Once again reading comments from people with Fibromyalgia on some sites I belong to, particularly from those who try prescription meds for relief, the situation is grim.  The side effects are ghastly, from extreme weight gain to memory loss, adding anxiety to the already long list of problems that come with this condition. PEMF and InfraRed Light have no side effects that I am aware of and I continue to be heartened by the potential for real reversal.

I am at the end of two months of daily sessions and will sign up again as soon as I return to town.  The improvements continue – they are small increments but I am paying really close attention and notice every one.  Less pain, more mobility, better posture, more energy – nothing else I have found gives me all of these results. I had three massages during this time period that helped as well.  Psychologically, having positive results changes the worrying mindset which I really appreciate. The prognosis of never improving and only getting worse is draining.

As the season changes to shorter, colder days and  more dampness in the atmosphere the challenge will be greater. I’ll keep heading toward that light at the. end of the tunnel.

 

 When I arrived at Vancouver airport  from London in 1970, my intention was merely to visit my oldest sister who had fallen in love with Canada when she worked on Expo ‘67 in Montreal.   She now lived in Vancouver,  a far-away place that she promised me would provide respite from the  burn- out of my baby-executive life in  Swinging London .  Neither she nor I could have foreseen that I would be drawn into a passionate relationship with the film business, it was not even on our radar. Sure, we had grown up in a very theatrical family, and movies and theatre were a constant presence. Having seen the impecunious lives of our talented and creative parents, we were both much more down to earth about the need to make a living.

 We  planned a six week vacation;  she suggested that I apply for  legal residential status in case I wanted to stay longer and so I applied to the Canadian Embassy.  Being legally able to work was important even if I were only to stay a brief  time as I was my own sole support. I was young, bilingual in French and English and had a solid resume of work skills so Canada wanted me. Also, unlike most newcomers to Canada I was going to Vancouver and not the more popular Toronto and they welcomed that.  The Canada Customs official at the airport handed me a piece of paper declaring me a landed immigrant and while I saw myself as a visitor and not an immigrant  that piece of paper came to have a value that was priceless.

I had lived in Paris, Amsterdam, Geneva and London after growing up in Dublin but no previous city looked like Vancouver. The spectacular beauty of snow-capped mountains and the Pacific Ocean was breathtaking. The air was clean and the citizens were making ready to form Greenpeace and already were the tidiest urban dwellers I had ever seen. By the time I had passed by the small multi-coloured wooden houses with flowering gardens en route to the high-rise building in front of a beach where I was to stay, I began to understand I was in a different place. I was a stranger in a strange land, open eyed. Everything was new. 

I needed a break from the fast life I was living. I was Managing Director of an employment agency, having been headhunted from London’s Number 2 agency who had trained me. I enjoyed the work, it satisfied my innate save-the-world tendencies and in addition to serving the immediate clients, it allowed me to find jobs, homes and new lives for other young Irish people who, like me were chafing under the  Sharia-like oppressions of the Catholic church  in our native land where everything from our skirt lengths to our reading materials was censored. In the 1960s London was the centre of fashion, design, and music and I revelled in it. Mary Quant invented the mini-skirt and Vidal Sassoon the geometric haircut and I was right there with them. I was well paid, loved my Hampstead and later Baker Street flats and partook of the Museums, nightclubs, black-tie casinos, fashion shows and rock and roll. Annabels and the Playboy Club were favourites and short trips to Mallorca took care of the need for sunshine. London was swinging all right and I swung right along with it.

Everything changed for me when virulent racism released after African Colonies one by one regained their independence and expelled groups of people with British Passports. I came into daily contact with the heartbreaking result of brown and black people coming “home” to a promised motherland only to be denied any kind of social or civic equality. Companies would routinely refuse to see people from specific places and racial hatred and contempt was stirred up by politicians and religious leaders; I had daily migraines trying to work my way through it and make any difference for the positive.  As an Irish woman, I knew that I was held in the same contempt as the other outsiders. I was accepted only because they deemed me ‘exceptional’ from the base others of my tribe which was very cold comfort indeed. Leaving behind this dark energy for a vacation in ‘The New World’ was an attractive proposition.

 Canada had little presence in the world’s imagination in those days though the new Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was rectifying that. Almost alone among world leaders, his liberal humanitarianism appealed to the imagination and politics of the 60s generation.  My ignorance of Canada was vast;  apart from Trudeau, I knew practically nothing about the country or it’s people.  The National Film Board short films I had grown up with on Irish and British television  mostly focused on Quebec; the TV series Wojeck gave the first inkling of a modern country. Tall and lanky Canadian Donald Sutherland was a bright presence in London, Mordechai Richler’s books made an impression on me and Marshall McLuhan was a visionary who’s ideas had become internationally known. Of the Canadian West I recalled a passage  in Lady Chatterly’s Lover, where her Ladyship Constance and Mr. Mellors discussed escaping to British Columbia together where the social restrictions on their love did not exist, suggesting  a place unsullied by the class system . It wasn’t much to go on but I went. 

That simple leap of faith changed my life, bringing with it a career challenge which would last into the next generation, carried on by an as yet undreamed-of son. 

People talk of “breaking in” to show business, tales are told of tables waited, houses painted, furniture vans loaded,  taxis driven, lowly day jobs performed., tens of thousands of dollars spent on Film School. It’s a struggle. Call it the Luck of the Irish or call it serendipity but without ever even having had an inkling of ambition in that direction, Vancouver laid out a red carpet of welcome for me. 

In 1970, London had a population of 8 million while Vancouver housed  under 500,000 souls. The commensurate reduction in noise, dirt, aggression and crowdedness was palpable and after a few weeks I decided to stay a while.   I set about finding work, first seeking out the Personnel Agencies  where I had impressive training and credentials. Alas, the Vancouver agencies were a stifled lot, mostly British and stuck in some Britain of long ago with patronizing and superior attitudes toward Canada and their Canadian clients. Having gladly left  behind that patronizing and narrow-minded view , I was in no mood to participate in it in the New World. If I was going to be in Canada I wanted to be with Canadians not ex-pats. If I was not going to work in Personnel  it left me open to consider any opportunity that came along. I was a capable young woman, had been working since I was a child and from the Arts to Commerce I had things to offer and a firm work ethic. 

That’s when  serendipity came along; my sister ran into a woman  whom she had known in Toronto, a Talent Agent who had moved West to run an Agency that her company had just acquired. There was a job there -unspecified but it was essentially an employment agency for  models and actors– right up my street but with an interesting curve. This brought me to the long-named Blanche MacDonald School/Jerry Lodge Talent Agency and an appointment with the Director. 

I studied and performed singing, dancing and acting all through my childhood and wrote about rock bands for a Dublin newspaper so creative temperament was not new to me. I felt confident I could do whatever was required.

Dressed in a red midi-coat and a yellow mini dress with red-and-yellow shoes, I showed up on Seymour Street; I was living in London after all which was the leading edge of fashion so I was up to the minute.  With two older sisters, one of whom had been a model and raised  by a fashionable mother, style was always part of my consciousness. I had not thought about it so clearly at that time, it was just part of who I was;  it’s value began to become clear immediately when I was presumed to be a model.  

It turned out the job was actually at the Blanche MacDonald School and the elegant Director described a junior position of receptionist/telephonist whose salary would barely pay rent in a shared apartment let alone food or furniture. 

 Mel Kristjan  wore a well cut suit of ivory wool and a hat which must have been French it was so exquisitely balanced. As she interviewed me with wide-ranging questions, she commented, “Aren’t you different, dear?” and my heart froze. I had been hearing this since I was a little kid and it was usually followed by an exclusion of some sort, often that I was too young even though otherwise qualified for what I wanted. 

The fourth of seven children of two starving artist parents, I was early marked as being “too smart for my own good” and  started school at age 2 1/2 . I could read by age 3 and consumed everything I could find in print. This precocity rushed me through the school system, skipping grades so that I finished Elementary School years early and even with a Scholarship for post-Secondary education I  was dropped into the world  and deemed an adult at 14. The future laid out for me in Ireland held nothing that I wanted.   For two years I worked at a Chartered Accountant’s office. Proximity to intelligent men  was considered an enviable position for a young woman but I had ideas above my station. At 16  I left home and country to see what the world had to offer. 

And now, still seeking a brave new world, I sat in an office in Vancouver where  that dear woman followed up her observation  of my differences with “Isn’t that wonderful!”. I knew immediately I was in the right place  and she promised to help me with free-lance work to supplement the salary. That was the first time I had ever heard the term free-lance and it was to become the life-time answer to how to work in a way that suited my nature and energies and eventually freed me of the migraines.

Decades ahead of her time and of the Me Generation, Blanche MacDonald had created a school based on development of individual potential and the staff were encouraged in our own development as well. When she discovered I could write, Mel had me writing Copy for the Ads and introduced me to an Editor who hired me to write a Fashion Column.  In her own fascinating past, she worked at prestigious Grey Advertising in New York and had travelled on the JFK Election campaign with her second husband, a photographer. She taught me how to see a photograph through an eyepiece and how to compose and lay out a page where blank white space is the secret to everything. She was chic and orderly in her every Virgo thought and as strongly directed as the daughter of a respectable Winnipeg lawyer’s family could be.  I enjoyed every day that I went to work and loved her unreservedly, often accompanying her home to dinner with her children. She was a special kind of Canadian that I would come to respect and enjoy in others that I met. Conservative in fashion while absolutely liberal in thought she  had bedrock values of morality and fairness that were unassailable. 

Naturally I enquired about the absent Blanche MacDonald whose gamine image was framed on a wall. With a name like Blanche and dark hair and dark eyes I  presumed her to be French. She had recently sold the school she had founded in 1960 and moved, post-divorce and with her children, to Alaska.  Alaska! Wow! I was thrilled by the freshness of this thought, moving to Alaska, I had never before heard those words. Then the story became even more thrilling. Blanche MacDonald was Native  Canadian. Indian.  That struck such a chord in me – I  was very aware of Native Americans but of this side of the border I was ignorant. How lucky was I to move beyond the ex-pat settlers and into the heart of a Native created business, the real and intrinsic  of this land?

 It seemed not to matter that Blanche was not present, the spirit of the business and the way it was conducted was all about the Indian way as I would come to learn it. The atmosphere was lovely, mostly female workers, soft voices, respectful interactions and lots of downright good cheer. 

There were always fresh flowers and interesting-looking people coming and going.   Because I was the one who answered the phone with that long name followed by how may I help you?, the agency clients got used to me. An awkward Toronto/Vancouver  historic schism of which I was unaware was creating difficulties with and for the new agent. The first professional agent in Vancouver, her brash Eastern confidence was rubbing the sensitive West Coasters the wrong way and they began to ask for me specifically to help with their casting for commercials or photo shoots. I was happy to oblige, even for my lowly salary. It was a healthy outlet  and made a virtue of my otherwise too-incisive opinionated critical mind.

 Once more I found that family and childhood influences had provided me with an education that was of valuable help in this new work. Years of movie and theatre going and opinionated discussion afterward had left me with a body of trivia that was not trivial at all inside this business. I was gently and decisively pulled in to the business. I had already begun to attend theatres and performances most nights trying to get sense of who was available. Often when casting commercials, I trolled the beaches and tennis courts for the glowingly fit and healthy young men and women so beloved of beer commercials, even driving up Whistler Mountain to recruit the skiers. 

My career began in earnest when  Sunny Berg the agent,  asked me to accompany her to a business dinner with an American film producer. It had been already remarked that I got along well with Americans against whom Canadians held a suspicious mien; lifelong neighbours, they had their different ways and indeed theirs was mutual suspicion. I had no such history and as a stranger to both offered some kind of conduit to understanding.  It was sometimes hard work and I only agreed to go when Sunny mentioned it was a Japanese dinner of sushi which I had never before tasted and was keen to try.

Over the course of dinner the producer questioned me about my origins. I still had a London accent and an Irish vocabulary which intrigued him. I did not know I was being interviewed and was my usual opinionated self about film, literature, the arts. I  told him how we Irish loved to claim Irish movie people no matter how distant or how tenuous their relationship to Ireland. I told him I could still sing the theme song from High Noon because of Grace Kelly starring in it.  It quickly became clear I was dealing with Hollywood aristocracy as the producer Tim Zinneman revealed he was the son of Fred Zinneman one of the greatest directors of all time and genius creator of such diverse classics as High Noon, Oklahoma!, A Man for All Seasons and Old Man and the Sea. Tim was surprised to find me conversant with all of this and convinced me that with my innate love  and knowledge of film and my Employment Agency experience and training, that I would be a natural to work in Casting on the Mike Nichols film.. I agreed to give it a try with the caveat that I was not sure I could do it.

At first the understanding was the film production would need 400 Extras to recreate an American University. No registry of people existed in Vancouver and so we set about creating one. Mel, Sunny and I designed a card that collected all of the information needed from inseam length to special skills.  When we opened the doors of the Arts Club Theatre there were huge lineups of people in a really festive atmosphere. After taking Polaroid head shots of every one and conducting a quick interview we ended up with what would become the basis of Vancouver’s first talent pool. 

The film makers were stellar in the pop-culture Pantheon. Director Mike Nichols  was already a long loved writer/comedian before startling the world with WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOLFF? and  THE GRADUATE . Anyone who read a good newspaper knew the cartoons of screenwriter Jules Ffeifer whose humourous sensibility was absolutely unique. Delighted to be in such company,  I was obsessive in getting the details  right  so as to live up to those kinds of standards. The film’s stars were Jack Nicholson, Art Garfunkel, Ann-Margret, Candace Bergen, Rita Moreno – in every case I knew their work intimately and had enormous respect for them. It was not in my nature to be star-struck, I had already lived with a spectrum of social classes and I took each individual as I found them, once even churlishly refusing to curtsey to a Princess I met.  I was however deeply impressed by my new company.

The casting work expanded from extras to Stand-Ins, Doubles and finally some small speaking parts. The film was called Carnal Knowledge and it was sophisticated and sexy on a level that was way beyond my understanding.  Jack Nicholson’s exuberant wolfishness rattled me but I nonetheless found and auditioned the beautiful young amateurs.  It hardly seemed like work at all and it used so many of my talents it was hugely satisfying. As a child of starving artists myself, there was an ultimate satisfaction in hiring creative people and putting money their way.

It was round-the-clock work while it lasted and I was still under the aegis of the school/agency and making that pittance of money. Mel offered me modelling work but I never really felt comfortable posing so in addition to writing for newspapers, I began co-ordinating fashion shows. 

Vancouver in 1970 was a sleepy small city at the very tip of the Western world, it had it’s own concerns and fashion was not one of them. A sizeable population of longhairs and pot smokers still lived as though in the 60s and the conservative society scorned them.  I was overdressed for everything I went to not because I was particularly flamboyant but just because I was not wearing jeans or drab trousers. The fringe element  artists and designers had a hub at the Blanche MacDonald School where long-standing relationships with New York, Milan, San Francisco  and  Japan kept everyone up to date. 

Vancouver fashion shows were still stuck in a stiff mannequin style where a narrator told you what you were looking at and the model pointed it out.  The shows I has seen in London had moved very far away from that into an entirely other realm of entertainment and style. 

I had already befriended several actors and musicians in whose easy company I was learning about North America. Several of them were War Resisters or draft dodgers as they were called, including Dale Wilson who would remain a life-long friend. The social order of Vancouver was really new to me, unlike those I had experienced.  There could only be new money – Vancouver was not old enough for any other kind and the heights of snobbery and self-importance that this money bestowed was almost amusing. In my upbringing subtlety was a quality that monied people shared, wealth was not spoken about, power was wielded equally ruthlessly but much more quietly.  The Droit du Seigneur was firmly in place until the working class revolted and the Feminist and Civil Rights Movements had changed the currency of social artifice – but apparently not in Vancouver which was the very definition of provincial. I was invited to dinner parties with such stringent role-playing going on that indigestion was guaranteed. 

The fortunes of these few were largely a result of some form of exploitation of nature, lumber, fish, minerals, paper and ruffled my Socialist feathers. I was so opinionated and judgemental at that age, well versed in Marxism and revolution.  After years of enduring a kind of Catholic Sharia Law in Ireland, where the Church had an entitled opinion on every single aspect of a young girls’ life from skirt length to haircut to banned books and films, I would never again tolerate any kind of oppression, of me or anyone else. As a guest in this country, I minded my manners and simply disappeared from that stratum; life among the Bohemians and artists was much more my style and that is where I spent my time. 

Dale helped me splice together the music I wanted for my first show and also with the layout of the written and illustrated programme. There would be no narration, only spectacle and after offering a relaxing glass of wine to the models, I watched with glee as they glided down the runway and had everyone in the audience rapt. By the time the intermission was over, the local TV Channel had sent a team and this breakthrough show had caused it’s own little frisson. 

Not everyone was pleased, some of the ladies at the school thought it unseemly for the august name of Blanche MacDonald to be involved with such spectacle. Mel encouraged me to go on; she was twice my age and a mother of two sons and a daughter from two husbands. Beneath her calm ivory surface, she was as exotic and rebellious to me as any heroine from a book. I willingly went along with all of her ideas and she mothered me, sometimes sternly but always lovingly. It was my first experience of mother-love and I cherished it. In later years she would have trouble letting go of me as an acolyte, long after life had bent and shaped me into maturity, we weathered it. In those halcyon days she continually opened doors for me into learning and practising fulsomely joyful work. 

The pace of life and work was full tilt boogie with one surprise after another. Under the Blanche MacDonald banner I was a Judge for the Miss Chinatown Beauty Pageant which opened up another whole world within the world of Vancouver, that of Chinese Canadians and their unique weave of Eastern and Western.  I often appeared on television chat shows to opine on women’s issues, rarely feminist but fashion and something called women’s liberation. Vancouver feminists of the day had recently thrown horse manure on the runway of a fashion show, hairy legs and hiking boots scorning women who were interested in cosmetics and style. Considering that the business of Blanche MacDonald was founded by a woman, that the staff was almost 100% female, all sorts of female, immigrant, lesbian, brown skinned, olive skinned and black skinned, single parents and careerists, I found the situation ironic.

 Knowing I spoke French, Mel introduced me to CBC French Radio where I was frequently interviewed as well.  I took it all in my stride; if Mel thought I could do it, then I believed her and jumped in, so far landing on my feet. 

It was a life-changing day for me when Wendy Sparrow walked in for a meeting to see what the school might do to assist her. A former student of the school, she was in production of entertainment  for a grand meeting of The Union of BC Chiefs. She had in mind a fashion show; I proposed one that was about the influence of Native Americans on western  fashion; we were still at the tail end of fringed buckskins, western skirts, soft leather boots – all Indian traditions.  From there we went to discussing such Canadian Indian designers as existed and the ideas just grew and grew – it was a glorious energetic meeting of minds. Wendy and I were much the same age and easily got along. Mel had a way of letting people run with ideas as she sat back and absorbed, interjecting only to clarify. This management style was a  brilliant fusion of her personality and experience and I am lucky to have been exposed to that way of engendering an atmosphere of creative freedom and support. Within days we had gone from a fashion show to a full performance piece  written by Mel’s first husband who was a gifted writer, a cultured man who had grown up among the Indians. His work was accepted by all concerned and Chief Dan George agreed to be the onstage Grandfather/Narrator. The Chief was a lovely man, a seasoned actor but not yet touched by the Hollywood Glitter that would come with the release of  the Oscar-winning LITTLE BIG MAN later that year. His working life had been spent on the docks, a kind of  hard-working man I had been familiar with in Dublin  and we got along easily. Like most Indians I would ever meet, the softness of his voice and gentleness of his demeanour was embracing and soothing. I did not underestimate the steeliness beneath and treated him with all the respect I had been raised to give to my elders.

Wendy Sparrow’s people were the Musqueam who still lived on ancestral lands beside Vancouver and who were intimates of the Salish on the North Shore and the Squamish  from the mountains and Coast.  I was suddenly surrounded by the true people of these parts, not just blow-ins like myself but the people who lived here back into the generations.  The nuns at my convent school  had given us common ground  with those the world over who had shared our Irish history of surviving invasion and genocide. I was just completely thrilled to be welcomed by these tenacious spirits whose very existence was an act of rebellion that spoke to my rebellious heart.  From toddlers to great-grandmothers, here was a society I could relate to. Their sense of humour was tricksterish and I was set up for laughs more than a few times as all the cliches of “Indianess” I had seen on screens were played out for me and then exposed.  As on the first day, everyone walking around raising a hand and saying “How” to each other as the Indians invariably did in early films and television and then falling around laughing about it when they saw me take it seriously.

Though mostly sharing and hospitable as are their cultural values, it was not all easy acceptance. In Canada  I had a new identity; on top of being Irish I now belonged to a group called “white people” who were not very popular with people of any other hue.  I had to jump through a few patronizing hoops with the more dismissive of the Red Power faction and kept citing Irish and world history until I passed: I bore no guilt, came in peace and respect and expected the same in return.

The production of XAW?THAN  had a large cast and needed a set and a lighting design and a director. We had no budget.  Mel asked me to pull in the services of my boyfriend Barry Healey who was a performer and former student at SFU whose Arts programmes were widely respected. Barry was really reluctant but once Mel tilted her chapeau at you and called you dear in that prim way, resistance was futile.   Barry pulled in his friend Sue Rose, a designer and so it went. Margaret Ryan, the Costume Designer from The Playhouse joined us, first class people from every department necessary to mount a professional show were drawn in one by one.

From humble beginnings, a breath-taking play was born, a visual, aural and theatrical treat. Christopher Dafoe at the Vancouver Sun called it a cultural breakthrough and that indeed was original in every way. I was in love with them and they were in love with me and we all played together to make something beautiful and important. This was the beginning of the ties that would bind me to Canada. Chief Dan George and his large family, Wendy Sparrow and hers. Now that I had seen Indians, I suddenly saw them everywhere in the city, often in rough shape. The division between them and the mainstream was shocking to me, the daily racism they encountered was appalling. Here it was again, not left behind in England after all and this time against the original people of the lands. I was outraged on their behalf and awed by their patience. So different under Occupation to my own hot-headed countrymen.  It was bewildering to me  how the apparently very nice non-Indian people I was meeting could tolerate it. No wonder there was antipathy from the Red Power members, I completely understood.

When The Society of Christians and Jews suggested they would like to finance a tour of the play all of us white people stepped out and turned it over to the cast members which eased a bit of the tensions with Red Power. None of us had gone into it for ownership or money, the play really was the thing. It reinforced for me how theatre, storytelling, performance and design could become Art and change the world. Xaw?than  would later become a film and played at festivals.

At that age, I was filled with Philosophy, Poetry, Music and Literature and was naive enough to hold the world to the same high standards I found in written and painted ideas and fiction. An Irish childhood of that era forced you to make a choice, pick a side. I was always on the side of the underdog and vocal about it. 

While all of this was going on, I was falling in love with Barry Healey,  comic performer, musician, writer and director and one of the most original people I ever met.  We lived together with lots and lots of laughter, competing with each other for witticisms and quips. I found him to be so pure, he was happy and he worried about nothing.  His raising in the middle of British Columbia had none of the ugly, edgy deprivations and abuses of my urban saga;  his imagination had been stimulated by a subscription to the New Yorker and by far-away radio and television. He was expert on the lives and materials of great Americans from James Thurber to Johnny Carson and his impressions were spot on and uproariously funny. Barry expected things to turn out well and they mostly did while I did enough worrying for two.

When Robert Altman sent his scouts to town, the circus of making a film started up again and once again Blanche MacDonald/Jerry Lodge was the go-to place to find on-camera talent. Talk about the luck of the Irish, now I was asked to find a cast that would work in the company of Julie Christie and Warren Beatty directed by the man who made M*A*S*H. Celebrated on a Global scale and letting me play in their gang. From DARLING to Dr. Zhivago, Julie Christie’s work was precious to me and Warren Beatty was a multi-tasking Actor, Producer, Director, really estimable people. I was ready to turn Vancouver upside down if it was possible to shake out the character actors they needed to fill the Western town they were building in the Northern winter. Mr. Altman was pleased with the casting and shot reams and reams of footage so that many an actor who worked for months and banked on the future notoriety found themselves a passing body in scene or two. He did though especially feature a young actor I had found playing in an amateur musical at Theatre in the Park and gave him a sizeable role. This would give him an entree to a Hollywood career but the young man chose to return to his religious Evangelical life instead. 

That production was all on a level of grown-up hipness that was way beyond me and I stayed away from most of it. Actors and actresses were cast and moved on to the location and stayed there through rain and sleet and snow. Stories of revelry and minor debaucheries came my way. I was 20 years old and getting my kicks from learning how to play with these accomplished and exceptional people, content to be invisible as I practised the skills that served their needs, inventing them as I went along. I was proud of my work and treated very well as a result of it though still on the stipend of income. The end of the year came and went and the promised bonus did not materialize. I just had to make a better living.

The school genuinely could not afford to pay me, their income went up and down and they gave many scholarships to deserving young women and housewives in courses called Self-Appreciation, Individual Development. Because of Blanche they especially sought out interested Native students and gave scholarships there.  I loved everything about it and those values and I had to pay my way.

Unlike many of my creative artist friends I had no trust fund nor supporting family. I had never had support so my first order of business was always to secure the cash to pay my way. Not only had I never had anyone to depend on, I was fully committed to being independent.

 My closest group of friends were musicians and painters  and I was missing out on all the daytime fun that they were having, being the only one who had a full-time job. They encouraged me to quit, assuring me I would not fall. I had a weekly salary since I was fourteen years old. In a new place, the first thing I did was save money for a ticket home and put it in a savings account. It was expected that I would send money back to my family who needed it and so I did. Money and the lack of it took up a lot of my attention at the same time as I was really fussy about what I did for money. 

I had high standards   when it came to my living space. After leaving my overcrowded family home I had since lived in fine architecture and tasteful surrounds. It made such a difference to my state of mind to be daily exposed to aesthetic harmony, my lifelong reading habit and days and weeks spent in museums and galleries, magazines and movies, all informed my visual sensibility.  I was filled with ideas so I busily set about making better any space I occupied. I cringed in dark spaces or on old sheets.  All of this refinement  cost money and I had to leave the cocoon of Mel and the ladies and test myself out in the free-lance world. Feminism was exhorting all women to free themselves and test their limits. It was a wave.

There were stills photographers, low-budget film makers, out-of-town producers of commercials working in Vancouver. One recommended me to another and between casting and production services, I cobbled together an income but it was something of a high-wire act. I collected titles. Casting Director. Production Manager. Producer. Script Supervisor. Assistant Director. I learned on the job, coached by my betters and then did massive amounts of homework. I still was not used to the idea that this was work, did not understand that I had begun in the company of mighty American studios who had been in production for decades. Millions of dollars and years of experience made it all easy. I was spoilt from the very beginning.

Freelance life was always busy, someone always needed my help on their creative projects, paid or otherwise. It became clear to me that Vancouver had an unusual number of creative people who chose a lifestyle that supported, however tenuously, their creativity. They welcomed me in but I did not have the courage,the tenuousness of it all made me nervous, I needed a predictable income. In search of work for myself I would also provide it for many of the others.

My talent in all of this would be to put that creativity to work in gainful employment that was still within the broader definition of art. We needed more movies; so far Vancouver had been “discovered” by some bright Los Angeles producer and the circus came to town, got everyone all stirred, unloaded millions of dollars into city pockets and then left.  I was determined to find out if this could be changed and we could attract more film makers.

Canada had a film business of it’s own then. Toronto and Montreal had the benefits of financing from the National Film Board, CBC and any other federal funds available. The West was largely ignored for these funds and it was the subject of much griping from the locals I continued to meet. 

I attended opening of galleries and boutiques, went to the Opera and the

e be-in and tasted Vancouver. I went home to Dublin for Christmas and the only interest from my family about my new life in film was a request from my younger brother for a picture of Chief Dan George. 

Working on McCabe & Mrs. Miller.

Through the sheer serendipity of working at the Blanche MacDonald/Jerry Lodge Talent Agency, I was presented with the opportunity to work on another film classic. Two in a row!  Carnal Knowledge had wrapped and the great colorful carnival  left town returning us to the smaller fare of casting  television commercials and print modeling. They provided frothy moments of fun but nothing like the satisfaction of working on a movie.  I had several freelance jobs on the side which supported my stipend of a salary; I wrote a fashion column for a newspaper and co-ordinated fashion shows.  The work was all creative and I really felt I was playing, it hardly felt like work at all. That Blanche MacDonald  room was a catalyzing energy and I wanted to be in it, even if I had to pay for it.

When the senior agent fell in love and left to get married,  by default, there I was, an agent. It was not an easy fit for me – I was far too critical of actors to equally  represent ALL of them and that’s what the job in the #1  agency in Vancouver required. I had international standards after  enjoying theatre and film in Dublin, Paris, Geneva, Amsterdam and London.  When I saw that quality of talent  and craft I recognized it, and rejoiced in it but I was not as ’nice’ as the average Canadian and could not pretend it was present when it was not. 

I was often one of two people who remained seated during the standing ovations that were de rigeur at the end of every performance at every theatre, the other sitter being the theatre critic , Christopher Defoe

 When the leading man is  prime Jack Nicholson or Warren Beatty and the women are Julie Christie, Ann-Margret, Rita Moreno, Candice Bergen – then clearly the bar has been set very very high. I felt the challenge of rising to it.  Coming from a tradition of apprenticeship, I was like a sponge for any information. I read everything available, hung out with directors, musicians and writers, steeped in creativity around the clock. Everything about film  production was fascinating to me; the marshalling of a few hundred people of really broad differences,  creating an ‘insta-community’ of cooperative teamwork, spending  millions of dollars in a short period of time, creating great noise and excitement  and then disappearing without  a negative trace.   I was avid to learn the systems and competitive about becoming good at the work. 

Robert Altmans’s production method was a polar opposite to  Mike Nicols . Everything I had learned on Carnal Knowledge certainly helped but on McCabe & Mrs. Miller, I learned it ain’t necessarily so. Whereas CK had a finished screenplay from a playwright, a director with a distinguished theatre career and was top-heavy with studio executives flying in and out, McCabe was always a work-in-progress, a creative journey. 

Mr. Altman was independent of  constraints and followed a wider creative path. He hired enormous numbers of actors which gave a shot of creative juice to the community that was highly energizing. The 60’s lived on in Vancouver and the creative community was so laid-back as to be almost inert. 

Being  self-supporting  since age sixteen, laid back had never been an option for me. 

To find the actors, I led  a busy social life at every theatre, high school drama department, Skid Row Mission, logging and fisherman bars.-anywhere and everywhere that there might be compelling faces and/or talented and skilled actors.

This kind of organizing and gathering of talent had never before been done in Western Canada and as I was 21 years old, still operating on big city energy, I was delighted to do it. I even had the joy of ‘discovering’ a young actor in a musical  at Theatre Under the Stars who was subsequently cast in  a large role in the film.

The shoot was long and protracted and actors talked excitedly about this big break. Given Mr.  Altman’s propensity for overshooting, there were several heart-broken ctors at the end of the shoot. Though they may have been on set for weeks or months, they frequently ended up only in crowd scenes or walking through scenes with the leading actors.

What I learned from this experience was that each film is a whole new world. Of course I was spoiled by the quality of the directors here but it did seem that the casting contribution was about  playing follow the leader. I felt so much  satisfaction from being able to ‘see’ the character as written and then searching for that actor. And it was bliss for me to introduce an actor to an opportunity to shine and also, pragmatically, to earn money so they could keep acting.