Dan Aykroyd was in town yesterday in affectionate support of his dad, Peter, who has just authored the family's first book. The Anniversary Compulsion is mostly about the 1967 celebration of our centenial, for which Peter directed PR, but it looks forward to the year 2,000, for which he predicts "an absolute avalanche" of millenial craziness.
Dan is best known as an actor, usually funny, and at Christmas he'll be Mack Sennett in Richard Attenborough's Chaplin. But his Canadian passport says "writer," and the evidence is in scripts like The Blues Brothers, Spies Like Us and Ghostbusters. For Dan, 1967 was "the year I really discovered American rhythm and blues." He was blown away by Sam & Dave at the Expo fairgrounds. He was 15.
The Anniversary Compulsion is not nostalgic. "We Centennial Commission guys didn't have much fun," says Peter, who wonders now if 1967 is "the only centennial this country will ever have." A similarly concerned Dan celebrated his 40th birthday "very quietly" on July 1 at the family home in rural Ontario. He drove an antique car in a local parade and "as a famous summer resident, I spoke about how I feel about Canada, and how we should all stick together, and how the Pakistani man who came here 10 years ago is as Canadian as I am with my French/Irish/English/Anglican/Catholic blood. We're all Canadians if we live here and celebrate this country." Later, at home, there was birthday cake. Peter says he celebrated his 70th birthday in February , in Costa Rica.
He thinks numbers are significant, though a long chapter "on the mathematics of 5 and 1 and 0" had to be left out of the book to keep it to 230 pages. Dan has his own anniversary compulsions. "We are compelled," he says, "by sentiment and tradition (and fingers and toes) to mark off time in fives. "March /92 was the 10th anniversary of John Belushi's death, and I had a little celebration of my own which we didn't have the year before of the year before, because it was only the 8th or 9th..."
His 10th wedding anniversary is coming up. "To me that's a big marker"--even though he and his actress wife Donna Dixon have actually lived together longer. Dan believes enough in the mystical significance of numbers not to fly on a 13th. But a 5 is good--even though one of his most vivid memories is of living at 505 Queen East, and being stopped for speeding by a cop with badge #5055, who have him ticket #50555 just as teh 505 streetcar went by.