ADVENTURE IN ALBERTA
Kids’ book relives Kelly’s youth
Dave Kelly was nine years old when he got his first glimpse of Alberta.
He was living in Ottawa at the time, although he wouldn’t be for long. It was in the 1970s and his father was planning to take the clan to Calgary where he hoped to find work.
Kelly remembers looking at some flyers about his new home. To a nine-year-old, it almost seemed like a mythical land.
“I was thinking ‘Man, we’re going to go out there and there’s going to be cowboys and guns everywhere and it’s going to be amazing,’ ” says Kelly. “I remember the excitement of being somewhere new and the fear of having to go to a new school and not knowing anybody. For a lot of people I know, we all moved here as kids. There’s not a lot of people who were born here. So it’s the excitement of moving somewhere and the fear of moving here.
“And I thought, well if you get an elk in their underwear then you’ve got something,”
I Met An Elk in Edson Once, written by Kelly and illustrated by Toronto artist Wes Tyrell, is a fun and poignant trip through Alberta taken by a bespectacled boy, his mom and a talking elk named Rusty.
Rusty, who is actually a she, is in search of her Uncle Todd. So the elk borrows the boy’s underwear and T-shirt for reasons that aren’t made completely clear and the three embark on an epic journey to find the elusive uncle. The boy and his mom, like Kelly back in the day, are newcomers to Alberta and the boy, in particular, is in need of a new friend.
So the story unfolds in rhyme as the trio enjoys various Albertabased adventures. Through Tyrell’s imaginative illustrations and Kelly’s writing, the book conjures up a sense of awe at the surroundings, which is also something Kelly drew from his own childhood.
“When I grew up in Ottawa, I never saw any of that stuff,” says Kelly. “I never saw deer, I never saw elk, I never saw bears. I never saw any of that stuff. At the time, when you looked at anything from Alberta, that’s what you see. It was a big, exciting thing to think about as a kid. We went to Jasper and we saw marmots and we saw mountain goats. We saw all of that.”
The three do indeed meet some marmots near Jasper, where they also take the SkyTram. They take in a parade at the Calgary Stampede, drink tea in Lethbridge’s Japanese-Canadian Cultural Centre, visit the badlands and Royal Tyrrell Museum and go to a waterpark in Edmonton.
Kelly, a longtime voice actor and playwright in Calgary who hosted Citytv Calgary’s Breakfast Television until 2009, wrote the rhyming storyline first before looking for illustrators.
“Literally, my inbox would say Elk in Underwear #1, Elk in Underwear #2 and Elk in Underwear #3,” he says. “People would send in and say ‘This is how I would do an elk in their gitch.’ We used that not so much to audition, Wes is a tremendous illustrator, but just to see who could get the feel for what we were after. Then it was a lot of back-and-forth around ‘How does underwear look tight on an elk?’ ”
Having serious conversations about such things may seem a little surreal, but it’s a testament to how seriously the book was taken by its creators. Kelly was contacted by the Nova Scotia-based MacIntyre Purcell Publishing, who gave him the task of creating an Alberta children’s book.
It was probably also a little surreal to see Kelly practising his rhymes at the Calgary Stampede, where he hosts the chuckwagon races. He would spend the hour
between the daily production meeting and the start of the races sitting in his “little closet” and attempting to find words that rhymed with Drumheller, among others.
“That’s where its infancy was,” Kelly says. “It was being around a bunch of young kids walking through the Stampede all googlyeyed at what they could see and saying ‘Can I capture that feeling as a kid?’”
Kelly, who is also an actor and prolific playwright, says I Met an Elk in Edson isn’t all that different from many of his plays, which include the Lunchbox Theatre-produced Epiphany and Dad’s Piano.
“If you’ve seen the plays I write and stuff I do, it tends to be about feeling part of something and feeling left out and finding your way in,” Kelly says. “This is a child’s view on being lonely and trying to fit in. Psychologists would not take long looking at all my plays and this and say ‘Boy, that Dave is a lonely guy.’”
As the father of two — Tess is five and John is six — Kelly says he has nothing but sympathy for parents who are forced to repeat books ad nauseam as bedtime readings. This is one reason he wanted to ensure it was at least mildly amusing for adults and could also appeal to a wide age-range of kids.
As for his own kids, Kelly says he has read it to them a number of times.
“Here’s the tragedy of it all,” Kelly says. “I read it to them and Tess goes: ‘The drawings are hilarious!’ I said ‘I know, and Daddy did the story. What do you think of that?’ And she said ‘The drawings are hilarious!’ So I’ve sold her. That’s the end of that. Wes is really excited that Tess doesn’t even notice that the story is funny.”
Dave Kelly Live is moving on up.
The former TV host’s popular mix of songs, stories, laughs, games and surprises began life 15 shows ago at Lunchbox Theatre. His first four shows sold out within days of tickets going on sale, so Kelly and his crew had to look for a bigger venue. Their search took them to Theatre Junction Grand.
Last year for his holiday show, Kelly moved Dave Kelly Live over to the Jack Singer Concert Hall in Arts Commons and it promptly sold out. So this year, Kelly has chosen the Jubilee Auditorium.
“It would be great to fill the Jube, but a lot of people are busy this time of year with office parties and other commitments. But we just don’t want to have to turn people away,” says Kelly who will host Dave Kelly Live: A Christmas Special at the Jubilee on Dec. 9 at 8 p.m.
Kelly’s holiday guests will be The Young Canadians of the Calgary Stampede and country star Paul Brandt. Last year, he was joined by Jann Arden.
“Jann can’t be live with us this year because she is touring in support of her new Christmas album but she is sending us a video. Paul Brandt will be with us to sing some of his Christmas hit songs and Hayley Wickenheiser, Canada’s premiere female hockey player, will sit down with me for a chat.”
Kelly says Calgary is unique when it comes to family Christmas traditions since so many here have come from away.
“Not many people in Calgary go to Grandma’s house to celebrate Christmas unless they are willing to take a plane or drive quite a distance.
“We took a survey of the current members of the Young Canadians and discovered very few of their parents and especially grandparents were born in the city. This means Calgarians have had to create new holiday traditions because, in effect, so many of us here are newcomers.
His own family came from Ottawa in the 1970s because Kelly’s father worked in construction and this is where those jobs were at the time.
To celebrate this phenomenon, Kelly went to the Centre for Newcomers and invited 21 really new Calgarians, ages 7 to 14, to join the show.
“These kids are from Nepal, Iran, Sudan, Singapore and everywhere in between. They’ve worked with a few members of the Young Canadians to learn a song which they will sing during the big finale.”
One of the most popular segments of Dave Kelly Live is Jim’s Bits with Village Brewery cofounder Jim Button. The newest version has Kelly joining Button in a large bathtub for In the Tub with Jim.
“For this show, Jim and I are going to be joined in the tub by a very special, very jolly guest and let me tell you that was quite a video shoot.”
Tickets for Dave Kelly Live: A Christmas Special are on sale at ticketmaster.ca or at davekellylive.com