by RAF KATIGBAK

As you read this column, take a moment to step outside. If you’re reading this at work, go to a window, open it up and lean out. If you work as a flight attendant and are currently somewhere 20,000 miles above the earth, DO NOT GO OUTSIDE! Instead, wait patiently until someone illuminates his or her call button, and give him or her whatever it is they want, unless they want to go outside.

For those of you already outdoors, take a deep breath, inhaling through the nose. What do you smell? If it’s a delicate fragrance with top notes that sing with dewy red berry, peppercorn poppy, cyclamen, water lily and muguet, and mid-notes of exotic Tahitian tiare flower, mimosa, orange blossom and yellow rose with a lingering support of warm amber sandalwood, creamy blond woods and sensuous musk, then you just might be in Celine Dion’s armpit.

But if it’s the pungent odour of broken glass, rusty bottle caps, run-over juice boxes and thawed out doggy dookie you breathe, then heck yes, you’re in Montreal.

That’s right dear readers, that familiar scent means one thing: it’s springtime! Everyone is “oot and aboot” as they say, breaking out of their climatologically imposed exile and proudly parading their pasty pigment. Finally, it’s the time when we as Montrealers can go out, hit the bars, start filling up the terrasses and do the thing we are the best at: being really really cheap.

That’s right, I said it: Montealers are cheap. It’s no secret we love to party; in fact, we do it more often, and possibly better, than any other city in Canada. But we never like paying for it.

Perhaps like Rome—another notoriously cheap city when it comes to entertainment—we’ve been spoiled from all the free summer festivals. Granted Rome had the Coliseum—where leather-clad gladiators would fight for the amusement of the crowd in a gleeful carnival of blood and gore—and here we have the Stage duMaurier, where the only danger is getting splattered with Pat Metheny’s meandering prog-jazz guitar splooge. But hey, a free show is a free show.

When we do have to pay, people can get downright nasty. Case in point, last Saturday night, when Club Soda’s Aoutch! party featured three shit-hot local bands and a top-notch DJ (well, okay, it was me) for the modest sum of $15. Keep in mind that you can’t go to a movie these days without dishing out at least that, after popcorn.

Early on—which as we all know in Montreal means around midnight—a group of females indignantly argued with the box office staff. “We were told it was $8!” “Sorry,” was the staff’s reply, “there was some confusion—that’s only if you’re coming from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs show.”

It’s understandable that expecting $8 and getting hit for 15 is at first a shock. In fact, if the disconcerted concertgoers were not dressed head-to-toe in designer ensembles whose total cost must have equalled the GNP of a small Balkan country, I might have even felt bad for them. But the fact was, they could have paid, they just didn’t want to, and a minor hissy fit ensued.

Of course, being cheap isn’t a bad thing per se. I can’t count the times that I have thanked my non–denominational higher power for the plethora of 99-cent pizza parlours within stumbling distance of my local watering hole, or felt the malicious glee after ramming the other shopper’s cart into the cured fish at Segal’s as we vie for the same last semi-crushed box of organic Heritage Flakes cereal on super sale that week.

But the danger of always scoping out the better deal is that you could lose sight of the bigger picture. Artists like Lesbians on Ecstasy, Frigid and Dandi Wind help make this town a vibrant, interesting and exciting place to live, and our support is essential. In the end, just like you and me, they need to put on their faux snakeskin one-piece spandex body suit one leg at a time, and like you and me, they also need to eat, pay rent and survive in the greatest fucking city in North America.

Riff-Raff@sympatico.ca

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