My Life in Work, part three...

Dispatch #38

I took a little break from examining my life in work, but I’m back at it now. When last we left our gallant heroine (or the feckless one, as she is sometimes called) she had just come back to Nova Scotia with her two boys and her cat, Agatha. I might do a life in pets sometime but not yet.

When I got back to Nova Scotia I had a job waiting for me. My old pal Jim Legge had gotten me a job being the cook at The Seahorse, an ancient pub in Halifax. I loved working there. It was the lunch shift so I got there pretty early in the day and set up for the rush. The menu was simple – fish & chips, clams & chips, hot beef sandwich, a special here and there. My co-workers were the waiters – all men and all a lovely bunch of coconuts. The only other woman was the food waiter – a great woman named Sissy, who would make sure some of the older hardened drinkers got something decent in their stomachs – she’d ask me to prepare a nice dish of liver and onions. On the house natch.

Not sure how long I did that job, but then I became a waiter at the Fo'c'sle Tavern, Nova Scotia’s oldest tavern. It was great to work in my own town. I was the first female waiter there, booze waiter as opposed to food waiter which they kindly allowed women to do. Booze waiting is where the big money was. Supposedly. Again, I missed my opportunity to cash in big somehow, but that doesn’t matter. I did the job fine. Sure was easier than logging.

One night me and George (a pal and bartender) were shot at when we’d closed up and were counting up the take and cleaning up. Someone who had been barred by the waiter who’s shift I’d taken thought he’d take a few pot shots through the back window. Once we realized what was going on we hit the floor and crawled around the corner into the bar itself and barricaded ourselves behind a long pine table we flipped on its side. We called the cops but it took a good long time for them to arrive. I didn’t much like that job anyway. I’d rather be involved with the actual cooking. So I got a job in Mahone Bay at a very high end restaurant called Zwickers Inn. I was 1^st cook. There were no chefs, but the owner was a hyper-organized sort who made even the fabulously fun job of cooking a bit tedious. The food was consistently good but there was no artistry to it. I think I worked there before I worked at The Captain’s House in Chester, but I’m awfully fuzzy about the details so it might have been the other way around. I loved working for the chef, Don Campbell, at the Captain’s House. I mostly did salads, desserts and prep stuff. Even though I loved him, he was old-school and women didn’t get positions on the stove. Oh well.

As I continue to struggle with remembering the timeline I have decided to give it up. I mean if I can’t remember who cares? Instead I’ll just ramble on about the jobs I had over the next few years.

I quit my job in Mahone Bay because my back was starting to bother me a great deal. I think after that is when I went to work for Debut Atlantic – which was a tremendous job. Debut Atlantic is (or was at that time) a non-profit organization that toured young and upcoming classical musicians through the Atlantic region. It was funded by the touring office of the Canada Council and was also under the auspices of CBC. We would get a roster of musicians set for the year ahead, find presenters in the four provinces and hit the road with the musicians when they got here. They might do six to nine dates and usually a few school performances as well. We would help the local presenters with publicity and help the musicians learn what it was to tour well. I got to travel to all the provinces and it really was heavenly work. I’m not a natural salesperson but selling these guys was a religious experience. Everyone gained all the way around. My pal Dawn Harwood-Jones had moved to Nova Scotia to do the job and as we’d been producers and performers for the musical Dream Children and were good pals to boot, she’d looked me up, met her future husband through me, and when she went on to work for the CBC I took over the running of Debut Atlantic. One of the most fun parts of that job was the travel in the provinces I got to do. I particularly fell in love with Newfoundland and specifically St. John’s. The excitement of landing at the airport there was like the one you feel when meeting a new lover. St. John’s was so different from any other city I’d been in at that point, and still is to my mind. Fun, irreverent, quirky and full of creatives. What was not to love?

At some point during this work a couple of pals of mine and I began what was to be perhaps my longest lasting gig – Catchword Productions. We created a company that put on mysteries at hotels – starting with Oak Island Inn in Western Shore. I cannot begin to tell you the fun we had doing this – writing crazy over the top scripts, designing an engaging game that invited the guests (up to 120 people) to play like most of them hadn’t done since childhood. Since the three of us had never been to a mystery weekend we were free to invent ours in a way that required very little tinkering over the years. We did weekends and one nighters. We did them at resorts, inns, golf course, on the train and even in a large boat. We did them all over Nova Scotia, PEI, New Brunswick and Connecticut. We killed hundreds of people, solved endless mysteries and engaged humans in the most enjoyable way. Some of you reading this will have been part of that fun – we shamelessly hired our friends and family to take part, paying a tiny amount of dough (in all fairness we made hardly any money at this) but offering a weekend away from whatever ‘real world’ they found themselves in. There was no plot idea too crazy for us to write about – we did seances, reading of the wills, alien visitations, plus the ‘true story’ of the treasure at Oak Island (or several true stories really)! To give you an idea on one weekend we invented a group that idealized and even deified Doris Day in the same way that the Rastafarians did Haile Selassi. The leaders of this group gave ironing workshops as part of the weekend. Or the one where the Romance Writers of Canada met. Or our favourite ‘The Church of the True Light’ which had a plot so close to what actually happened with some television evangelists AFTER we staged it people thought we had a channel to the future. Our complete mission statement was to encourage adults to play and we accomplished that for about thirty years. I learned that if you do the right work it is all play, and I still have people shout out at me in random places like the airport in Cuba, “hallooo Ninette Beazly, Nose of the North”, one of my favourite alter egos.

Kerol, me, Gavin, Willie and Linder - early days CatchWord laughing our foolish heads off

I think that is enough for now. When we next meet up with our heroine she will be organizing conferences and training to become a psychotherapist.