This just in: Don Mills not dead! Sinful Love lives!

Back when I wrote my very first post here at Don Mills Diva, I pointed out how ironic it is that Rob and I made our home in Don Mills.

It is ironic because back in 1985 Rob was the lead singer in Sinful Love, a Ramones-style band that had a local hit song and video - Don Mills is Dead - which points out, in no uncertain terms, that our chosen neighborhood is lame.

So last night, as I searched YouTube to see if anyone had posted video of me reading at the BlogHer Community keynote (vanity, thy name is DMD), I realized that someone had posted a video of Don Mills is Dead.

The video and song below were written, directed and produced by Rob and his band mates in 1985 when the technology we take for granted today was years away from even existing. It achieved regular rotation on MuchMusic (Canada's MTV) and garnered Sinful Love a cult following in Toronto.

Rob was 18 years old.

Sure, his haircut leaves something to be desired. But you know what?

I couldn't be more proud.

(And also, the woman who opens the door and shakes a frying pan at the band? That's my late mother- in-law. Secretly, I think she was proud too)

Passages

We could barely afford this house but we bought it anyway, not least because we imagined all the wonderful parties we could host here.

It was at a party, after all, where we met and the music blared and all the promise and mystery of life seemed hidden in the songs, brash and uncompromising, to which we sang along.

Brash and uncompromising; that was us. Drawn together by a love of fun, a reverence for music and just a touch of wildness.

This room would be perfect, we decided. Room for guitars and drums and keyboards to play. And microphones and even a recording system, Rob joked, to capture jams for posterity: what if Collective Soul dropped by one day?

Or White Stripes, I concurred. And we laughed because we both knew it would be our family and friends who would gather here to laugh and make music and that would be enough.



And it was enough. And magic happened here: when a keyboardist for a country music group and an amateur rapper – friends of friends –– collaborated and when Rob’s long defunct punk band reunited to rehearse the songs they would perform at our wedding.

And then Graham was born and our life expanded. And we sang to him and danced with him and perched him on our knee at the keyboards and behind the drums.


But it happened that his toys got bigger and bigger and our toys sat unused for days and weeks and months even. And it hardly seemed fair that our past should be allowed to crowd out his present.

And so for the past week, mostly as Graham and I slept, Rob has worked down here, not disposing of the past, but prioritizing it, rearranging it, moving it to the sidelines and making way for our son’s future.

It is written that a boy becomes a man when he puts away childish things and yet it seems to me in this modern world, where age is just a number and adulthood a playground and men stay boys for far too long, quite the opposite is true.

It seems to me that a boy truly becomes a man, and a girl a woman, when they finally focus their full attention on childish things and in doing so, give the next generation its own space to play and laugh and explore their passion.

On Don Mills and Diva-dom

If I had known my husband in 1987 I would have been wild for him. Not that I’m not wild for him now but I mean WILD in the obsessive, unhealthy way that only a 17-year-old girl can be. He was in a punk band (a punk band!) called Sinful Love which had just recorded a song with a video enjoying rotation on that crazy new network MuchMusic.

The name of the song?

Sigh.

Don Mills is Dead.

Back then he was a punk raging against THE MAN and I was a diva-in-training, on the cusp of a social whirlwind that would be the defining feature in my life for the next 15 or so years.

But that was then. This is now.

Now we have a kid. We have a mortgage. We have a lawn to cut and eavestroughs to clean.

We live in Don Mills.

Ah irony. As a writer I appreciate irony more than anyone. But this cosmic slap-down is a comeuppance over which the Universe is surely still chortling more than five years after I abandoned Queen Street for Canada’s First Planned Community.

There are days when I remember fondly all-night kitchen parties and undiscovered indie bands and size 2 jeans and go-go boots and late night philosophizing about how my cohorts and I would wrestle the world to the ground.

I think about heady days on the university newspaper when a brooding political writer was the Tracy to my Hepburn and the night early in my career days when I lead a group of movie producers to an after-hours club where we bought mickeys of vodka from a biker selling them out of a hockey bag in the corner and danced to a country band until 6 a.m..

I remember the fruit of possibility was so ripe and so sweet; I needed nothing else to sustain me.

My husband and my son sustain me now. But there are still times when the reality of diminishing possibilities is an acute, exquisite ache.

But that’s not unique is it? The retreat of youth is an age-old story and the story ends the same way for most of us. (I’m sure my parents were betting on that when I announced to them in my early twenties that I would be permanently relocating to Arizona with a boyfriend who played trumpet in a ska band).

It’s hard to pinpoint the moment when one grows up. For me it was when I realized that the story usually ends the same way for a reason. The chapters on youthful rebellion and wildness gradually give way to chapters on hearth and home because sane people aspire to happy endings. And generations of people far wiser (and probably cooler) than me have figured out that settling down is probably your best bet at a happy ending.

I live in Don Mills but I am not dead.

I will still stage my own small rebellions. I constantly risk the loss of free babysitting from my mother-in-law by staying out too late with my downtown friends! I fly float planes! I fight every parking ticket I get! I throw the biggest and craziest house parties in the neighborhood! (yes, my friends come uptown). When it’s questionable whether I can get away with that outfit/ comment/ purchase, I shut my eyes and dive right in.

Maybe I’m still a cop-out, but I don’t care.

I don’t define myself through my cool lifestyle anymore. In fact, I don’t even have a lifestyle anymore. I have a life. Welcome to it.