Two years ago, during Westmount's 125th anniversary celebrations, David, an avid amateur multimedia creator, took a camcorder and videotaped Trent playing the role of Westmount's first mayor, the Hon. Eustache Prud'homme.
Trent and members of council were acting out the city's early history in a play, 'There'll Be No Tavern in this Town', written by Trent and staged at Victoria Hall. (The clip, occupying a staggering amount of drive space on Nicholson's sites, can be seen by going to http://www.oocities.org/~davidnicholson/VicHall/Vic-No-Tavern.htm and following the links).
Now, with Westmount residents poised to vote in Sunday's referendum, the Nicholson web site includes a large section on the City's fight against forced mergers. Easily accessed through a "Paws Off Our City" link that spoofs the plethora of signs appearing around Westmount, the site encourages residents to take three other Westmounters with them when they vote on Sunday. One of the quotes says it all: "Some day we'll scream, 'We are mad as hell and.' They will say, 'Your turnout was so low,' indicating we did not care!"
What started in 1996 from scratch as a single web site dedicated to Westmount has today become two, averaging a combined 30,000 'hits' a month. Wednesday-Night.com, the second and larger by far, is an extension of the Nicholsons' weekly Wednesday night 'think-tank' get-togethers they've held at their home for nearly 20 years.
David estimates that since starting the sites, he has embedded thousands of links in them, dealing with the minutest to the most important aspects of Westmount life, from Trent's speeches to a gallery of online art that includes work by Herb Bercovitz, Harry Mayerovitch and Wayne Larsen.
Nicholson controls the sites through a Pentium III PC with 128 megabytes of RAM, that sits in a ground-floor office in his home. They occupy several gigabytes of storage space at several Internet service providers he is connected to through a high-speed cable link. All of which, David claims, makes him one of the largest web sites in Canada. And while he puts together most of the pages himself, with Diana as editor, he gratefully acknowledges the help of many contributors, including Bercovitz and Prof. Gerald Ratzer.
During Westmount's last council meeting, Trent commented that, thanks to the Nicholsons' work, Westmount is becoming world-famous.
"We get more hits from California than we do from Westmount," said David, acknowledging the sites' growing international popularity. So far, he knows of only four sites on the web dedicated to Westmount: his own, the City administration's and Westmount Public Library's.
As for Wednesday Night, at one particularly momentous meeting some years back, the leaders of some of the world's largest financial organizations-including the director of the International Monetary Fund, Jacques de la Rosier-accepted the Nicholsons' invitation. "I had an average of $98 billion sitting around the table," David recalled with pride.