Hearing stories is a favourite form of entertainment, all around the world and all throughout time. As humans, it's what we do.
You can't even say it's one of those things that set us apart from the animals because we know, in the way bees point the way to the flowers and elephants keep tabs on family, that they do it too.
But what if you are the story?
What if someone is talking at length, to a live audience of more than 1,000 people and a broadcast audience of 2 million, and the subject is you? And specifically, our city, on the occasion of its 100th birthday as a municipality?
In the hands of Canada's favourite storyteller, Stuart McLean, for just a moment the cringe balloons to civic terror. People listen raptly to Stuart McLean. The entire nation tunes in to eat up his nourishing words. People feel what he feels, and believe what he conveys. So if he didn't portray Prince George correctly, what would the nation think of us thereafter?
Unlike any other Stuart McLean appearance over the years, this one was specifically centred on the subject of Prince George. He always does a welcoming monologue, but this one was all about us, the community we are, and it became Hi Def clear that he had done his homework. He talked about the industrial growth, the geographic features, some of the key moments, but when he might have shied from the truth - the uncomfortable and disgraceful truth - he waded into that, too. He didn't cast stones or poke at raw nerves, he just acknowledged that the Lheidli T'enneh First Nation was here first and remains so, there was gross mistreated of their culture, but better times were dawning.
It would have been yet another injustice to history had this trusted teller of stories avoided this foundational truth of our past. He was too thorough to miss the moment and too talented to mishandle it. Point made, story told, city represented.
McLean went further, though. He always has a musical guest or two when he brings his Vinyl Cafe show out of the radio and into the concert hall. On this occasion he turned the spotlight on the duo of Pharis and Jason Romero and the solo stylings of Raghu Lokanathan - both of them from right here in this region.
Again, he did his research. Before he said a name, McLean introduced the first act with a flowing description that talked about his songwriting traits, his impact on other musicians, the underground respect he had across Canada even if he wasn't on Top 40 radio, and called out Lokanathan with the sincerest of appreciation.
Lokanathan responded with his locally popular song Caledonia which, as McLean pointed out, could have been about a woman but was, if you know this area, about the place itself. He sang it sweetly, traded its lyrical curse word with a comical guitar twang to respect the broad audience, and established for Canada what we in Prince George have known for years: Lokanathan is among the very best singer-songwriters north of the 49 and south of Santa.
Like when the CBC Radio show Madly Off In All Directions recorded an episode and blanketed Canada in the musical abilities of the local band The Pucks, the Vinyl Cafe just did the same for Lokanathan. It triggered live, in-house pride that was hard to keep from burst through the tear ducts.
He brilliantly tapped another unpolished music gem in Pharis & Jason Romero. They live in Likely, just a couple of hours southeast of here, but how many in Prince George had ever heard of them before? Yet they have won international awards, the esteem of powerful fellow musicians, and been broadcast all around the world on shows like A Prairie Home Companion. They are bone-chillingly good at what they do, but even here they aren't as famous as they should be / will be.
When Pharis & Jason play, they instill one of the world's best kinds of physical conditions: the opposite effect of arachnophobia. When they hit certain vocal tones, their acoustic instruments resonating through your core, it sends thousands of spiders up and down your spine and it thrills you with happiness. I don't know what the Latin translation of that would be, but I'm calling it arachniromero.
McLean has won the Order Of Canada for his stories about fictional family Dave and Morley and their fictional kids Sam and Stephanie. A whole universe has been built for these endearing and hilarious folks. McLean read more of these, to the delight of the huge CN Centre arena audience. But he is, as a great storyteller must be at heart, a generous teller of tales. He also saved a featured spot in his show to read a local story, a true story, written, he told the crowd, by Prince George's Vince Ramsharan.
It was a story of Vince's boyhood in a poorer country before he moved to Canada, and how his family treasured as a group the one Christmas apple they could afford each year - a BC No. 1 Golden apple, sliced and diced into equal parts so everyone in the home could enjoy a small morsel of sweet Canadian goodness.
When he moved, as an adult, to British Columbia, he was eventually confronted with the nostalgic realization that he now lived in the land of those apples.
The power of using local stories is, the audience might find them keenly familiar, and I did in this one. My family had the same Christmas experience with oranges from the Orient. And, more profoundly, I happened to know Vince Ramsharan. I hoped with strained wish-veins that he was in the room to hear McLean regale his tale.
Vince was certainly there in literary body, his personality crackling through McLean's microphone, his personality humming through the broadcast wires - simple, kind, focused on other people, sharply observant of life. Vince's and Stuart's words, and the offerings of the musical guests, sliced those sentiments and observances into tiny morsels of Prince George sweet goodness for everyone in Canada to savour.
For those who missed it, and those, like me, who want to hear it all again (he built the editing process into the performance process, so that's worth a double take by itself, for curiosity), the show from 100-year-old Prince George will be broadcast a few times on CBC Radio between May 22 and 26.
