An Alizée Thanksgiving Miracle (or: How Op Drop Got Its Groove Back)

I think she'd look cute in Claymation, actually

(Blogger's Note: I honestly feel like I ought to be starting this post out like a letter to Penthouse Forum--Dear Op Drop, I never would have believed something like this could really happen, until it happened to me--because the story I'm about to relate just seems a little too sacchrine and conveniently-timed to be true, like something out of one of those old Rankin-Bass holiday specials. All it needs is a little blonde elf who longs to be a dentist. If I was reading it myself instead of writing it, I'd be tempted to doubt its authenticity...and I honestly wouldn't blame you if you did...but I promise you it really did happen this way, more or less. Sometimes, life just imitates art made with stop-motion puppets, I guess...)

So, on the spur of the moment, I decided to go visit my sister in Montreal for the Thanksgiving long weekend. The reasons for this were threefold:

a) She moved to Montreal from Toronto almost a year ago, and I was the only one of her close family and friends who hadn’t been out to see her, as yet.

b) I hadn’t been to Montreal since I was about 13 years old, and even then it was only for a few hours, en route to Quebec City.

c) She doesn’t have an internet connection at home, and seriously bummed and confused by the events of last week, I needed a serious break from all the Alizée drama of last week. An Alizée-cation, if you will.

All-in-all, it was actually a pretty cool weekend. I got to see the sights, practice mon francais a little (leveling it up from Feeble to Awful in the process), eat too much, dance too much, and drink juuuuust enough. Not a bad way to spend three days.

Though I’d intended for it to be a completely Alizée-free weekend—even going so far as to create an Lili-free playlist on my iPod for the bus ride over—naturally this didn’t work out as planned. Being in a predominantly francophone city made it awfully difficult not to think about everybody’s favorite Corsican, especially when my sister asked how on Earth my French had gotten so good, all of the sudden, when I’d shown almost no interest in it in school. (“Good” being a relative term here, of course—I still can’t conjugate irregular verbs worth a damn, and verb tenses are completely beyond me.) By the end of my first afternoon there, I was surreptitiously checking out every music store we went into on Rue St. Catherine (the main shopping drag downtown) to see if I could find some of Lili’s albums, and maybe “position” them a little better for greater visibility.

It turned out to be for naught—I’ve had better luck finding Lili’s albums in the wild in Toronto, sad as that is to say—but all the same, so much for the Alizée-cation. By the time we got ready to go out that night, I was all excited to request a song or two from Psychédélices (even going so far as to bring my iPod along in case the DJ didn’t have the album handy), only to discover that none of the clubs we went to were actively playing francophone music. I begin to see why she doesn’t have any fans in Montreal—all they apparently play out there is American Top 40. Arrgh.

As we headed back to my sister’s place, I began inwardly cursing the fact that I hadn’t brought any disques with me to slip the DJs and show them what they were missing…and the thought made me give my head a shake. I’d decided to be done with all that, at least for awhile…hadn’t I?

As it turned out, I actually had brought a few disques with me, albeit unintentionally: repacking my bag for the trip home this morning, I discovered three ‘undropped’ disques hiding in the bottom…probably ‘reclaimed’ disques from the Fan Expo op that I’d tucked into the wrong compartment. As I got into the taxi, I idly wondered if I should try dropping them at the bus terminal, but came to my senses and remembered that would be a pretty good way to get myself arrested on suspected terrorism charges in this day and age. (I did leave one hidden in my sister’s DVD collection, though more because I think it’ll freak her out than out of any genuine belief that it’ll convert her into a Lili-fan.)

Completely giving up on whole Lili-embargo thing, I listened to En Concert and Psychédélices on repeat on the bus ride home as I played Iron Man on my PSP, until my iPod’s battery finally gave up somewhere around Guelph. Tiring of the game (which is sadly only so-so) and needing some tunage to get me through the last four hours of the trip, I checked out what I had loaded on the PSP’s memory card, and was pleasantly surprised to find the rip of the En Concert DVD still there from my very first op drop back in July. I settled back into my seat to watch that, instead…only to notice, about an hour in, that the kid in the seat behind me—dressed in skater-punk-chic—was occasionally leaning forward to watch over my shoulder.

Clearly embarrassed that I’d caught him, he stammered out an excuse that he hadn’t known PSPs could play movies, and was now thinking of getting one for his regular trips back and forth between home and school. We struck up a converstation as I showed him some of the features and explained how you could rip DVDs and FLV files to the PSP to watch on the go, as well as mp3s. He asked if he could test-drive it, so I let him borrow it for the rest of the trip home. He fooled around with the game for maybe ten minutes or so at most (like I said…only so-so), and asked if I had Madden or NBA Street (which I do not) before finally switching over to En Concert.

“Hey!” he said, about two minues in. “She’s singing in French?”

“Yeah…” I said somewhat hesitantly. “She’s done some stuff in English—a few of the mp3s on there are English versions, but’s it’s mainly French, yeah.”

He blinked, then shrugged. “Cool.”

And with that, he sat back and watched the whole thing, with his eyes glued to the screen from beginning to end. And although I made a point of trying not to study him like a tagged water buffalo in the wild on Animal Planet, I did manage to catch him bobbing his head in time to the music, and even snickering at points. Once En Concert was done, he leaned forward to nudge my shoulder.

“You got any more videos?” he asked.

“Not on the PSP, no.”

“Oh,” he said disappointedly as he handed it back over. “Thanks, man.”

“No problem,” I said. “Here, have this.”

“What’s this?”

“It’s a DVD I made,” I explained, as I handed him one of the Mark IV disques I had left over. “More videos. Like, an hour’s worth.”

“Oh, cool,” he said as he took it from me, then flipped it over to read the label on the back, and frowned. “You hand these out? Do you work for her, or something?”

“Kind of,” I shrugged. “Not really. It’s just a thing I do…that some of her fans are doing to make her more well-known over here…grow the fanbase a bit, y’know?”

“Oh, so she’s not Canadian? I thought she was from Quebec or something…with you coming from Montreal and everything…”

“Nono, French…like, from France. Well, Corsica actu—”

“Oh, that sucks,” he cut me off with a sigh, and I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe he was hoping I could set them up, or something. “Well, I can show it to some friends…”

“That’d be awesome. Do any of them play WoW?”

He frowned again. “Yeah, I think so. Why?”

“Show them the fourth one first. It’ll blow their minds, if they haven’t seen it already.”

“Cool,” he said again, then tucked the disque into his backpack. “Thanks.”

We pulled into the bus terminal in Toronto about fifteen minutes later, so we really didn’t get a chance to talk again except to nod our good-byes. Stupidly, I never thought to ask his name, or give him mine, and I completely neglected to point out the website address…but it’s all over the labels and the title screens of the DVD, so hopefully he’ll drop by at some point, and let me know what he and his friends thought.

And that’s the story about how, thanks to a random encounter on a bus on Thanksgiving Day, Op Drop managed to get its groove back.

All it needs is a snowman voiced by Burl Ives, and I think it'll be ready for prime time.