It's "Curtains" for Toronto’s Old Runnymede Theatre
HEREsay #6: A Sketch of Nasty Little York
In researching a piece about Montreal history, I have found myself, rather counterintuitively, reflecting on my sojourn in Toronto. While living there between December 2016 and June 2018, two close friends and I would meet semi-weekly for wine and delectable platters at the now-shuttered German cafe Stadt to hash out ideas for a large-scale writing project. It would be called Nasty Little York, a derogatory nickname given to the poor, muddy settlement of York before it was renamed—and rebranded—Toronto in 1834. The project would be map-based, with each piece of short fiction—sketches, really—linked to a specific location in Toronto. The goal would be for the location to inform the story; to provide a framework, literal and metaphorical, for the events that take place. Someone coming to the web-based platform could peruse a bespoke map of Toronto, choose an area, and read tales that take place there.
Many meetings and many fried artichokes and kale caesar salads later, my friends and I even got to the phase of researching funding opportunities. The project seemed, to me, to be on the cusp of launching. And then, as it does, life had other plans. Or, at least, I did. Wanting desperately to move back to Montreal and with opportunity knocking, my husband and I packed up and, for the second time in less than 19 months, moved our entire existence—including a dog and three cats—across Central Canada. The project paused indefinitely.
Although the large-scale project never launched, I had already written several Toronto-based sketches as warm-ups for how the stories might operate. On my long list of locations that intrigued me, the old Runnymede Theatre in Bloor West Village was near the top of my list.
The Runnymede has lived many lives since its completion in 1927:
Beginning as a 1400-seat vaudeville theatre, stars twinkling on the ceiling, the Runnymede transitioned into a single-screen cinema with the rise of film in the 1930s.
The bingo fad of the 1970s led to yet another transition, this time into a bingo hall, before the Runnymede turned back to a cinema in 1980 (this time with two screens instead of one).
With skyrocketing rents ($35,000 a month at the time), Famous Players could no longer make a profit with the cinema.
Fittingly, given its book-centric plot, You’ve Got Mail was the last movie to play in 1999 before the Runnymede became a Chapters bookstore.
Eventually, even the bookstore saw its demise, and in April 2015, the building reopened as a Shoppers Drug Mart.
In setting a story inside the Runnymede, I was interested in how the mundane (a chain pharmacy; a lovers’ spat) could occur within more grandiose contexts (a majestic old theatre designed in the Atmospheric style that once had courtyard murals and a ceiling painted like the sky; deeper issues of masculine distraction and transitional confessions).
I am not sure how I feel about the original piece now or my current reworking—its main character is meant to grate and I want to capture a certain type of theatrical relationship dynamic I kept seeing in Toronto, but should I, perhaps, have come at the story from the other angle, from Natalia’s and not Fahad’s perspective?
I am almost through Gabrielle Zevin’s impeccably wrought Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which, for all its verbal dazzle, gets hard to bear because of the unwavering selfishness of the female protagonist, Sadie Green. I may be swayed by the last twenty pages I have left to go and Sam and Marx, the other protagonists, balance her out to a degree, but so far her cruel demeanour and vicious overreactions are ruining my enjoyment of the novel’s sweep. If people as consistently unsympathetic as Sadie Green really exist, and I have my doubts, what do we ultimately get by sticking with her through nearly 500 pages of anti-growth? Perhaps someone could persuade me that her way of approaching friendships is justified, but I would need a lot of convincing.
The model I used for my most recent edit of the Runnymede sketch was the musical version of The Devil Wears Prada starring the incomparable (and under-utilised) Vanessa Williams, which I have just seen at the Dominion Theatre in London. In the musical, which follows the trajectory and story beats of the film very closely (perhaps too closely), the songs offer moments of breadth to explore Andy’s moral quandaries and secondary characters’ ambitions. For all its faults, the musical does a wonderful job balancing any wrongheadedness or cutthroat attitudes with relatable anxieties and softened edges.
With my tweaks, will a reader see past the hardened attributes of Fahad, the character I have created, to the softer core and the points I am trying to make, or do his distasteful characteristics mar the insight? I see the redeemability in him the way I cannot quite see it in Sadie Green, so are ‘unlikable’ characters the darlings of their writers alone?
If you have any thoughts after reading the sketch, I would love to hear them. But if fiction is not your thing, I have bolded a few scattered passages below where I tried to reflect the history and decor of the Runnymede to colour or underscore the central relationship of the sketch. Feel free to skim. ;)
Happy reading/skimming,
Mikey
Curtains
Fahad picked up a Proraso beard oil, flipped it around to the back. “You’re making a spectacle of yourself,” he said. This was the wrong thing to say. It’s why he said it.
“And ditching me for Sheila last week wasn’t, Fahad? It isn’t hysterical to yell at me in the middle of Bryden’s for asking Rob a question? A question.”
“You really wanna hash this out in a Shoppers?”
The Proraso wouldn’t do. According to Reddit, it was the New Belgium Brewing of beard oils. Whatever that meant. All he knew is that he wanted the Bugatti, the Koenigsegg CCXR Trevita of beard oils. An ELEMIS or Beardbrand. One where he could feel the price tag on his cheeks.
Natalia flipped him off. “A Shoppers with a plaque,” she qualified.
“Good enough for Heritage Toronto,” he said, scanning a Just for Men Beard Wash, letting a beat pass, “good enough for our pissing contest.”
What had he liked about this girl—this “woman,” as she always corrected him. Her hair? Ringlets shellacked to the point of looking unwashed. Her penchant for booty-hiding sweats? The way she lumbered side to side, as if incorrectly operating a rocking horse? More likely it had been the way she nibbled his ear. Her taste in Netflix shows. Her scrappiness in a fight. And she had great eyebrows. Thick. Lily Collins-style.
He needed to break up with her.
He also needed beard oil.
The beard was a new development. Made him look better in his blue suit, crisp white shirt. More mature. Covered the acne scars on his chin.
“Would you call this beard short or medium length?”
He turned. Natalia was in front of the nail polish. Rows bathed in holy LED. She held a bottle of silvery liquid behind her to show him and shook it.
“Silver?”
“Soft Cashmere Pewter,” she corrected.
“Nah.” He liked it. But if he’d said so it would have taken her longer to decide and, in the end, she’d have put it back and opted for something brighter. Something ‘Aruba Blue’ or ‘Millennial Pink.’ If he said he liked Aruba Blue or Millennial Pink, she’d pick Soft Cashmere Pewter.
Natalia put it back on the shelf, shifted a step over, still not looking at him.
Fahad thought of all of the other couples who’d shopped for beard oil and nail polish in the middle aisle of Shoppers. All the other mundane conversations about Soft Cashmere Pewter.
“You ready to split?” he pouted. “I’m wasting my time here.”
“You really thought they’d have some expensive brand in a Drug Mart?”
“What makes you think I’d only want the expensive brand?”
“I’ve met you.”
“Then why’d you let me derail us? You ready?”
She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again, her gum smelling of cinnamon. Eventually, she mumbled, “I’m shopping.”
“But we came in for me. I’m done. Let’s go.”
“It’s always about you,” she snapped, turning the head of a septuagenarian in a poncho sweater.
“The volume of your voice says otherwise.”
Natalia coloured, as if she were actually embarrassed. She was never embarrassed. He trailed behind her as she meandered up and down the aisles, the pink slowly coiling from her cheeks. Picking up things, putting them down. What was she on the hunt for: a sale, an epiphany? Advice from the Q-Tip gods?
“Whatya think the rent is on this place?”
She didn’t respond. Ignoring him, as usual.
“I read that at the end of the nineties it was, like, $35,000. You think now it’s Harvard tuition-high?”
Three toothbrushes had her attention.
“Come on. Guess?”
“Will you have the answer if I guess?”
“No.”
“Then why guess?”
None of the toothbrushes were a winner.
Natalia wandered back through the central candy aisle, running her hand over the 4-packs of gum. He showed her a Mr. Big bar and winked. She rolled her eyes up towards the domed ceiling, its medallion of gold, green, and silver, cheap and glossy like spray paint.
“You don’t have to stalk me,” she groused, raising the alarm of the young Indian woman straightening crackers.
“You can’t stalk the willing.”
Fahad shrugged his shoulders at the Indian woman, gave her one of his suave smiles and a double wink. She went back to her crackers, assuaged but unimpressed.
“What did you want to tell me?” he asked. “Earlier, you said you had something to tell me.”
She ignored him. Of course.
“Can we go yet? What’s keeping us here?”
Ignored. Natalia looped yet again into the side aisles.
Losing his mind had lost its appeal, but he threw her one. For old time’s sake.
“You love playing deaf, don’t you honey.”
An accusation of intent spiked with a female diminutive that, in better times, could have been a pet name. A tried-and-true formula for blast-off.
But she didn’t bite. She didn’t grumble. Just the back of her head, its nest of greasy curls.
“Searching for gold in these here racks, toots?” he baited again, chewing the “toots” like an old-timey gangster.
Nothing. Where was the smack of her fingers on his leg? The grinding of her thick eyebrows, sigh of cinnamon gum?
Fahad stood and ruminated over a package. Realizing it was anti-itch cream, he stuffed it back on a shelf.
She had never given up before. Not before him.
Natalia descended into the beauty section, where she knew he wouldn’t want to venture. Too obvious, ablaze like the stores at the other end of Bloor Street with their neon lit underwear and mannequins bathing in fluorescents. A movie screen hung over the displays splashing perfume ads, Kristen Stewart soaring naked on a loop.
Begrudgingly, he walked a few paces behind Natalia, pretending it wasn’t a thing.
He tried to suss out her body language. To catch a glimpse of her eyes when she raised them towards this face cream or that. Her eyes always gave her away. She had eyes like eggs. Scrambled, casting about, meant she needed to be held close, calmed. Her forehead kissed. Sunny-side up: she was on Molly. Hard-boiled: watch out. The calm before the storm. But Natalia averted his watchfulness.
Beyond arm’s length, in the radiance of the displays, she looked beatific, her skin and hair glistening. His eyes trailed her to where she stood under the proscenium arch, perusing a pyramid of perfumes, then wandered up to the blue-sky ceiling and mustardy décor. The clamshell lighting and playful putti a throwback to the building’s heyday as a vaudeville theatre.
He cast around for something to comment on. “120 bucks before taxes for 50ml of Advanced Night Repair Synchronized Recovery Complex? I’ll tell you what’s complex. That name.”
Ignored. This was getting to be too much, even for her.
She immediately put down the 50ml Tiffany’s perfume she was holding to her nose and escaped down a side aisle. Fahad followed. Obedient. A puppy dog with stewing, bad dog thoughts. Natalia picked up a box of hair colour. Put it down. Picked up another. If she registered his presence beside her, she didn’t let on.
Fahad placed his hand lightly on her eventual decision: a box of bluish gray. Natalia looked up, finally meeting his eyes with her own.
“You don’t need this.” He plucked the box from her hand, placed it back on the shelf in the wrong place. Grabbing one of her hairsprayed curls in his fingers, he assured her, “Your hair’s already perfect.”
“Fahad…” Her mouth stayed open. Her cinnamon tongue hovered and touched her top row of teeth. A new gesture in her repertoire.
She continued to meet his gaze with an indecipherable plainness. The LEDs making halos of her eyes.
“I’m…We…,” she began, then let the halos say the rest.
No and no! Maybe Ben Hur??!!
A Toronto story this time, Mikey. Love it. I don’t remember if you ever told me that you two had lived in Toronto for a year or so. It’s the city I grew up in although I was out in the suburbs in Don Mills so Bloor Street West was terra incognita to me. I did, however, visit that Shoppers Drug Mart several years ago and was very impressed with how they had maintained parts of the old theatre. Thanks for giving us a history of the many roles that building has played.
As for your couple and their bickering in the aisles, will you reveal to us whether they end up living happily ever after?!? 🤔😁