Farewell to Dave and Morley, and Stuart McLean
Is it wrong that I’m going to miss Dave and Morley more than I do Stuart McLean? I never met McLean, the muchloved CBC Radio storyteller who died Wednesday at 68.
But Dave and Morley, the fictitious characters McLean created for the Vinyl Cafe, these were people we knew. They were good friends of 20 years. And now I miss them, perhaps not as much as I miss my old dog Spot, but more than I do some blood relatives.
We spent a lot of time together — weekends, sometimes, but more commonly on long road trips that would fly by once we got lost in the stories, many of which involved Dave trying to dig his way out of a hole, making things worse.
It was hard to drive straight. You’d be cringing and laughing at the same time, tears falling on the steering wheel as Dave unravelled some tale of domestic disaster — the do-it-yourself electrical job that almost destroyed the kitchen, or the time he accidentally went for a ride on a bicycle locked to a car’s roof rack, or Polly Anderson’s Christmas party where the punch bowls got mixed up and the teenage daughter who tried to get drunk stayed sober but the pre-teen son ended up slurring “come and get me, copper” at a traffic stop.
The Vinyl Cafe was like a marriage of Norman Rockwell and The Simpsons. Dave was an unmade bed of a man, well meaning but forever tripping over his own flaws. First time I met him, he had swallowed a fly and, being a hypochondriac with an overactive imagination, was trying to extract it by placing his mouth over the bulb of a table lamp, drawing it to the light. Morley was pretty awesome, too, but to me Dave was like looking in a mirror. And now they’re gone. Or, to be real, McLean is gone — and the nation is poorer for it.
“He was a Canadian ganglion, our connective tissue,” his friend and colleague Shelagh Rogers, the chancellor of the University of Victoria, wrote on CBC.ca. “He was our ear, our stethoscope.”
Rogers wrote of the “thousands of people who came to the Vinyl Cafe in the grand necklace of theatres that dot our land, Stuart telling them stories about their community as though he’d been living there forever.” He was good at creating characters who seemed familiar no matter where you lived.
Several years ago we took my mother to see McLean at the Royal Theatre during one of his cross-Canada Christmas tours. It was everything you would hope, relaxed and witty and warm (OK, stifling, we were high up at the back), the packed house eager for the retelling of stories the audience could recite by heart. When McLean began Dave Cooks the Turkey the crowd erupted in applause, just as it would had he been Paul McCartney playing the opening bars of Hey Jude. It was great.
Except when we walked back to the car after the show, there was a homeless guy sleeping in a doorway. It was hard to ignore the contrast between the goodhumoured, well-fed world inside the theatre and the reality on the street.
That’s what a lot of humour does: reminds us that all is not well. From Stephen Leacock to Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels, Canada has produced a long line of satirists who mine the gap between life as it is presented and how it really is.
The people who do that best often come from the edges of the country, which offers a different perspective on the absurdity of things. Rick Mercer is from Newfoundland, as are the cast members of This Hour Has 22 Minutes. Victoria’s Ian Ferguson and his brother Will grew up in the far north of Alberta. Last year’s Leacock Medal winner, Susan Juby, was raised in Smithers and lives in Nanaimo. Wickedly funny Jim Taylor, the author of 16 books, is a Vic High grad. Adrian Raeside came from New Zealand, landed on the West Coast. They’re all good at calling bull.
But as much as satire is a means of pointing out that all is not as rosy as we are led to believe, it can also have the opposite effect, letting us know that things aren’t that bad. McLean’s humour was gentle and familiar and grounding, a reminder that there’s more to the world than the anger and anguish that pours out of your screen all day. It’s not all Trump and terrorism and tension.
McLean — a three-time winner of the Leacock — took us to a fictitious community based in a common reality. It was a place where Dave and Morley dreamed and failed, felt joy and sorrow, and frequently endured the kind of heartache reserved for those who take on others’ pain. If they occasionally crashed through the thin ice of human frailty, they were also good to the core.
They — he — will be missed.