More than once in your life a group of small, serendipitous events will inexplicably come together in one moment, each a little mirror on a larger disco ball.  I’m not a person of faith but I am convinced there is something to The Grand Coincidence; many like to call it good karma, so I will too. When I co-hosted “The Labour Show” on Guelph’s CFRU-FM, the station’s staff would put items of interest into our mail slot.  There are lots of labour songs and musicians out there but we all tend to gravitate toward the same classic numbers so it can be difficult to mix it up each week. One day a CD appeared with a little note attached to it that said “PLAY THIS!”, more of a demand then a request. It was by a local band, The Barmitzvah Brothers, and it had a drawing of Guelph’s Family Thrift Store on the cover. The store’s sign had been altered to read “Lets Express Our Motives: An Album of Under-Appreciated Job Songs” and the liner notes said that the songs on the album “were inspired by the jobs of various friends and family members…and stories from Studs Terkel’s book, Working.  A locally produced little gem had arrived…good karma, indeed! 

Family Thrift Store was a fixture in our downtown that had something for everybody. As one of the dying breed that prefer paper media, I loved having the option to buy a copy of The Winnipeg Free Press from 1941 for less than the price of a present day newspaper. Ray Mitchell owned Family Thrift for 18 years.  His daughter Jenny, now a mother herself, virtually grew up in the place.  Jenny’s son Otis probably would have done the same but sadly Ray received a notice to vacate from his landlord in March. The city is expropriating most of the block, which includes many low rent apartments and other small shops, to build our new multi- million -dollar library. There will be WiFi, a café, condos and plenty of parking; not exactly what a library offers in the traditional sense, as in “a collection of books”, but I might be a bit old fashioned.  I have murdered three cellphones but the Made In Canada 1970 Northern Telecom throwback I scored out of Ray’s electronics section is still working beautifully.  I have yet to find a three dollar cellphone anywhere on Earth.

I definitely flipped through a copy of  Studs Terkel’s Working at Family Thrift at some point in time. Studs is a patron saint to many of us in community media. Terkel was a voice of the people, first in the heyday of Chicago radio and later as a TV host when that medium was brand new.  He was red baited in the McCarthy blacklist years yet he never sold out his lefty principles, continuing to be a voice for the underrepresented until his death last fall at 96 years old. Working tells the stories of well over a hundred people in ordinary and ignored professions, as reflected in the subtitle “People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do”. Each tale is a vignette of a day in the life of workers such as the “Bar Pianist”, “Neighbourhood Merchants” or “Hooker”.  One or two of these at a time make for great end-of-the-workday bedtime reading.  You might also want to check out graphic novel version of Working by comics legend Harvey Pekar (American Splendor). It’s likely that the old edition I had in my hands was the very copy that inspired “Lets Express Our Motives”.

The Barmitzvah Brothers were created for a high school talent show in 2001 and despite their name they are neither Brothers nor Jewish. They all belonged to the greater Family Thrift Store community however, Jenny by blood and her friends Geordie, Johnny and Tristan by association. Most talent show bands are a one-off deal but The Barmitzvahs lived on, thanks to sharp and eclectic musical chops, clever lyrics and a virtually bottomless resource of instruments initially drawn from the tables of Family Thrift.  “Let’s Express Our Motives” was released in 2007 at a point where the Barmitzvahs all had multiple projects on the go, both musical and otherwise, as well as day  jobs. Not unlike Terkels’ book each song is a tribute and a mini biography, where we hear about the endeavours of the “Library Page”, “Traffic Technician”, “Rodeo Clown” or, not surprisingly, “Barmitzvah Brother”.

In the ode to Ray called  “Thrift Store Owner”, Jenny sings of the “father and daughter team” that ran the Family Thrift as background singers rhyme off an amazing litany of items that were available there.  When she sings, “underneath all the underwear/there’s a French Horn in there/I think I’d like to try”, you get the feeling that the background brass accompaniment was fished out of that very pile. The song was penned well before the impending demise of the block but there is a distinct, retroactive tinge of sadness in its delivery now. No Wal Mart will ever produce as heartfelt a love letter as this.

    When Ray was given his final eviction notice, he decided to close out Family Thrift in style. “Thriftstock” ran for a week with countless bands playing every night until the doors closed for good on April Fools Day. It was suggested in the Thriftstock program that some attendees would leave in tears and I didn’t expect to be one of them. I had loaned an accordion to my friend Erin that my champion salvage expert buddy Walter had rescued from someone’s trash. It’s missing a couple of keys but it still makes a glorious robust sound. It was reborn at Thriftstock in Erin’s band called the “Shake It Bitches”.  My eyes welled up when they started to play but this quickly passed, for The Bitches version of Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff” is pure joy to witness. The sudden emotional merger of all of these elements added up to a shining disco ball moment for me. Joy in the present; sorrow in knowing the music was over when the lights went out.  Family Thrift has been sitting empty for months now, a testament to bureaucracy unleashed. There is no rational reason as to why it couldn’t have stayed open until the wrecking ball came. It also seems fitting that the last performance in the store was by a band called “The Burning Hell”.

It’s extra sad to watch a community get displaced for what may seem like the best of intentions. The culture created by tossing cash around will always feel contrived and Starbucks-like without fail. Communities grow organically. They emerge from dejected and forlorn places that people adopt  for creative space, the “ good lot of plain, ordinary, low value old buildings” that Jane Jacobs said our cities needed in order to thrive. The vanguard of talent and light will inevitably arise from the attic or the basement. They could very well be a bunch of friends salvaging instruments and telling stories on a somewhat obscure CD that you should try and track down under a pile of irregular underwear at an owner run business somewhere, before you miss a golden karmic opportunity.