Things You Should Know About Me: Courtroom Artist

I was once a courtroom artist.

Back in the early 1990s I got a phone call from my former high school art teacher. He was moonlighting at a local TV station as their graphic designer and said they needed a courtroom artist for a prominent area murder trial. He wasn't available (due to his daytime job as art teacher) and asked if I'd be interested. Being the young and dumb artist that I was back then I enthusiastically agreed to do it. I was sure that such a high profile gig would get me noticed and lead to more work.

I showed up at the courthouse the next day, drawing tablet and colored pencils in hand. Things took a turn for the worse early on as I saw that everyone had to pass through a metal detector to enter the courtroom. Right before it was my turn I suddenly remembered there was a metal X-Acto knife in my pencil box! As I was trying to think what to do, a policeman barked "Next!" at me and I sheepishly walked through the detector. Amazingly the knife didn't set off any alarms, so I spent the entire day in court with a knife on my person. Take that, courtroom security!

I took a seat and got out my pencils and paper. There was a stylish and attractive woman sitting next to me who glanced at what I was drawing from time to time. There was also a family of less than stylish people in the row in front of me who noticed what I was doing and kept turning around to watch. I didn't think much about them at the time.

The trial involved a defendant in his late twenties who was accused of killing an underage girl and burying her body in a shallow grave in a field. Real Citizen Of The Year material. There were lots of grisly descriptions of the body and the crime scene. It probably sounds interesting in a morbid kind of way, but it was anything but. Despite the way they're depicted on TV and in movies, courtroom trials are extremely tedious affairs. In fact it took several hours just for the two sides to decide if a certain word could be used to describe a piece of evidence, lest it color the jury's attitude.

As the trial dragged on I sat there and sketched the defendant trying to look innocent, the judge looking scholarly and pensive and the jury looking like wished they'd been smart enough to get out of duty. The family in front of me kept monitoring my progress, pointing and whispering excitedly to one another.

After what seemed like eons we broke for lunch. When I came back I took the same seat and noticed the family in front of me was gone. The stylish woman was there though and leaned over and introduced herself, telling me she was the prosecuting attorney's wife (!). Talk about a small world. She said that right after I left for lunch, the family in front of me asked her where I went (thinking that she knew me).

It turns out they were the family of the accused murderer! Apparently the mother of this clan was very impressed with my drawing abilities, especially my portrait of her son. You know, her son, the accused murderer. She actually asked the lawyer's wife if she knew how to get a copy of my drawing of him! What the hell was she going to do with it, frame it and set it on the mantel? 

"Let me show you my pichures, Betty! This here's my daughter Luann and her husband Junior, this one's of my sister Jolene and her third husband Eddie, these here are all my grandbabies, and this one... this one here's my pride and joy, drawn special by a genyoowine artist. It's my little boy Bill at his murder trial!"

Things You Should Know About Me: My Name

My last name, as you've probably surmised from the title of my blog, is Canada. It's a pretty simple name, consisting of three easily pronounced syllables. It's not like I took a handful of Boggle cubes, tossed them on the table and adopted the resulting gibberish as my moniker.

It's not even a particularly rare or exotic name. According to the howmanyofme website, there are 10,352 other people named Canada in the U.S., and 163 Robert Canadas. Heck, there's even another Robert Canada here in Evansville who's no kin to me.

Despite its simplicity, the public seems to have a hard time comprehending my surname. When I tell someone my last name, a puzzled look will usually cloud their face as they struggle to understand what they've heard. Many times they will simply assume they couldn't have possibly heard me correctly and will substitute another name they think I most likely said.

For example, when I was a kid my dad and I went to a barber who labored under the delusion that our last name was Kennedy. He would even write Kennedy in his appointment book. No amount of persuasion or documented proof on our part could dissuade him of this notion.

Kennedy is the most common mangling my name, although at various times I've been called Canaday, Cannon, Campbell and many more.

Many, many people are at a loss as to how to spell my name. Most of them try spelling it with a "K." I'll try and help them out by saying, "Canada, like the country." Believe it not that doesn't always work. A surprising number of workers in the service industry have never even heard of the sovereign nation of Canada, much less know how to spell it. Even when they've heard of it, they still don't get it right, as they'll say, "Oh, is that spelled like the state?" Sometimes I weep for the future of our Republic.

Growing up was fun with a name like this. If I had a nickel for every time a schoolmate called me "Bob Mexico" I could pay off my mortgage. Sometimes the geography enthusiasts would be a little more creative and call me "Bob Quebec." You expect that kind of humor from ten year olds; however it still happens to this day. Grown-ass adults still make those same jokes, as if they're the first to ever think of them.

Dining out is always a treat with a name like this. A few years ago I went out to eat with a group of friends at a busy restaurant and had to wait for a table. When the hostess asked my name, I told her "Canada" of course. Half an hour later we heard her loudly announce: "Cannibal, party of three! Cannibal? Cannibal!" Everyone in the lobby, including me, was wildly looking around, hoping to catch a glimpse of the group of freaks with such a cockamamie last name. As the hostess continued to shout "Cannibal," it slowly dawned on me that she meant me. She honest to God thought my last name was Cannibal. Oy gevalt! I wearily rose to my feet and said, "Here," and we took the long walk of shame through the lobby, all eyes fixed on the party of cannibals.

At one point I actually considered changing my name to something simpler, but decided against it. Why should I have to change my name like a common criminal trying to avoid the law? The Smiths and Joneses of the world don't have to put up with this sort of thing, so why should I? I will say my name proudly, and the hostesses and service workers throughout the land will just have to deal with my name and learn to pronounce it properly. Even if it kills them. Or I do. This. Ends. Now!"

Things You Should Know About Me: Left-Eared

Like most normal humans, I am right-handed (I kid, I kid! No angry letters, please). However I am most definitely left-eared.

What the hell does that mean, I hear you asking? It means when I talk on the phone I have to hold it up to my left ear. I can't use a phone with my right ear.

It isn't that I can't hear out of my right ear. On the contrary, I've always had near-superhuman hearing. It's just too weird to hold the phone up to my right ear. It feels wrong, like "petting a dog's fur against the grain" wrong. Silly as it may sound, I could no more talk on the phone with my right ear than I could pick a lock with my toes.

I'm not sure how this ear dominance came about, or if it afflicts anyone besides me. Maybe it resulted from the fact that I'm right-handed and usually doodle or perform other tasks while I'm on the phone, leaving my left hand free. It would be mighty awkward indeed to hold the phone to my right ear with my left hand, so... I became left-eared.

Things You Should Know About Me: Colors

When I was a kid I was convinced I could invent a new color.

I was five or six years old when I first learned about the color wheel. You know, mix red and blue to get purple, yellow and blue to make green and so on. I had some kind of cardboard and acetate color wheel that I could rotate and see the various color combinations.

I couldn't accept the limitations of the standard color wheel though. I was positive there had to be other colors out there, just waiting to be discovered. So I'd get out my box of 64 Crayola crayons and experiment, trying to come up with a brand new color.

I managed to come up with yellow greens and bluish reds and such, but those were just shades of existing colors. I wanted something totally new.

I thought perhaps my failure was due to the medium I was using, so I switched from crayons to watercolors. The results were even less promising with paint. Most of my watercolor experiments ended up a disappointing dishwater gray.

Needless to say, I never discovered any new colors. It didn't stop me from trying though. I was sure that my failure was due to the fact that I just hadn't found the right combinations in the precise percentages.

Desperate for results, I even cheated at one point. I mixed white and red and of course got pink. I refused to call it such though and insisted that I'd discovered a new color called Light Red. Unfortunately the scientific community (which at the time, consisted of my parents) didn't buy it.

Of course as a child it never occurred to me that the human eye can only see certain wavelengths and that even if by some miracle I did come up with a brand new color, I wouldn't have been able to see it anyway. Say, that gives me an idea. Maybe I could take a blank piece of white paper and tell everyone I invented a new color that's beyond the range of human vision!

Things You Should Know About Me: Backwards Movies

When I was a kid, my family and I used to watch movies backwards.

Well, maybe not backwards, but definitely out of order.

Back in the day my parents and I would often go into town and take in a movie. My Dad usually picked what we'd see so I saw a lot of westerns, war stories and spy thrillers as a kid.

Unlike normal human families, when we went to a movie we didn't consult the show times in the newspaper and plan our trip accordingly. Nope, we'd just show up, buy our tickets to whatever was playing (there were no multiplexes in those days) and barge right on into the theater. No killing time in the lobby waiting for the next show to start for our family!

This meant that the majority of the time we walked into a movie that was already well in progress. Sometimes we got there just a few minutes late, but most of the time we'd arrive over an hour into the run time. I'm sure the other patrons appreciated this as we blindly groped around in front of them, feeling for our seats in the inky darkness and disrupting the entire theater. We'd finally locate some empty seats, take a few more minutes to remove our jackets and get comfortable and then we'd start watching what was left of the film. Of course we had little to no idea of what was the hell was happening onscreen, so we'd sit there watching in puzzlement.

When the movie was over, we'd stay in our seats as the cleaning staff came in and straightened the theater around us. Then we'd watch the coming attractions and finally the beginning of the movie. When it got to the part where we first came in, we'd usually get up and leave. For many years I assumed this was how everyone watched movies.

There were some drawbacks to this method of movie going though, specifically in the areas of plot comprehension, character recognition, motivation and most of all suspense. It's hard to feel the tension that the director intended in a scene when you see the hero escape a trap before he falls into it.

For example, take the original Poseidon Adventure (Spoilers ahoy!). Naturally we arrived over halfway through the movie. As near as we could tell, a group of cruise goers were unhappy that they'd booked a trip on an ocean liner that was inexplicably upside down and were searching for the travel agent to get a refund. Shelley Winters' character consumed too much at the all-you-can-eat buffet, had a heart attack and died. This apparently made Gene Hackman very angry, causing him to question his faith in God and yell at everyone. Stella Stevens was so upset by the proceedings that she rent her garments and had to wear a men's dress shirt for the rest of the picture. Or something like that.

It all made a little more sense when we finally got to see the beginning of the movie and watch the ship tip over. Some of our initial assumptions about the plot were then proven inaccurate.

When the movie got around to Shelley Winter's death scene again, my parents realized this was where we came in, so we had to get up and leave, causing a big commotion and no doubt ruining the film for everyone else. As normal as it was for our family, I had to admit it wasn't the ideal way to watch a movie.

I have no idea why we went to the movies this way. To find the answer you'd have to ask my Dad, as he was the activities director and driver. I was just a kid and had no say in the matter. All I know is that most of the movies I saw during my childhood were seen out of order, Slaughterhouse Five style. I just assumed that this was how everyone saw movies.

As I got older and the day came when I could drive myself to the cineplex, I looked up the show times in the newspaper and arrived before the movie started. That way I actually got to see the beginning, middle and end of the movie, instead of the other way around. What a novel concept!

Things You Should Know About Me: Grunny

I was in the first grade of grammar school when I learned that "grunny" was not a real word.

Lots of homes have so-called "family words;" made-up words that have meaning to a particular group of people but no one else. In our family we had the word "grunny" which meant, well... poop. Why we didn't just say poop, I have no idea. Maybe I, as a toddler, came up with it. Maybe my mom invented it, as a nice way to refer to doody. Who can say? The precise etymology of grunny is lost in the mists of time.

Grunny was a versatile word that could be used as both noun and verb. It was used to describe feces of course, as in "Hey, there's grunny on the floor!" It could also be used to describe the act of defecating, as in "I have to grunny." There was even a past tense of grunny, as in, "I grunnied twice yesterday." One could even use it as an epithet, as in, "You're a big grunny head!" Yes, grunny was quite a word alright.

I wasn't the only one who used the word; my parents and even my grandparents said it was well, so I quite naturally assumed that grunny was a bona fide word in the English language. As a toddler with little or no access to the outside world, I had no idea it existed only in my family.

Then came the fateful year I entered first grade and the public school system. That's when I found out the terrible truth.

I was an average kid in school; I wasn't the most popular, nor was I hated or shunned like some poor souls in my class. I was just sort of there. We were having recess indoors that day, due to inclement weather. I was playing with the kids in my class when I realized I had to go to the restroom. I said, "I'll be right back, I have to grunny!" Cue the "needle scratching a record" sound effect, as the kids all stared at me. Finally one of them said, "What did you say?" I told them again that I had to grunny. As soon as I said it the second time, the horrible realization descended upon me, like a suffocating dry cleaner bag, the kind marked, "This is NOT a toy". Cold and pitiless realization filled my soul as I realized there was no grunny. It was a made up word for babies, foisted upon me by my parents, who, though they were miles away, probably sensed what was happening that very minute and were laughing and cackling away at my humiliation.

Of course the other kid immediately started shouting, "Hey guys, get this! Canada just said he had to grunny!" The news spread like wildfire throughout the classroom and the derisive laughter got louder and louder. I stood there motionless, the way Charlie Brown stands amidst a background of upper case "HA HA HAs." I didn't know what to do. Should I swing my fists to stop the laughter? I was an only child until age seven and the only kid in our entire neighborhood; I didn't know from fighting. Should I run? To where? We weren't allowed to leave the classroom without permission. I could have ran and hid in the art supply cabinet, but that would have probably resulted in further humiliation as the other kids locked me inside. Should I curl up like an armadillo and let the taunts bounce from my scaly hide as my mind receded into a happier place? No, I needed to keep my eye on this bunch, as they were prone to administering wedgies. I ended up halfheartedly making a rather unconvincing argument that grunny was indeed a real word, in spite of my new found knowledge that it definitely was not.

Eventually the commotion attracted the teacher's attention and she came over to find out what the ruckus was all about. When the other kids told her, she tried, most likely out of pity, to take my side and tell the other kids that many families make up their own words and there was nothing wrong with that. I wasn't reassured though, as her mask of calm authority cracked just enough to see that she was trying to stifle a braying donkey laugh. "I see," I thought as my little eyes narrowed and I shot her a steely glance, which she caught as she turned away, abashed. "I cannot even rely on the authority figures for protection. I am alone in this urban jungle."

For the rest of the day our lessons were punctuated with the sound of nearby classmates telling each other that by George they thought they had to grunny, or was that grunny they smelled wafting through the air? It was an interminable afternoon.

Dinner at our house that night was strained, with a side dish of tension. I ate perfunctorily, calmly picking at my food, waiting for my mother to ask the question she asked every evening: "Did anything interesting happen at school today?"

"Oh, the usual," I replied, in a cold and emotionless monotone. "We learned some spelling words. A few historical dates. An art project."

"T-that's nice," said my mother, unsettled by the soullessness in my voice. "Anything else?" she asked.

"No, nothing," I said, seemingly putting an end to the topic. "Oh, there was one thing," I said, the same way Columbo toyed with his suspects. "I learned something today that might interest you. Did you know that GRUNNY IS NOT A WORD!!?!?!????"

"W-what?" stammered my mother. "Of c-course it is! Don't be silly."

"Oh, don't pretend," I hissed. "You knew it was a made up word for babies, but you never told me. You let me waltz saying it all these years because you thought it was cute. You could have at least told me the truth before I started school and blurted it out in front of the entire class!"

My father, his attention momentarily diverted from the evening news on TV, eyed me and asked, "You said it at school? HAW HAW! What a little dope!"

"Thank you for that analysis, Father," I said coldly. "What other fake words have you taught me, hmm? Please tell me before I go to school and embarrass myself again. Is 'doorknob' a real word? What about 'sandal?" 'Butterscotch?' 'Repossess?' 'Spoonerism?' 'Tincture?' Is this even English I'm speaking?"

"All right, shut yer yap," said my father. "I'm tryin' to hear the TV."

"Of course, father," I answered. "In fact, may I be excused? I have to go to the bathroom and... what do you call it? I can't quite think of the word... 'Gunny? Grubby?' Gosh, if only there were a word for what I have to do."

I gave my parents the silent treatment for the rest of the night and sat brooding in my room. Eventually my classmates forgot about the "Grunny Incident," and my humiliation became a distant memory. But from then on I took anything my parents told me with a large grain of salt.

Things You Should Know About Me: Spaghetti

I know this is hard to believe, but I never ate spaghetti until I was in college. 
 

When I was growing up my dad was strictly a meat and potatoes man. Every meal my mother ever cooked for our family was some variation of meat and potatoes. Spaghetti was neither of those, so serving it was out of the question. Italian food was also considered a little too "exotic" for our house.

I knew of spaghetti's existence of course. I'd hear my friends talking about having it for dinner, and I'd see people eating it on TV. I just never had the opportunity to try it for myself. My school served it occasionally for lunch, but I always brown-bagged it. I was always curious as to what it tasted like and I wanted to try it, but when you're a kid with no money of your own, you eat what you're served and like it.

Finally one day when I was in college I decided I'd waited long enough to try it, so I went to the grocery store and bought some spaghetti and a jar of sauce, brought it home and cooked it up. My parents, upon seeing me eating a heaping bowl of pasta, reacted as if their son had turned into one of those "long haired hippies" they'd heard about. There were many worried glances and whispered exchanges between my parents that night; they were sure that college was filling their little boy's head with all sorts of radical ideas. You'd have thought I'd brought home a bag of marijuana and fired it up in the kitchen. They just couldn't understand why their son was bringing this strange and foreign substance into their home.

In the years since my bold culinary experiment my parents have tried spaghetti. They eventually found themselves in a situation where it was being served and they had no choice but to eat it. They now tolerate it when they have to.

By the way, when I finally tried spaghetti, I thought it was just OK. Didn't hate it, but didn't love it either. It wasn't the spaghetti's fault, it's just that when something's built up in your mind for twenty years, there's no way the reality can live up to your expectations.

On a similar note, I was in college before I ever tasted rice as well.

Things You Should Know About Me: Super Smelling

I have an abnormally developed sense of smell. It's not at Bloodhound level mind you, but it's definitely higher than the average person's. "Well, that's quite awesome," you may be thinking. Wrong! It is not awesome. Believe me, of the five senses, smell is the last one you want to be enhanced.

The world is not a nice smelling place. Oh sure, now and then you wander past some flowers or a bakery, but those are rarities, my friend. 99.9% of the world just plain stinks. There's car exhaust, cigarette smoke, sewage, body odor, burnt popcorn, foul breath and doody everywhere you go. And I can smell it all from a mile off.

Even so-called good odors can be a bad thing when you have super smelling. Perfumes and colognes are just as bad as a pile of moldy gym socks if they're applied to excess, which they generally are.

It galls me that as my sense of sight fades rapidly with age, my nose seems to become ever more sensitive. Or maybe the world is just starting to smell worse. Either way, it stinks!

Things You Should Know About Me: Mockingbirds

I hate mockingbirds. I don't why, but my neighborhood is positively lousy with them. I'd never even seen one in person until I moved into my current house. Everywhere I go, there'll be a mockingbird, sitting in a tree singing away like an idiot.

I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who enjoy mockingbirds and their songs. Some are probably even impressed by their talent; that such a simple creature could so accurately mimic the calls of dozens of other bird species. These people are idiots. Mockingbirds are not talented. They're the plagiarists of the bird world. If they're so bleedin' talented, then why don't they sing their own compositions?

Nor are they pleasant to listen to. They are a plague and a pestilence, and an assault against the senses. Mockingbirds are the avian equivalent of a toddler who's trying to get your attention by saying, "Hey, hey, hey, hey, HEY, HEY, hey, HEY, HEY, HEY!!!!!" over and over and over until you walk out to the garage, open your toolbox and thrust Philips head screwdrivers deep into both ears.

There are thousands of other kinds of birds chirping away in my neighborhood, but for some reason they don't bother me. Perhaps because all the other birds sing in a regular and predictable pattern, which fades into the background after a while? Mockingbirds are constantly changing up their songs, going through their little sets like a bad stand-up comedian, so it's impossible to ignore them.

Also, every other species of bird in the world has the good sense to clam up and sit quietly once the sun goes down and darkness falls. Not our friend the mockingbird. Day or night, 2 pm or 2 am, doesn't matter. The mockingbird will be loudly - VERY loudly - imitating its brethren all night long, right outside my bedroom window. I'm hopeful the neighbors were all asleep when I was out in the front yard in my underwear at 2 am, throwing rocks at a miserable singing mockingbird in a tree.

Atticus Finch may think it's a sin to kill a mockingbird, but what does he know? He's not even real. The fact that I don't own a gun and my fear of incarceration are the only reasons I don't blow the heads off of every one of these miserable wretches that I see.

Things You Should Know About Me: Cherries

Welcome to a new feature on my blog, in which I share personal information about myself so that you, the reader, can get to know me better. Let's get started, shall we?

I hate cherries and anything cherry flavored. I especially loathe anything that's artificially cherry flavored. I can't even stand to smell cherries. It is my considered opinion that cherries are the Devil's anal polyps.

This hatred may stem from the fact that drug companies insist on making virtually all their medicines cherry flavored. I no doubt associate the flavor and stench of cherries with being sick. Same reason why I can't drink 7-Up-- the only time I ever drank it as a kid was when I was sick and my Mom made me drink it.

So if you're ever out and about and happen to see me in public, please dispose of any and all cherry flavored and scented foods and accessories in your possession. Thank you.