They delivered, rain or shine, on horseback, by train or truck, the divine bottle that landed on the steps, full of fresh milk, ready to be poured into coffee or cereal.
Storyteller, Arleen Thibault is the milkman’s daughter. And if we believe the fantasies of folklore, it would share DNA with many spectators of storytelling evenings. This myth of the milkmen, casanovas of the dawn, who kept company with the abandoned wives, gave birth to his last show, milkmaid’s daughter, which will be shown at Salle Claude-Léveillé at Place des Arts. Back to a dying profession.
Milk, at home, was a family affair. His father, his great-grandfather and his uncle were dairymen. As a child, she remembers having accompanied her father on his ” run of milk” and thus to have tasted the great privilege of being able to enter the houses.
“When I could, I helped him with his runs of milk. It made her company. I did a couple of streets with him, she says. For me, it was like having Halloween, people were giving me candy. Going into people’s homes sharpened my curiosity, my sense of community. When you are a child, apart from your family, you don’t have many opportunities to see how people live. There were affluent neighborhoods, housing where people with disabilities lived, through that, he educated me. »
The relationship to people
This relationship with people, living in various situations, fed his creative imagination.
“I learned to approach customers, people, like characters. At home, we made jokes. It really fed me. In my family, we are a little crazy, we make caricatures. My dad is a trickster,” she says.
This relationship to community life in an urban environment was also at the origin of his previous show, The wish, which she has carried, with great success, on the old and the new continent. “It was the story of tenants in an apartment block who had to make one wish,” she says.
Although necessarily inspired by his family experience, the show milkman’s daughter relies on invented characters. First, there is that of the milkman, Lucien, who meets “the truck of his life”, and whose adventures we follow. Then there will be a bored client, of course, and a jealous husband. Everything you need to unfold a vaudeville. “I embroider around the themes and have a lot of fun,” she says.
retro universe
Through this story, she frequents the retro world of the 1950s and dairy bars. “My characters are a lot in there. She has also collected dairy stories from people of different generations.
His father, meanwhile, got up every day at three in the morning, to go to his first customers at 5:30 a.m. “It was 10 or 12 hour days a day, summer and winter. You had to be physically strong. He never took vacations, except on weekends,” she recalls. It is this loyalty, this commitment, that she also wants to highlight.
“I decline the dairy profession to show how one can remain faithful to one’s commitments. How the relationship to work has changed. The relation to objects too. Before, when you bought a fridge, it was for life. The objects were not part of planned obsolescence. It’s a relationship to something very engaging, which has become disposable. I show how the character adapts to all that,” she says.
His father quit the business in his late 50s. He had had, like the other milkmen, to become self-employed. Truck and gas bills made it difficult to practice the profession. We had to face competition from convenience stores. In the meantime, moreover, housewives have mostly entered the labor market. And we no longer recycle milk bottles.
While traveling in Europe, she also discovered that the mythology of the profession was not the same in France and in England. “I realized that milk delivery was not done the same way,” she says, adding that Quebec has rather inherited the British tradition in this area. The costume differs, in particular. European milkmen are traditionally depicted in white suits with a bow tie. Arleen’s father has long worn a navy blue suit with a pale blue shirt.
“We have a little American film side,” she says.