When it both was and wasn’t
As outdated ads linger throughout a city 100 days later, there’s a sense of living in Schrödinger’s world
The sign is enchanting. “Celebrate Guinness Time.” Who wouldn’t love, after more than 100 days away from bars and restaurants, to have poured for your pleasure an immaculate pint of Guinness? “Guinness Time” sounds like an artefact from another era, the era when convivial beer-drinkers could freely gather and share libations in close quarters. Then you notice the print at the bottom of the banner and realize that this sign hanging in the window of Quinn’s Steakhouse & Irish Bar in downtown Toronto really, truly is an artefact from another era — the era before COVID-19. The sign reads “St. Patrick’s Day: March 17, 2020.”
St. Patrick’s Day never came this year. So, in a sense, it never went.
Quinn’s, like virtually every restaurant and bar in Ontario, closed on March 17th, by emergency order of the Ontario government. On the recommendation of health officials all over the world, as people were advised to remain home unless absolutely necessary, St. Patrick’s Day passed uncelebrated in the usual ways. Shuttered bars, and especially Irish pubs, missed out on one of the busiest drinking days of the year. More than 13 million pints of Guinness are poured worldwide annually on St. Patrick’s Day. This year, the brewery effectively sold none.
You would be hard-pressed to find an Irish pub that did not promote its St. Patrick’s Day celebrations heavily. In early March, every year, you can see signs advertising pint specials and live concerts on almost every city block. This year, most of them have stayed up. The pubs were closed on St. Patrick’s Day, and other than those that hastily converted to makeshift takeout operations, have remained closed ( at least in Toronto) ever since, their liquor supplies whisked off the premises for safekeeping, their windows boarded up to keep out looters. And the signs remain, as if to remind us of how long we’ve been in lockdown.
As Ontario follows the rest of the country toward reopening, retail storefronts and other front- facing businesses have begun to resume something like ordinary operations, retrofitted with new social distancing instruments and employees decked out in masks or face shields. Bars are following a slower trajectory. Those without patios are still not allowed to reopen in Ontario; once they are, many may not. Some have already shut down for good. By the time things have returned to normal, hundreds or perhaps thousands of pubs across Canada will have been permanently lost.
The lingering St. Patrick’s Day signs are memorials — a living testament to widespread change. It isn’t only St. Patrick’s Day that has persisted in our mostly vacant, and lockdown- abandoned cities. All around Toronto, on the sides of bus shelters, on construction sites, over department stores, looming above highways, hanging from lamp posts and plastered throughout subway platforms, billboards, placards and posters of every variety continue to advertise events that never arrived, and the arrival of products that came out months ago. They stay up, too, in a kind of publicity for the past or a future that never happened.
A season of the musical variety show The Masked Singer is still teased as forthcoming in posters marking its February debut. Billboards tell of the big summer blockbusters whose release dates were ultimately pushed back to the fall or into next summer, of film festivals that had to be held virtually or cancelled altogether, of art events no one attended. On almost every street corner, the face of Meghan Remy still looks down at you. Her album Heavy Light, as U.S. Girls, has lingered in ads that won’t come down or be replaced. It feels like the last album, the only album, released this year.
Theatre posters show the impassioned face of a woman playing Donna Summer in a hit musical about her — a musical cancelled days into its two-week run. You can see ads for Miss Saigon, the classic drama meant to open at the Princess of Wales in early May; or for The Boy Friend, starring none other than Kelsey Grammer, which was to occupy the same venue the month prior. Mirvish Productions, the enormous company that mounts these shows, will survive of course, its season on pause until January 2021. But the smaller theatres, such as the Factory on Bathurst, still have posters around for their spring and summer season. These were the hard-won dreams of actors, writers, directors. Thwarted by COVID, the ads are proof of what was, what would have been.
In movies about the end of days, the last remaining ads are often shown as a sort of doomsday harbinger, cruelly honouring the last vestiges of a more innocent and trivial world. In 28 Days Later, a man wakes from a coma to find London abandoned; as he roams the empty, trashstrewn streets, electronic billboards still show smiling faces drinking Coca- Cola, pathetically unaware there is no one left to buy it. In WALL-E, the robot hero roams past posters for running shoes and hamburgers, sports drink and suitcases, being promoted to an empty world.
It’s in the nature of ads in public spaces to show us the latest thing. But at the end of the world, with no one around to attend to the mundane, the whole process suddenly freezes. Whatever was being advertised at the moment of catastrophe is what sticks around, maybe even forever. So, there is something distinctly apocalyptic about this neverending St. Patrick’s Day celebration. Perhaps it’s that, if our world were functioning anything like normal, these banners, posters and billboards would be the first things to go. They would be advertising something else.
Eventually, “Now Open” signs and posters will invite us to reunite at our favourite bars, or remind us that we’re all in this together. When theatres open again, new plays and movies will be announced on street banners. But even when the old posters come down, it won’t be so easy to erase their image. COVID will remembered, long-term, as a world-historical event incomparable to any other in our lifetimes.
And lockdown might be remembered as the time when St. Patrick’s Day never happened, and when St. Patrick’s Day seemed to last forever.