Sitcom

David McGimpsey

• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781770562059
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

Implicating extremes from Coriolanus to Karen Carpenter, David McGimpsey's Sitcom is both serious poetry and a work of comedy.

Where Timon of Athens meets Shania Twain, that's where you'll find Sitcom. Mischievous, generous and side-splittingly funny, this collection of wry soliloquies and sonnets begins with a milestone birthday and finds itself in demi-mondes as varied as the offices of university regents and the basic plot arc of Hawaii Five-O – offering, along the way, a sincere contemplation of mortality and the fashion sense of Mary Tyler Moore. In between, you'll find Auden, Arthur Carlson, oper, Girls Gone Wild and the lead from Suddenly Susan's turn as a creative writing student.

Unembarrassed by its literary allusions or its hi-lo hybridity, Sitcom 's strategic and encompassing voice is prepared for each comedic disaster and is, somehow, always ready for next week's episode.

Act III

‘Couche-toi sans pudeur
Vieux cheval … ’

– Baudelaire, ‘Le goût de néant’

Breakfast

Another bowl of Corn-Syrup Crunchies,
sweet Sugar-Frosted Tomorrow-o’s …
you can hear Sheryl Crow sing right to you:
‘If it makes you happy… you could be dead.’
You flip through the catalogues:
the wristwatch guys with their four-button suits,
eyed by women sipping flavoured coffees,
heading out, with leather case, to the Ave.
Would that case be filled with sweet yellow pills –
Elvis-strength, Elvis-meets-Orpheus strength –
the perfect accessory to smart, snug,
dress-casual at your dread workplace.
Morning in a city you can’t love,
and you bus it up, bus it down downtown;
the slog that makes it all go so soggy
when once you stood so iron-fortified,
filled with highly needed riboflavins.
‘If your name is Pappy, it can’t be Chad;
if your name is Pappy, don’t call yourself
Chad.’ Syrup Crunchies have you desk-crashing,
impervious to local coffee stands.
Through the years you’ve developed a rep
as cubicleland’s trusty ‘trivia guy’ –
most likely to know the unlikely name
of some desperate character actor –
when they want to know who played Gitchy-Lou
in Hey! There’s a Husky in My Salon!
they ask you. Even if on occasion
you scream, ‘Joan Fontaine! I can’t believe
you don’t know who Joan Fontaine is!’
they always ask you. At your desk, you think
of your stint at Buford Business College,
walking away from sure certificate
into the folds of the Bandicoot Pub;
the Bandicoot’s nooks still on your mind –
aye, those nooks so nooky with their nookness,
where, nestled, you’ve often asked, ‘If I drink
this whole pint without upchucking
will you go out with me?’ Good times, good times.
At work, you feel like a chimp wearing pants.
You take to the phones, trying to coax
credit card numbers from senior citizens,
and you’re dreaming of quitting, of quitting,
of uncorking one great big last one: O,
would you walk into your parents’ basement
and ride the sofa to oblivion
and feel the fate of the small actor,
the touch of Coriolanus he brings
to the role of Second Old Man in the Bank,
the smidge of Willy Loman in his stint
as UPS Guy? Weary steps upstairs.
An answer to your own trivia game.
Stanley Kowalski, meet Blossom’s father;
Cyrano, say hello to all the guys
in the ads for ‘hair restoration techniques.’
Say, if you were Jonathan Silverman,
star of NBC’s flop The Single Guy,
what would you recommend after your dodgy
show was cancelled two laughless seasons in?
What would you do? Would you just carry on?
Would you tell yourself, ‘Okay, single guy,
get on the stage again, be Mercutio,
audition for spiffy new ad campaigns?
Fight and claw for any part you can get,
be it sitcom, romcom or tragicom?’
Or would you say, ‘It's over, Jono,
close that window because all you’ll see
out there is your former best friend’s limo
speeding off to the set of his new movie
while your SAG card expires.’ To hang on
is the character actor’s pudding pie –
you know the face but never quite the name.
He makes a living, is good, lives the life,
but, eventually, he is asked to play
Dorothy’s love interest on The Golden Girls.
Pucker up. It’s time to kiss Bea Arthur.
Pucker up. At lunch you get this gem:
‘The difference, you realize, is you’re part-time,
a salesman. We are members of a firm.’
You don’t have too much to say to that one.
Many believe guillotines work because the blade’s
so sharp, when it’s the blade’s heaviness
that does all the work – heavy salaries,
heavy homes, heavy holidays, heavy faith.
If it makes you happy, you must be daft.
No need to try to explain or make friends;
get back home to a new bowl of cereal.
For now, just pop one down and desk-snooze,
you know better than ever what they’re like:
like they never felt the hand of Elvis
shake the cherry blossoms loose and hearken to
an early summer so he could freckle
the bare shoulders of women off to work;
like they never thanked Elvis for each new day,
for the crunch on the crust of flax-seed bread,
the pear-flavoured schnapps that holds you at night,
or the wools that warmed children’s feet.
Like they couldn’t bless Elvis’s simple gifts:
the sassafras tea that takes you away,
the snapping turtle’s forgotten sharp claws,
the sycamore seeds by your headstone.

TiVolta

Golden Girls have been naughty, Fonzarelli,
Old Christine’s got it good for the Fonz,
Dusty’s trail to diabetes for the Fonz,
It’s like … you know, a dying Fonzarelli,
Hazel, have you met Mr. Fonzarelli?
Alice, c’mon, make a snack for the Fonz,
Timmy, sell Lassie right now to the Fonz,
Everything’s Archie and Fonzarelli,
Major Dad but minor poetry, Skippy,
‘You again?’: that’s what you say to Skippy,
La petite vie avec Le Morte d’Arthur,
I dream of Jeannie helping old Arthur,
Far out, space nuts, back to earth for Fonzie,
Enos, because I could not stop for Fonzie.

Montreal

‘Montreal winter is like a hundred funerals,’
I said to my new best friend in the world,
‘if by a hundred one means a thousand.’
My new best friend, a sophomore at Dartmouth,
in town to fete Quebec’s sweet liquor laws,
took my insight philosophically.
‘Whoa, dude,’ he said. ‘You should love your city
more.’ Weekend trips for students languishing
in their worlds of 21 or Over
is as Montreal as a two-cheeked kiss
or a fistfight in the grand parking lot
of the Place Versailles Mall. Do I not love?
Have I not defended this city right down
to how, here, you can’t turn right on red?
Did I not suggest local personalities
Ron Reusch, Mitsou and the Great Antonio
have their faces carved into Mount Royal?
And just this past St. Patrick’s Day parade,
the oldest such parade in North America,
did I not welcome the Grand Marshall
to splendid Ste.-Catherine Street by yelling,
‘Hey! Sparky! I’m a helicopter! Whoo!’?
It’s been a bad year. It’s been a bad year;
despite the best efforts of Hannah Montana
and Kelly Ripa to keep us all perky,
despite assurances from know-it-alls
who say Silken Laumann and Catriona LeMay Doan
are actually two different people,
Montreal has limped along with its limp.
Pierre Trudeau and Mordecai Richler are gone,
and somebody said they saw Leonard Cohen
in the Gap, berating a clerk, saying,
‘You call this snug-fit?’ I’ve been staying clear
of the Smoked Meat Hut and Chez Rosbif alike.
And the east winds that push refinery smoke
away from the island turn warm with spring.
It’s been a while since the last season
of the cursed-but-cute Montreal Expos,
who’ve moved to somewhere with actual fans,
where they don’t boo the national anthem
and they don’t call the catcher ‘the goalie.’
No more Septembers when our star fielders
are traded to the Yankees or the Sox
for an astigmatic shortstop and a can
of diet soda; no more sweet seasons
for ‘Big Beer,’ twenty-four ounces of trouble
they sold in the last, most hopeless years.
In the empty grandstands of the Big O
I will read O magazine and I will have
a Dr. Phil Moment with the sucker
who sits beside me. I’ll make up homespun
sayings that make no sense: As mad as
a june bug with a cotton flyswatter,
tired as a hen in a peach orchard
with a june bug sitting in the choir.
I’ll not wait for the July moving day
to sing the simple songs of Pom bread
and the Pain du Pom festival de poésie,
to say, ‘O, the poutine! O, the bagels!
O, bagels stuffed full of poutine!’ I will
even finish my stinging reply to
the Toronto writer who suggested
Montreal should be renamed ‘Loserton.’
Skilled in both cappuccino and latte,
I will say we deserve something classier,
something along the lines of ‘Loserton Heights.’
After all, there’s a place just up the street
which claims to have invented ‘hot chicken,’
and a place called ‘verres sterilisés’
(sterilized glasses) where, coincidentally,
I met my new best friend in the whole world.
His girlfriend, Taffy-Jane, was there with him,
and she was just as philosophical.
A sports therapist who really believes
bums can be motivated to succeed,
she said, ‘You should really just try to love
yourself a little more.’ I left for home
through the Plateau streets towards
pigeon-grey downtown. The chesterfield.
I should love myself a little more.
I should love myself a little more.
God, I hope she meant that in a sexual way.

Fáilte!

I love St. Patrick’s Day. I really do.
It’s the only holiday completely
ruined by the music of U2. Sure,
Christmas is ruined a bit by the music
of U2, Easter maybe a bit more;
I’m sure more than one Yom Kippur has felt
less atoneful because of the music
of U2, and, let’s face it, every day
is a little ruined by the music
of U2. But Paddy’s Day is the only day
completely ruined by the music
of U2. That makes it special among days
and is, actually, an amazing legacy
of Bono’s unofficial papacy.

Voice-Over

Scheduled guests on The Tony Danza Show
stay at the luxurious downtown Omni,
where one can listen to quivering ghosts
from the prestigious Lowell family...