The Quack, issue 333
The smirk edition
Good morning, angels.
I just settled into my cozy Quack-writing chair with a pot of Quack-writing tea steeping on the table. Seems like it’s about time to write the Quack.
Grab a cup from the cupboard. Let’s do this.
23
I logged onto Facebook the other day and an invitation popped up to join a group call “Memories of CBC Windsor — Anniversary Edition”. Windsor is where my CBC career got started 25 years ago, so I gleefully accepted and was greeted by the above photo taken at the Canada Day parade down Ouellette Avenue in 2001. That’s me at age 23, fourth from the left, completely unqualified for anything I was doing. I have my arm around a woman who was way out of my league who would marry me a few months later anyway.
Have I told you the story of how I got into CBC? It’s ridiculous.
I was a CBC Radio listener in my late teens and early 20s. In June of 2000, I was listening to our local morning show host (Paul Vasey, third from the right in that photo) introduce a contest they were running for Canada Day. He asked listeners to write a parody of a famous Canadian song. The best would win two first class train tickets to Ottawa for Canada Day, VIP passes to all the shows on Parliament Hill, and three nights stay at a hotel downtown.
To this day, this was the least CBC Radio prize I’ve ever heard of. The most anyone usually gets from the public broadcaster is a mug.
As it happened, I’d been training for this contest for years. I was on student council in high school, and my shtick was writing parodies of popular songs for the morning announcements about things like the daily cafeteria specials.
As I listened to the other entries play on the radio, I realized people were making a huge mistake. Everyone was choosing parody songs that were already funny. Most of them were rewrites of the Barenaked Ladies “If I had a million dollars.” If there’s one thing I learned singing into the microphone of the P.A. system at Leamington High School, it’s impossible to take an already funny song and make it funnier. Whatever you write is just going to be disappointing.
My pre-Erin girlfriend at the time knew if we were going to make this work, we had to choose a beloved Canadian song that wasn’t funny in any way. Something earnest.
We chose “Snowbird” by Anne Murray.
Instead of “Spread your tiny wings and fly away. And take the snow back with you where you came from on this day,” we sang “We market ourselves as the land of snow and ice. We’re kind of like Americans — except that we’re all nice.”
Anyway. We won. We went to Ottawa. We had a great time.
Two weeks later, my girlfriend and I were at a party. It was well after midnight. We had imbibed a few drinks.
“We never thanked CBC for sending us to Ottawa!” we realized.
So we picked up the phone and called the talkback number and rambled a drunken message of thanks to Paul Vasey and the rest of the Morning Watch crew.
Of course, they played it on the radio the next day.
Here’s where fate stepped in.
Later that morning, the staff at CBC Windsor had a meeting to discuss what to do to celebrate the upcoming 50th anniversary of the station. They tossed around ideas for a while. Someone proposed they ask a local songwriter to write a theme song for the occasion.
“I like it,” said a producer, “but who are we going to get? Does anyone know any songwriters?”
There was a long pause as the group thought.
“What about those drunk college kids who called the talkback line last night?”
Which is exactly what they did.
We wrote them a ridiculous song. They shot a TV commercial with us performing it. It played all through the summer of 2000.
Sometime in August, the phone rang at my parents’ house. My dad answered. It was a producer at CBC.
“Hi, I’m looking for Dave.”
“Sorry,” said my dad. “He’s out right now. Can I help you with something?”
“Oh shoot,” said the producer. “I’m Eric at CBC. We realized we never paid the kids for that theme song, so I was just calling to negotiate.”
My dad didn’t wait a beat. He knew I was getting ready to enter my third and final year of college.
“I bet he’d do it for free if you gave him an internship,” he said.
“How about we do both?” said Eric.
**
I started my internship the following January. They gave me three months in the PR office.
I was grateful, but I didn’t want to be in the PR office. I wanted to be in the newsroom.
I was already in the building, which was a huge first step. I knew I had just three months to make something bigger of this internship, so I started going to the morning story meetings for the Morning Show.
“PR folks don’t usually go to story meetings,” said my supervisor.
“Oh, I think I’d still like to,” I said.
(Now scroll up and take another look at me in that photo. Look at that smirk. The absolute cheek. Unqualified for anything, and yet confident he could do anything.)
I sat in every story meeting. I was terrified of everyone. I watched every day as the producer went around the room asking for pitches. Every journalist in the room had to pitch two or three solid stories every day. They skipped over the PR kid every time.
After a week, when they went to skip over me, I cleared my throat.
“I’ve got a story,” I said.
Everyone in the room looked at me.
I drew up all my un-earned confidence and pitched a story. It doesn’t really matter what it was, but they liked it.
“How are we gonna do this?” said the producer. “We don’t normally send PR interns to cover stories.”
“Can I do it on the weekend?” I asked.
The producer thought a moment. “Sure,” she said. “Why not.”
From that day on, I never let them skip me in the meeting. I spent the next several months doing all sorts of things on the radio. Traditional journalism, yes. But I was also doing satire. Writing and producing comedy skits. Writing songs. Silly monologues. Satire is a seriously underused treatment in current affairs radio, and the producers seemed to like it.
Everything seemed to be going Davy’s way. I was having a ridiculously fun time making radio. And I’d started dating Erin, who I’d had a crush on for years.
The last day of my internship, I was sitting at my computer writing PR copy about that evening’s TV news. The senior radio producer sat down across from me.
“So it’s your last day,” she said.
“Yup,” I said. “I’ve had a lot of fun.”
She smiled. “I bet you have. What are you doing Monday?” she asked.
I sighed. “Well, I guess I’ll be looking for a job. I’ve got a couple ideas. Nothing set yet.”
“What if you came to work for me in the newsroom?” she said.
The smirk returned.
“Seriously?” I said.
“Seriously,” she said.
That’s around the time the photo was taken. Three months later I’d be reporting from the busiest border crossing in the world immediately after it was closed for 9/11. The next month, I’d be marrying Erin. Two months later, we’d be driving a U-Haul to the Fredericton, where I’d be starting a year-long contract. A year after that, we’d be moving to Iqaluit for my first staff job. And on and on.
I told you it was a ridiculous story.
Bread
Another week has gone by, and I’m still eating sourdough bread with zero pains in my guts. I’ve got a rhythm going now for making bread, so a loaf comes out of the oven just about every day. I’m learning a lot, including the fact that the bread I bragged about in last week’s newsletter was over-fermented. There are a couple of clear signs in the photos that I can clearly see now but was blind to then. Ah well. They were still delicious.
Alright, angels. It’s been a slice. Thanks for hanging out with me for another Sunday morning.
Have a great week.