Rose's Cantina

I will be celebrating my mother's 93rd birthday today, outside in the back garden, watching the weirdos walk down St. Laurent Boulevard. We're having a barbeque in her honour, steak with all the fixins, washed down by a couple glasses of French wine. If she were alive today, she'd be out there with us in the freezing cold, smoking Rothmans, and drinking some sort of Labatt product. She loved to smoke. She loved to drink. She loved to laugh. I miss her, and always will. She left this Earth in September of 1992, and she was only 68 -- six years older than I am now. Man, she seemed like a dinosaur back then, and now that I look at myself, I wonder: is that what the young ones see when they look at me? Really, I don't care anymore. I am who I am. If you don't like me, or my wrinkles, or my cheap dye job, get stuffed. That's what she would say. She lived a tough life, raising three kids on her own, as I did, living on fumes, as I did for...

The first time I visited the Big Apple, I was 22 and on assignment for a newspaper, attending the premiere of the James Bond movie Moonraker. I had no idea what to expect. I had very little money, no credit cards and a suit I'd bought at Reitman's for forty bucks. Hannibal Lecter would have noticed my cheap shoes and bag as the serious signs of a hick. I didn't even have enough money to take a cab from the airport to my hotel which was the tony Essex House, the place where all the guests stayed while appearing on SNL back then. Seriously? I was petrified. When I got to the hotel, I was given a key chain with Roger Moore's face on it and my room key. It was noon and I was alone. The rest of the press corps wouldn't be arriving until the afternoon. What was I to do? "Well," the publicist shrugged. "There's the bar." After about two glasses of wine, I relaxed and started chatting up the bartender. Then my other junket mates began to pou...