It was cold that morning on rue Sainte-Catherine. I emerged from the cold and gray bowels of the metro, leaving the cocoon of teleworking, to go very close to the Duty, in the Village, as it is called today. Along the way, the ambient distress assailed me around the Berri station, a sort of modern-day version of the Court of Miracles, populated by disenchanted beings whose only home is the tarmac, or by disconcerted immigrants seeking their bearings.
The windows of the National Theater announced the upcoming arrival of queer burlesque artists, from Asia or Lebanon. This is where the Théâtre de l’Oeil Ouvert company chose to tell us about its next musical show, The giantess, which will be on display this summer. The giantess is none other than La Poune, aka Rose Ouellette.
A memorable woman as tall as three apples, who defied the clergy, her gender and her social condition to become a very popular vaudeville star, she was the first Quebec woman to direct two theaters, including the same venerable Théâtre National founded in 1900, which once housed the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art.
In a few words, La Poune was a comedian who made the whole of Quebec burst into laughter from the First World War until her death in 1996, at the age of 93. If she was long snubbed by intellectual circles (“the farts”, as she called them), it is said that the elite of Outremont sometimes went down to the National to listen to her in secret. Pierre Elliott Trudeau himself would have been there, as would French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who would have asked for news of La Poune from a stunned Robert Bourassa in 1974.
La Poune was born above a tavern, at the corner of Papineau Avenue and Ontario Street, where the chic restaurant Chez ma gros truie darling gave way to a modest Belle Province, then to a Maison du Souvlaki, both of which recently closed their doors. They leave behind an abandoned commercial space.
Today we call this neighborhood the Gay Village, even though its streets are often sad enough to cry. Last summer, restaurateurs no longer dared to open their terraces there as they became the scene of violence, delinquency and drug addiction.
At the time of La Poune, it was the Faubourg à m’lasse, a neighborhood of poor, if not very poor, French-Canadian families. For example, Rose Ouellette was born into a family of 21 children, 17 of whom died at a young age.
According to legend, reported by a local child, this famous suburb was so named because, when the barrels of molasses were unloaded in the port, the women of the neighborhood went to the quays with small containers. At the end of the transfer of the molasses cargo to the dock, the crane operator deliberately dropped the last barrel, as if out of clumsiness, and the women collected the molasses in their small containers to take it home. We were poor, but we were united.
Even on an empty stomach, we need to laugh. Indomitable, untamed, La Poune found her vocation, her destiny there. Expelled from three schools in six years of schooling, working in a factory at 13, she was fired for playing the accordion and making employees dance during break time. In the midst of the crisis, at the beginning of the 20th centurye century, the people of the neighborhood will applaud him for forgetting hunger, rent deadlines, poverty. Playing off her small size by dressing like a child, she becomes famous. She is funny, while women have until now been reduced to the secondary role of foil to comedians. Once widowed, she maintained a long homosexual relationship with her secretary.
A small musical theater company, the Théâtre de l’Oeil Ouvert is not afraid to delve into the history of female icons to tell the story of Quebec. He did this by depicting New France newly conquered by the English at the time of Corriveau, in the 18th century.e century. By singing the story of La Poune, he will tell the story of the hunger and poverty of the Faubourg to my heart’s content, during the crisis.
Today, the Village needs warmth and hope just as much as it did in the past. Towards the east, new vocations must be found at the deserted towers of TVA, aka Télé-Métropole, and Radio-Canada, which once hosted La Poune. But we must also give care, a place, to the most deprived. So that the Gay Village finally loses a little of its sad face.
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