Tag Archives: western

Rip Van Winkle

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Posted: September 20, 2018 at 10:01 pm

As the story goes, Rip Van Winkle fell asleep for 20 years and awoke to discover he missed the American Revolution. I felt like Rip last weekend when I visited my alma mater, Western University, in London Ontario, with my buddy Mark. SO much has changed while I slept through the last 40 years. Here are a few of the differences on campus from 1978 to 2018: 

In 1978, I ogled the lithe and nubile cheerleaders at the football games. They wore short, SHORT skirts, and I was glued to their every move, waiting for their skirts to flare up so I could see their underwear. In 2018, it’s almost the same, except they’ve saved me time and effort by just wearing the underwear, without the skirts.

About to enter the washroom at the campus Spoke ’n’ Rim bar (an action I completed about 9,000 times in the ’70s), I read a notice on the door: “Western respects everyone’s right to choose a washroom appropriate for them. Trust the person using this space belongs here.” We didn’t have that in 1978, but I think it’s a good thing.

It’s not polite to look at another dude at an adjacent urinal, but I spied a young man in the Spoke’s washroom, two-thumb texting while he peed (look Ma, no hands). There are a bunch of reasons why that never happened in 1978.

When I was at Western, there was a bar in the basement of the student centre called the Elbow Room. It was a chill oasis of calm where I drank beer in-between classes. Alas, the Elbow Room is no more, but there’s still a bar at the same location. Only it doesn’t sell alcohol and it’s called Wax Bar. Their corporate slogan is, “There’s a Brazilian number of reasons to get waxed.”

My old dorm, Saugeen, was a co-ed, 1200 student, hormone-bursting apartment block of debauchery. From its inception, it was deservedly called the “Zoo,” owing to its collection of uninhibited animals. The residence symbol was a monkey, which I designed as a student and which graced the cover of the Saugeen yearbook. At Saugeen last week, the residence proctor (kind of like the president of the residence) gave me a tour of my old haunt. She brought out the 1978 yearbook to jog my memories, but then balked. “Oh no,” she said. “Does that say ‘Zoo’ on the cover? We can’t say ‘Zoo’ anymore. In fact, we’ve forbidden anyone in this residence to ever say ‘Zoo.’” I assume they were in the middle of a failed attempt of rebranding, trying to convince parents their children’s residence wasn’t wild. The Zoo: “The Nickname That Shall Not Be Named.”

My dorm room in 1978 accommodated two guys, on a floor of 30 young men, bent on mayhem. Saugeen has long since integrated every floor with boys and girls, a calming influence on the drunken idiots. The proctor used her skeleton key to let me into my old room, now decorated with ruffled pillows and darling stuffed animals. The current inhabitants of Room 754 are two gals named Balpreet and Jordynne.  There was no one named Balpreet or Jordynne at Western in 1978, but there probably should have been.

I visited Saugeen’s cafeteria. It’s now a beautiful, distressed-wood-and-planters ashram with organic quinoa salads and an Asian stir fry bar. When I lived in Saugeen, the cafeteria was a cement-block hangar that held pub nights with drugged-out rock bands, always ending with a wet t-shirt contest. The food was boiled until it was grey, or fried until the batter calcified. A mainstay was what we called Mystery Meat.  We dubbed the Swiss Steak “Swiss Mistake.” Once a week they served fried chicken and fries in a little red plastic basket, lined with a red and white checkered paper, called Chicken-in-a-Basket. It was greasy and disgusting, renamed by the students as Chicken-in-a-Casket. Those were the three best entrées.

Near Saugeen’s cafeteria, there was a photocopier where our drunken selves photocopied our bare butts so we could give pictures to girls. Hilarity ensued. For some reason, probably linked to hygiene and the #MeToo movement, the photocopier has been removed.

One thing hasn’t changed since 1978. The Western football team, once again National Champions, won Saturday’s game 77-3.

Pukin In Lucan

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Posted: June 23, 2016 at 9:32 pm

The moment Sproner set the table on fire, the evening took a crooked turn at the Orange Shillelagh Pub.

Where else would a college kid want to be on Saint Patrick’s Day? As a sophomore at Western University in London Ontario, it was my pleasure to introduce the freshmen in my dorm to an honoured Saint Patrick’s tradition, Pukin’ In Lucan. I rented a big yellow school bus to transport 50 guys from our campus to Lucan, a rough, working-class village of Irish descendants 30 minutes from London.

The clientele at the Orange Shillelagh that night was a mix of college kids with alligators on their golf shirts and the Irish townies who wanted to kill them. As a self-satisfied member of the former group, I was unaware how irritating our boisterous drinking games and other antics must have seemed to the locals. We chugged pint after pint of green beer, and sang vulgar rugby songs, standing on chairs. We took breaks to hoot encouragement toward Princess Glow, a corpulent, energetic stripper on a stage slightly larger than a coffee table. I sat at a small, round table with three guys from my dorm: Sproner (one name only, like Prince or Madonna), Hulk (not the real Hulk, but a guy with fists the size of hams, ready for clobberin’), and bespectacled John Mann. The table was topped by a drab, felt slipcover, best to absorb spilled beer. Bored, Sproner flicked his lighter and touched it to the felt. With a whoosh the entire surface became a low flame. The fire lit something in Hulk’s eye, or maybe it was the mickey of vodka he guzzled between beers, but Hulk took the empty bottle from his breast pocket and threw it at a townie table. The bottle smashed against the chair holding a townie wife, spraying glass on her back and hair. Hulk sauntered to the townie table, very cool, to end the fight he started. The townies stood so quickly their chairs overturned and they lunged at Hulk.

“He’ll be fine,” said Sproner. “There’s only three of them.”

“Uh, Sproner….look at the table,” I said. Flames licked higher as the felt blackened.

“Oh, shit.”

Sproner and I swept our table of glasses and tried to smother the fire with plastic-covered menus. This only fanned the flames. Amid the chaos, John Mann really, really needed a bathroom break. And not the kind of bathroom break one would like to have in a gritty bar of questionable sanitary practices. The sit-down kind.

A word about John Mann. He lived in the dorm room next to mine, and never made one peep. Never played his stereo loud, never banged on the wall (the other 30 guys we lived with did this every day). He was gangly, pimpled, and socially awkward. His eyes looked enormous as seen through coke-bottle glasses. He rarely spoke above a whisper. So I was shocked he came to Lucan, drank his share of green beer and seemed to be enjoying himself. He was a new man(n). I was thankful for the transformative properties of beer, ribald songs, fighting and a naked woman.

John Mann was in a hurry, and lucky the only bathroom stall was free. The latch on the stall was broken, but John Mann could close, if not lock, the door, the kind that hovered a foot from the floor. He dropped his underwear and pants to his ankles, sitting just in time. Once the emergency had passed, John Mann contemplated his life in the pose of Rodin’s The Thinker. The evening was shaping up to be the highlight of his social season, the highlight of his social life, the best night of his life. John Mann couldn’t have been happier than he was at that exact moment, sitting on a scuzzy bar toilet with a fuzzy head and diarrhea. He was yanked from his reverie by a loud bang as someone crashed through the outer door of the bathroom.

Under his stall door, John Mann could see a pair of frantic feet, darting to and fro. John Mann sat up straight upon hearing a low gurgle, deep in the intruder’s throat. The disembodied feet dashed toward John Mann’s stall. The door burst open, scraping John Mann’s knee as it swung. John Mann’s roommate Cyrus leapt toward John Mann with an arched back and an open mouth. John Mann was frozen in place, but really, where else could he go in that split second? A gusher of emerald puke exploded from Cyrus’s mouth, landing on John Mann’s naked lap, legs, and the clothes bunched at his feet. John Mann could feel puke sliding off his thighs and testicles, dollops splashing in the toilet bowl below him.

Cyrus swiped his mouth with the back of his hand and silently, sheepishly, left John Mann on his throne with the stall door open. John Mann sat still for a few moments, then calmly stood. He methodically wiped his body and clothes clean of green vomit, as clean as was possible using one industrial size roll of toilet paper. John Mann pulled up his pants, washed his hands and returned to our charred table in the bar. He ordered another green beer. John Mann wasn’t going to miss the rest of the best night of his life.