JOKER MYERS SERIOUS ABOUT LOVING CANADA
Canada Mike Myers Doubleday Canada
ERIC VOLMERS
There’s an anecdote in Mike Myers’ new book, Canada, about the perils of fame.
It was 2002 and Myers was one of the biggest movie stars on the planet.
He had just watched the Rangers beat the Maple Leafs at Madison Square Garden.
Having spent most of the evening gorging on MSG-filled concession foods, he found himself in desperate need of a washroom while on the cab ride home.
He quickly located a restaurant with a tiny restroom, but as he was going about his business, he was met by someone he refers to as the “Effusive Fan.”
This fan showed little regard for personal space.
Without getting into the gory details, the story continues with Myers meekly responding in a “diarrhea quiver voice” to the fan’s persistent questions outside the stall as the tiny washroom filled with “fetid fog.”
It’s a great story: funny, more than a little gross and decidedly self-deprecating. It ends with Myers, who hasn’t lived in Canada for decades, coming to a very Canadian conclusion about what being famous feels like.
“Hours of shame sprinkled with moments of unexpected and unexplainable validation,” he writes. Not that he’s complaining. “As I say in the book, when people complain, it really does sound like someone saying ‘Why do they pay me in gold bars? Gold bars are heavy,’ ” says Myers, in a telephone interview with Postmedia. “It’s just that it’s not nothing. It’s happening. And when you grow up in Scarborough, where your dad sells encyclopedias and your mom works in the office of a factory, and you grow up in a country that’s not famous to the rest of the world, you’re not prepared for it.”
Myers opens his colourful new book by discussing fame and our country’s peculiar take on it. One of the early conclusions he comes to is “there is something in our character that distrusts fame.”
That Myers sees this as an admirable quality may seem strange on the surface. He is, after all, one of many Canadians who had to leave the country to find showbiz success. He remains one of our most famous exports.
But from his years as a breakout player on Saturday Night Live, to his movie stardom in massive Hollywood franchises such as Austin Powers, Wayne’s World and Shrek, his career has been exclusively based in the U.S.
But, as he says in the opening paragraph of the book, “no description of me is complete without saying that I’m a Canadian.”
So when he received a call from Canadian publishers asking him to write a book to help celebrate Canada’s 150th birthday, he quickly warmed to the idea.
“I thought, in my head I’ve kind of been spending the last 53 years writing a book about Canada,” says Myers, who began a cross-country book tour Friday in Toronto.
Canada (286 pages, Doubleday Canada) can be very funny, of course, but it’s also thoughtful, heartwarming, occasionally sad and at times surprisingly political.
It’s a memoir that doubles as a celebration of the country, chock full of personal and cultural pictures and artifacts. It begins by chronicling our “Next Great Nation” period from 1967-76, a decade that coincided with Myers’ own formative years growing up poor but happy in Scarborough with a thrifty Liverpudlian father who loved comedy and being “silly.”
For Canadians of a certain age, part of the appeal of the book will be the cultural touchstones Myers covers. They include relatively well-known phenomena, such as the “Cinema Bleak” of David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan, to Mr. Dressup, the Friendly Giant and (the first) Trudeaumania.
But he also unearths some wonderful obscurities. There are pics of NHL hockey-card checklists, souvenir CN Tower whisky bottles and even three of Myers’ old Toronto Transit Commission passes. The fact that many of these pieces come from Myers’ own collection suggests he never throws out anything Canadian.