Pass it on...

I remember when I first heard that my second grade teacher, Miss Fishman, lived alone with like, a million cats, and how her house smelled like pee. I learned that juicy nugget of information as I skipped stones with my best friend Matt by the waters of Île Bizard. What I remember most about that moment was not so much what I was hearing, but how it was told. Matt—whose pre-adolescent headgear mutated the word “cats” into “catsch”—delivered the information in a hushed tone, with emphasis on the words million and pee. I was seven and that was my first secret. I felt a little privileged, a little dirty and a little excited. At that very moment, my secret-cherry was popped, and I was officially addicted.

Ever since then, I’ve been a fiend for secrets. Maybe it was the influence of growing up with four older sisters, but in high school, I traded secrets like crack with other girls. You wanted to know what Robert McConnell—captain of the rugby team and campus heartthrob—really thinks about you? Was it true that Mr. McNally had a wife with a wooden leg? Did Stacey Neufeld really put peanut butter “down there” and ask her dog to lick it? You’d come to me.

My addiction subsided as I got older, but even when I recently heard that a girlfriend of a friend of a friend once pooped on her boyfriend’s bed after he forgot her birthday, and he liked it, I got a little giddy with excitement.

What is our obsession with secrets anyway? Maybe it’s because we live in a world where everything is searchable, indexed, hyperlinked, Google-able and blogged (thanks Internet!), and shows with names like Mythbusters play on TV, I suppose it’s nice to hear about a genuine, honest to goodness secret.

So last Friday, when I heard from my friend Bob that Montreal music darlings Arcade Fire were playing a secret show, just for friends, in a church basement on St-Viateur and St-Urbain—right in the eye of the hipster hurricane—I got all tingly.

Just the term itself, “secret show,” is enough to whip music fans into a frenzy. But unlike other acts, who use them as a publicity tool (one particular American indie-ish band actually sent out a major press release about theirs), or companies like Microsoft who hosted several “secret shows” in major U.S. cities to launch their Zune mp3 player a few months back, the Arcade Fire held true to their low-key Montreal-ness by doing it the old fashioned way: word of mouth.

All that people heard was “Arcade Fire,” “secret show” and “church basement,” and instant hype was born. It was like those stories we’ve all heard of Prince or the Rolling Stones taking over a small club and rocking out at the height of their fame, or when jazz legends would gather after gigs at hotel bars and jam out until daybreak. This was the stuff of legend.

Last Saturday, a couple of hundred hipsters flooded the Mile-End church basement expecting a legendary experience. What they got, well, let’s say it was short of legend. The pressure was on. Their five upcoming shows in Montreal sold out in a nano-fart and they’ve sold out series of shows in London and New York (two tickets for their New York show recently went for $722 U.S. on eBay). Their new album Neon Bible has turned the “highly anticipated” knob to “11.”

Not to take away from the Arcade Fire’s performance, but they performed their new introspective almost goth-ish material with an understandable tentative-ness.

These were new songs performed before the most judgmental crowd you could choose: the indie elite. It also didn’t help that, the night before, they played in front of probably the easiest crowd imaginable: a hall full of screaming 14-year-olds at the bassist’s old Ottawa high school, Canterbury .

Perhaps because there wasn’t any alcohol—beyond the few bottles smuggled into the church by some enterprising heathens—the crowd was a dud, only loosening up towards the end (one adventurous chap even rigorously crowd surfed for a couple of tunes).

Overall, the show was slightly underwhelming, but mostly because expectations were too high, and conditions not ideal. However, that didn’t detract from the real Montreal magic of the moment, how all of us were united, for one night in one big secret.

To get more of your secret on, check http://postsecret.

blogspot.com.