Donna Lypchuk
It's for your own good. I'm a jinx. Everywhere I've ever worked has gone under within five years of my departure.
Either I was a jinx or -- this is a real stretch because I'm the World's Worst Employee -- absolutely indispensable to the smooth and successful workings of the operation.
The only place I've ever worked that is now not currently gone (not counting the endless magazines I've written for that subsequently went under and -- gulp! -- Friday Night! With Ralph Benmurgui) is A Space, which during my time was located at 299 Queen St. That was 299 Queen when it was a funky old warehouse building and not the super-slick interactive headquarters of CITY-TV.
The latest victim of my bad karma is the McLaughlin Planetarium, where I worked part- time as an usher for more than four years, which closed last week. We used to call it "The Pleasure Dome" because every celebrity in town having an affair used to bring his mistress there and grope her in the dark, and also because the manager of this place had a laugh just like the guy from Frankie Goes To Hollywood. Plus, it really was a pleasure to escort to the washroom violent, drunken patrons with vomit bubbling out of the corners of their mouths, one after another, night after night, to the strains of "The lunatic is in the hall."
It is also amazing how many people, once they've finished throwing up, liked to enjoy a good cigarette in the planetarium's non-smoking lobby before they returned to the theatre for another dose of seizure-inducing strobe. In fact, there was so much vomit and urine spilled that many who worked there refused to sit in the seats, and marveled at those who would actually pay to do so. Maybe they should have called it the McLaughlin Vomitorium.
Aside from having to deal with bodily fluids and telling people to put out their "special" cigarettes, this was not a hard job. I mean, you didn't have to be a rocket scientist to work there. You didn't even have to know how many planets rotate around the sun. In fact, the question I was most frequently asked when I worked as an usher was, "Where's Pluto?"
The ninth planet from the sun wasn't even included as part of the solar system. In many of the educational shows, Pluto was not even mentioned. This is because the orrery, a machine that projects the path of the planets as they rotate around the sun on the dome of the theatre, did not include the planet Pluto as one of its projections. For years, I assumed this was because the planetarium itself was so antiquated that it was actually purchased prior to the discovery of Pluto. Actually, it was because if Pluto was to honestly and scientifically be projected on the domed ceiling it would be projected as a point of light somewhere out in the middle of Bay St., so the planetarium staff chose to just ignore it rather than be accused of being proportionately wrong, thus spawning generations of Toronto school children who think that the solar system ends at Uranus.
Or "Yer Anus" as Don Harron, a popular guest voice-over artist at the Planetarium would put it.
Despite the fact that educators chose to ignore Pluto, or, as was the case with one unfortunate show, immerse the general public in Charlie Farquharson's strange toilet humor for hours on end -- "An ASSteroid? Is that the same as a hemorrhoid?" (har-har) -- the best programming at the McLaughlin was the stuff that was homegrown. The star shows were written, researched, generated and created by Canadian artists like Mychael Danna (best-known for his scores for Atom Egoyan's early films), who composed the most beautiful, haunting, inspired soundtracks. These shows were often technologically seamless and real marvels as spectacles, and had a spiritual quality to them that could put crying babies to sleep and calm the frayed nerves of museum-weary parents who had thought it was a good idea to expose their over-stressed, hyperactive children to the terrors of the Bat Cave in the ROM.
The worst programs were the actual laser shows, purchased as a package from a firm in Florida called Audio Visual Imagineering. Computer-generated images in primary colors of trapezoids, squares, triangles and sometimes (gasp!) circles would be projected on the ceiling and appear to dance around to the strains of the Beatles or Def Leppard or Bon Jovi. A similar effect could be achieved by standing outside with your cigarette held aloft against the night sky and waving it around really fast while blinking rapidly. Surely a Canadian could create a spectacle like this as well as an American -- and more cheaply. Why was there never any Laser Murray McLaughlin or Laser Spoons?
Still, no matter how mediocre, the laser shows always sold out. And historically, the planetarium has always been one of the most popular theatres in the city. So how could it be allowed to shut down -- and just in time for one of its most bedazzling shows, "The Christmas Star"? For me, this is the latest, greatest mystery of the universe...
By the way, why doesn't some smart entrepreneur take out the chairs and turn it into a night club? The revenue could be turned over to support the ROM. It would be the perfect place to watch "all the stars come out."
