quote:

~ The Baroness ~


It’s 2002, dead winter, a few days before New Year’s. Mean wet cold prowls the city. I am silent on the couch in my warehouse apartment after crying for what might have been 4 hours. I have thrown the phone against the wall and its electronic guts are splattered all over the floor. My pajama sleeves are streaked with snot. I feel like a gutted fish.

“Asshole” I mutter, trying not to cry again, but I do, and start punching the cushions furiously.

My reflection thrashes in the closet mirror then slows to a stop. Stunned, I get up and walk towards it. Oh dear. My swollen face glistens. The upper lip is comically puffy. My eyes are pink slits. I look nothing like myself.

Suddenly I leap into clothes, throw on a jacket, toque and boots and bolt out the door. To the rhythm of my pounding head I start walking along Queen St. Soon I am striding with determination, then practically running, all the way from Broadview Ave. in the East to Soho in the West. I march straight into the Flight Centre and yank off my right mitt. Parting a see of browsing ho-hummers I smack the sweaty credit card on the counter, and say to the girl, gasping,

“Europe please, as soon as possible.”

With the sight of my sorrow-beaten face no longer shocking, she smiles broadly. I am her dream customer, a woman scorned.

Clickety-click.

“Um, how about…” click click “…two days from.. no wait – that’s New Year’s,” “Perfect!” I smack the counter again. I may have yelled that. People are staring.

When I walk out the door I’m holding a rail pass, a plane ticket and an itinerary that stretches from France to Italy to Austria. I am in shock. I start laughing out loud, right there in the street. Aren’t I a skittish, dreamy academic who befriends pianos? What’s happening to me? I can’t speak Italian!

Not that I was new to planes, trains and automobiles… As a touring songwriter and musician I’ve battered many a suitcase. By the time I was twenty-four I had crossed Canada ten times and covered both American coasts. Yet for some reason Europe seemed like too great a challenge for a solo traveler on so many levels, and I feared spoiling my Romantic ideal. Flipping the bird to these excuses and my busted heart, I decided it was going to have to be trial by fire.

Off I went on New Year’s Eve. How fitting.

That day wasn’t just about turning betrayal into freedom, it marked the birth of my favourite alter ego - patron saint of adventure and small acts of audacity - “The Baroness”. There isn’t a parlour maid alive she couldn’t turn into a brazen queen. Occasionally now, when I open my eyes on stage I feel like I’m looking out of a different pair. It’s her - at the reins, going on a killing spree through the land of Fear. When all the other tenants of my mind vote for chickening out, she vetoes with one swish of her red gown and just like that, whatever it is I “shouldn’t do”, I’ve done.

Take, for instance, when I decided to drop everything and live alone in a remote northern cabin for four months… Friends and family assumed I was depressed. My mother made impassioned pleas for my sanity. No one (not even me) knew that I was in the capable hands of my own imagination, and a safe, subtle rearrangement of self was not going to cut it. Swish - and I’m driving a cube van down the 401 with my grand piano in the back.

It was only fitting to refuse any incoming mail that wasn’t addressed to my new moniker. The first time I made the 30-minute trek to the nearest postal depot (also a general store, gas station and library) the shopkeeper eyed me suspiciously through his glasses.

“Ah,” he said with a wry smile when I came to the counter. “You must be the Baroness.”

I pictured the bridges of Paris, Florence at dusk, snow falling on the lights of Vienna… and the armful of songs I would inevitably be taking back to Toronto.

“Indeed I am sir.” I replied. “Indeed I am.”

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