Alizée, Petula Clark, and the Impossible Dream

Well, that was certainly an interesting week…in the Chinese proverbial sense of the word…

My apologies for having been so suddenly absent, Op Drop fans, but real life caught up with me in a big way in the first week of October, leaving precious little time for blogging, disque-dropping, and even less vital activities such as sleeping and eating. Not only have things started to ramp up at the brand-new job, but my cousin’s wedding caused a truly impressive number of distant relations from abroad to descend on the city like good-natured locusts. Life since the wedding has been a non-stop whirlwind of busy workdays and even busier weeknights spent entertaining strange visitors from afar.

Finally, though, the last of them has been bundled off to the airport—and are probably somewhere over the prairies even as I write this—and life can finally get back to what passes for normal around Casa Disque Drop. A few days too late, sadly…the unexpected abundance of family gatherings completely put the kibosh on my plans for another massive Op Drop at this year’s Nuit Blanche citywide art festival, as I simply had no time to prepare. But on the bright side, playing tour guide for a week opened my eyes to a few more potential targets for future ops that I’d previously overlooked.

I also made the unexpected discovery that I’m actually carrying on a family tradition of sorts, as it came up in conversation that my oldest uncle headed up the Toronto chapter of the Petula Clark fan club in his late teens and early twenties. Though my mom and aunts brought it up at the wedding simply to embarrass him in front of his wife (who was naturally unawares), I cornered him at the bar a couple hours later, and began peppering him with questions about it. How had they operated? How many members did he have? What kind of promotion did they do? Did they actively try to convert non-fans, and if so, how did they overcome the cultural and language barriers?

“You do know that Petula Clark sang in English, right?” he asked.

“Uh, yeah…but, hypothetically speaking, how would you have overcome them?”

“You’re strangely interested in this,” he observed, bemused. “Are you a Petula Clark fan?”

“Nonono,” I stammered. I looked back over each of my shoulders, then leaned forward conspiratorially. “I’m, um…well, I’ve been doing this thing…”

And that was how I took him into my confidence, revealed my secret identity, and proceeded to spend the next twenty minutes telling my fifty-seven year-old uncle all about Alizée and Operation: Disque Drop. He was pretty obviously amused by the idea, but surprisingly impressed as well. And when I was done explaining myself, he said something that really struck me.

“What you’re doing is quite literally quixotic, in the truest sense of the word. You’re tilting at even bigger windmills than I did…at least Petula already had a hit single and a following, here.”

I must have had a strange look on my face, because he paused and frowned. “Sorry, do you not know what ‘quixotic’ means?”

Boy, did I. Don Quixote has always been a personal hero of mine, moreso even than Batman or Iron Man, who up until now have been the patron saints of Op Drop. Like them, Don Quixote was just an ordinary man—and an old man, at that—who nevertheless took it upon himself to don a suit of armor and begin a one-man crusade against an apathetic populace, like one of the chivalric knights of old. And in his case, it was all done in the name of an unattainable beauty, the Lady Dulcinea del Toboso.

I’d never drawn the comparison before, but you have to admit, it kinda fits.

My uncle made me promise to burn a disque for him before he left. I handed it to him right before he got on the plane, and he promised to watch it on his laptop on the flight back to Vancouver. Somewhere over the prairies, I suspect he’s being converted into a Lili-fan even as I write this…which would be cool, as he’s somebody who really “gets it”, y’know?

It’s not the hundred disques I was hoping to get dropped at Nuit Blanche, but I think I’ll chalk one up in the ‘win’ column all the same.

Take that, Petula Clark!