Allow me to lift a little of the wild snow from the past and stir up the soup of memories. Today, 40 years ago, February 9, 1984, I signed in The duty my first text, a review of the restaurant L’Actuel, the defunct mussels and fries bistro on Rue Peel. I was 20 years old and I was enrolled in my first year of journalism at UQAM.
Before university, I had been a caterer for two years, an expert in choux pastry and tartlets, between CEGEP and “my future”. I was still young and I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. Forty years later, it’s a bit the same thing. Except that…
I became the dean of the newspaper. Not in age, but in years of free electron, yes. All my colleagues arrived afterwards. I’m “just” a freelancer, but like bedbugs or Louise Deschâtelets, I’m hanging on.
In total, I have seen: three newsrooms, five directors, a news director with whom I married in 1988 (it lasted 11 months…), a clerk who went bad (went to the competition) and with whom I had a child after we met in New York in September 2001 during the famous attacks. We can say that The duty will have provided me with material to love what I must and to do… my best.
French is a very difficult language. We have barely been writing for forty-five years before we begin to notice it.
My first “lifetime” text — this restaurant review — was written on the back of a placemat from the bar where I worked as a waitress, the former Faubourg Saint-Denis on rue Émery, a stone’s throw from UQAM. That evening, Daniel, the bartender, made fun of me: the little one had ideas of grandeur. Jean-François Lacerte, my class accomplice, clerk at Duty, called me urgently at 5 p.m.: “You have to deliver your text tomorrow! » Welcome to everyday life. I typed my first article on an old typist from the Judith-Jasmin building. If Judith could return to a newsroom today, she would have to take a remedial course, even in French and Wokism.
This first Tuesday evening in February 1984 would mark all the following ones, spent most often in pajamas, working from home. My “Tuesdays” have become untouchable, inviolable and silent. The rest of the week is more convivial. Even the cat is allowed to jump on my desk.
I’m talking to you about a time…
I was a restaurant reviewer for 15 years, before the excesses of foodism and the introduction of pasta with three strips of truffle for $22. The “Zeitgeist” page, which also bore the name “Plaisirs” and “C’est la vie!” », has existed for 30 years. I owe to our late director Bernard Descôteaux – then editor-in-chief – the good fortune of having migrated from the hot topics to the “news stories” and of having remained at the newspaper.
Every Friday, I talked about eros and thanatos, wrote a letter from the heart (Dear Joblo), met fabulous and often humble people, poets and madmen, worked together with bums from a good family like Jacques Nadeau, took more or less calculated risks, sown seeds of whatever, inspired, sighed, searched, kidded, made smile, shocked or provoked, suffered and enjoyed my solitude, my freedom. I have written in almost all physical and mental conditions.
I have been Madame Food, Madame Fuck, Madame B., convenient labels to put me in a box. I have given up trying to explain the subversion of mockery behind the appearance of lightness, even in the choice of subject, the most delicate aspect for a columnist. I spoke about my vibrator (“The Second Violin”, February 13, 1998) in a newspaper where priests wrote editorials at Christmas and Easter until 2010.
Impose your luck, hold your happiness and go towards your risk. Looking at you, they’ll get used to it.
I have been enrolled in this school of artisans for 40 years, “paid to be curious”, as my deceased, the one of eleven months, said. “My” page is an immense privilege and a carte blanche that I have never taken lightly. Nothing belongs to me except to be faithful to the appointment. This “you” could be the subject of an entire book or a sociologist’s thesis. We bonded.
Those who preceded me and hired me, Jean-Guy Duguay (he called me back a few months after Lise Bissonnette had kicked me out), Pierre Beaulieu, Guy Deshaies, Benoît Aubin, fueled by coffee virile, smoked Gitanes without filter in the newsroom, did not drink jasmine kombucha at lunchtime and sneered loudly: junkies new ones used to the adrenaline of the ones we kill.
They were lucid and cynical, brilliant and rebellious. Their professional motto: “ never let them see you sweatshirt » (sponsored by Old Spice). News cowboys with scathing repartee who had heard it all and who had the most juicy and unpublishable anecdotes in town. They had style, and “style is a presence, it takes character”, an old philosopher pointed out to me last week…
It doesn’t change the world, but…
Tolstoy, that old bearded man, wrote: everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing themselves. I have changed a lot in 40 years, partly thanks to my job. I gave a voice to the voiceless, created links, virtuous circles. I soak up the spirit of the times, the zeitgeistmore weighed down since the pandemic shift.
My job does not consist of fueling denial or flattering the readership; I am a passer, a passer-by. Alain C. wrote to me last Friday that he loved my texts 65% of the time, loved them 30% of the time. This is already an achievement. Beauty is always in the eye of the beholder.
For the purposes of this article, I found some texts that made me smile: the one about Passard’s restaurant in Paris (“White truffles and vintage manure”, https://bit.ly/4btG15K), the one about the bovine veterinarian (“Stories of Udder”, https://bit.ly/3SuDNdG), the one about my colonoscopy (“Journey at the end of the tunnel”, https://bit.ly/3SurYUT) and the one about this second-hand bookstore (“Shoebox Whispers”, https://bit.ly/3SzkSym). Because you have to laugh about it, otherwise what’s the point, I ask you?
“What I learned can be summed up in three or four words,” said Gabin. He would have added: if statistics do not change the world, there may still be love. The love of the living, the different, the unusual and the crooked petticoat, of transversal thinking.
I don’t consider myself a messiah; It’s already still beautiful to be here. And if I’m still there, it’s also thanks to you. Did I already say thank you, by the way?