always takes me 2 years to get settled in to anywhere, so I haven’t even bothered to come up with some good plans for finding a place in Squamish. One of the half-formed ideas I mentioned was my hope of finding some local theatre, which I hadn’t. “Theatre?” he asked, or words to that effect, “What are you doing this afternoon?”

What I was doing that afternoon, to start with, was climbing into the back of a ’82 brown american sedan with a ’78 engine and driving north to Brackendale with my sysadmin and a couple of his friends who were on their way to a dress rehearsal for a dinner theatre adaptation of Merry Wives of Windsor. I was under the vague impression that I was going to hang out and be the dress audience. Then he said I could dress up and play a servant if I was in to it. I figured he meant a costumed usher or waiter or something. He didn’t, of course, he was asking if I wanted a bit part. Guess who spent their weekend doing Shakespeare? Guess who got up on a real stage in a real costume with a real script in front of a real audience for the first time since, um… Waterloo?

It’s better than just that. The Brackendale Art Gallery is an extraordinary space for dinner theatre, particularly renaissance-era dinner theatre, full of heavy log beams and odd carvings and wall painting and fire places and hanging pennants in faded colours, and strange staircases and upper balconies around the wrong side of the stage. And the cast were blessed with a brilliant costume designer and a hard working musical director. Everyone – actors, “crew”, servers, front-of-stage entertainers, assorted children – were in fabulous custom period dress. The gallery building is run as an grudging collective, the theatre troupe has no director. Everything was adhoc and unlikely. A wonderful sense of immersion developed. The usual massive surreality of a backstage was heightened. Restoration era women in overtightened bodices and complicated hairdos and powder blue down jackets. A perfectly shakespearean bearded figure in expansive pantaloons and authentic looking tights leans out of the shadow of a black velvet curtain, his eyes twinkle for a sec, he picks up an open bottle of Miller Genuine Draft and disappears. Wedged in the doorway of the hectic wood-beamed kitchen, between acts, I eat an entire left over baby chicken carcass while pretty wenches – there is no other word – rush back and forth with trays and banter with shaved-head hoody-wearing bus boys.

Out back of the gallery there is the most beautiful little chapel I think I have ever seen in North America. It’s not big, maybe a dozen pews. Friendly modern colours, fluorescent lights cut to look like clouds, and a mural of Howe Sound at sunset above the stained glass above the altar. It should seem campy but somehow it’s just right. In the back there is a little loft with a bed, and on the wall a framed photocopied cheque for three months rent. Someone lived there? There’s a minora, a wedding registry and lieing on the ledge of the pulpit, in a heavy leather dust cover with an ancient, heavy leather bookmark, a 60’s era edition of “The Prophet” by Kahlil Gibran.

That night is opening night party. The next day it’s raining by the time I get up, and by the time I get dressed it’s already getting dark and I have to hitch out to Brackendale in the rain on the highway to get to the theatre. That doesn’t go so well, but I get there. Already it’s surreal there. I get to get in front of an audience again. They want me to work up some lines for this performance but I’m pretty happy doing my walk-ons and working the curtain (my hardest task) with my “assistant” Marpho, the recovering TO punker who now lives in an ad-hoc house on the outskirts of Squamish and makes bejewelled hammers and such – knick-knacks he says – for a living.

That night is closing night party. First we have to clear the set, pack it all up and sweep the floors, but it’s not too bad when the fiddlers got a lively medieval riff to work on and the audience is hanging around and seems to be helping out. Once we start, we start in the gallery. At some point the scandihoovian greybeard gallery owner turns us out. Back into the ’82 American, which I now recall was pulled over and ticketed for three different violations the night before, all of which were waved “because it’s so close to christmas”. Eventually we make it to a cast members house. We listen to all that music that you can only listen to when buzzed and in a mood without feeling a little silly: Led Zeppelin, the B52s, the Pixie’s louder material. Rock rock rock. We didn’t feel silly that night. It’s quite a group here in Squamish. Ex-80’s soldiers and the types of odd characters who would have gotten swallowed up in some larger scene in a City, but are an empire unto themselves here.

It turns out mondays are the traditional nights for the empire to get together and I’ve been invited. This time I borrow a bike for the rainy transit. This time it’s really raining. It really is a small logging town on the west coast, smack in the pocket of the mountains, right on the fingernail tip of a big finger of the ocean. The clouds are low and dumping, the streetlights are random and pink. At the music director’s/costume designer’s house there are an awful lot of instruments and a thorough jam session.

I had planned to get a lot of work done over the weekend. I’m getting caught up. Heck of a weekend really, if I didn’t mention.