#oh look...

The summer of 1985. She’d moved to Toronto some months previously and was renting a room in a house on Bathurst Street, working for a home care service by day and doing laundry at a women’s spa downtown in the evenings. I came down that spring to (in theory) find a summer job, and the two of us would look for an apartment to share, while I attended the Ontario College of Art starting that fall.

(I never did find a job that year, nor did we end up sharing an apartment.)

The 40th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was coming up. Reagan was talking Star Wars (not the movie) and nuclear umbrellas. Brezhnev and Chernenko had died in fairly rapid succession; Gorbachev was just in and already talking about reform iirc. The Berlin Wall had yet to come down. An American warship capable of carrying nuclear missiles was due to visit Toronto’s harbour front. Nuclear disarmament was a big topic.

My sister and I saw something in a free Toronto newspaper about an upcoming protest related to most of the above - the shadow project. The goal: to use chalk paint to mark hundreds of people-shaped “shadows” on streets, sidewalks, and buildings, reminiscent of the images etched into surfaces when the bombs fell. We decided to participate. Everyone was given one of the above cards, marked with our name and providing contact phone numbers and the legal hotline to use if we were arrested.

I remember it mostly as a minorly scary (chance of arrest, ack!) but mostly fun night, spent with a group of other people while we ran around with our little buckets of chalk paint and paint brushes, painting life sized “shadows” every few metres along the stretch we’d been assigned. I think we were on University heading south from Bloor, because I can remember coming up to where the road split to either side of buildings (but it might have been Spadina).

I also joined a protest group that occupied Nathan Phillips Square for a few days; I can remember sitting in circles singing protest songs, sleeping overnight on the grass in the little parkette there with other protesters wrapped in sleeping bags and blankets, going on coffee runs to refill thermos or use publicly available bathrooms in the underground PATH commercial zones nearby (including the very high class ones with perfume dispensers underneath the Hotel York, among very few open at oh-my-fucking-god early in the morning). The dog in the bandana who the police were unsure of what to do with when they arrested his owner (iirc they just picked out a few known faces to take in, most of us were ignored and just sat around and sang some more). I remained involved with the protest movement for several months afterwards, until my college work load got to be too much. Oh, and I was introduced to Bloom County at one of the evening coffee shop meetings, when a member brought in his anthologies (thank you random person for getting me hooked on the adventures of Opus et al).