Teach the world to sing

by RAF KATIGBAK

A funny thing happened to me last weekend: I found the secret to world peace. Or at least I felt like I did. No, it’s not something corny like love and/or understanding. Heck, it’s not even hockey—although I do admire the sport’s power to bridge the great Canadian nerd/jock divide. Any guess? If you said “Buddhism”… well, you’d be wrong, but close: it did start in Japan. Yes, I’m talking about karaoke.

Let me explain. Last weekend, I found myself in rural Quebec—the Pontiac region, to be precise—in a small village called Portage du Fort. Settled mostly by the Irish in 1844, Portage was once a bustling outpost that held provisions for travelers on the Ottawa River along which it quaintly rests. With its mills, train station and terminus for steamboats carrying grain and wood, Portage had a bright future. Then, in 1914, a huge fire destroyed almost everything. Bummer number one. The Irish, resilient buggers as they are, rebuilt and eventually began to prosper. Until the Canadian Northern Railway bypassed the village. Bummer number two. Then the government built a dam, and a pulp and paper mill opened, providing many jobs, and once again, things evened out. Until a few years ago, when the mill closed. Bummer number three.

Adding to the tragic history of the place is the fact that it’s a bit of a cultural anomaly. While it sits on the Quebec side of the river, the population is entirely English. So, shunned by their fellow Quebecers for not being French enough, and by their Ontario neighbours for being Quebecers, Portage is doubly isolated. So isolated, in fact, that there is more than a faint hint of Irish accent when they speak, a throwback from the settlers from over a century before. Most of the women in town are pear-shaped and good-natured, busying themselves with crafts like making purses out of old pairs of jeans they find at the Goodwill (although why anyone would want to stick their belongings where someone else’s crotch used to be is beyond me), and the men in town are farmers, tradesmen and former mill workers, i.e. they’re are all stocky, Irish-looking, manly men who obviously know the hard-earned reward of working a field, i.e. they’re the opposite of me. They’ve lived through so much shit that when something monumentally harsh occurs, like their barn collapsing, they just sigh, roll up their sleeves and rebuild it, while I usually curl up into the foetal position and weep uncontrollably when my phone doesn’t get reception. While they have that air of real-world ingenuity and know-how where I imagine they could repair anything from a toaster to a tractor by giving it a few well-placed whacks with a hammer, the only tractor I’m at all familiar with is the beam that the Starship Enterprise uses to grab stuff in space with on Star Trek.

But while I felt so alien to that region, what we did have in common was a shared love of karaoke. Luckily, I was able to explore that common ground last week at Portage’s only watering hole, the Lakeside Bar, where every Friday is Scott’s Karaoke Night (which advertizes “DJ, Karaoke, Security... all for one low price!”). When I walked into the bar, I immediately felt the tension. I noticed that most of the men there had that stocky no-bullshit utilitarian look that had me feeling, with my weirdo angular haircut and skinny jeans, that I would feel more at ease running the clown tent at their country fair. My uneasy feelings of otherness were only strengthened when I saddled up to the bar to order a drink and the bartender—an effete young girl with a strange, spiky haircut that made her look like a reverse Statue of Liberty—cut me off. “I just want to say that we don’t have any Redbull and we don’t got any coolers,” which I guess is what small town folks think young city slickers drink.

But when I surprised her with my order of a Jack Daniels on the rocks, everything changed. This was a no bullshit drink. A drink that said, “I, like you, am here to party.” The order even won over the young roughneck in the Bud Light cap at the bar (whose name I would later find out to be “Pinner”) who yelped, “Whoa, Jay Dee! Don’t fuck around eh! Git ’er done!”

The tension was broken. We were all there for one purpose: to get wasted and sing badly in front of a room of strangers. Even the surreal homo-erotic implications of a small Asian man belting out the lyrics to Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” seemed to be overlooked, if not completely lost, on the crowd, and we were joined all together as one in song.