On Wednesday, Rachelle and I went to the Lula Lounge to see Mary Margaret O’Hara perform. When I moved from Ottawa to Toronto a few years ago, this was the sort of thing that I imagined I’d be doing all the time. But no, in spite of the myriad cultural opportunities that Toronto daily presents, I tend to keep to my ten-block trench, living the small village life that tends to characterize life in the big city.
Lula Lounge is on Dundas Street in Parkdale, and it has a thrown together Bohemian décor—you know, a multi-ethnic and mismatched collection of things found at garage sales. The crowd on that night didn’t feel exactly friendly, or even happy. No, the majority of the people looked like vaguely unhappy hippies, like people that might have named their children after spices, trees or foreign countries, and bitterly rued that their lives had been ruined by politics and society, man.
No matter, I was excited. I’ve been a fan of Mary Margaret O’Hara since 1988, when I came across her brilliant Miss America. It’s hard to describe this album, but I guess I found it transcendent, that at times, O’Hara was able to transport herself and her audience out of their bodies and into a state of ecstatic improvisation.
At any rate, this was the only “real” album she’s produced, and over the years has earned the reputation as an eccentric and reclusive genius, one who very rarely ventures onto the stage.
Her presence was slightly comic, but not exactly in the Ha-Ha way. Watching as she hunched her shoulders and swung her arms, marching around in odd, chicken-scratch circles, I thought of her sister, the comedienne Catherine O’Hara portraying a character in a Christopher Guest film. Mary Margaret’s sincere eccentricity bled through whatever stage persona she might have hoped to erect around herself, and she gave off the vibe of an earth mother who might at any moment command the audience to “finger paint!” or “switch partners!”
She was strange, even a little mixed-up in intent, it seemed.
Eschewing a traditional vocal narrative, O’Hara chose to create a kind of collaborative soundscape with the other artists on the stage. Working from the background, O’Hara embellished their performances with vocal flourishes that suggested canine yips, ghostly murmurs and a scattering of baby talk that spoke of possession.
It was like watching a broken oracle.
Always subverting herself, O’Hara would pull back or deflate whatever artistic ascent she might have been developing, taking cover beneath the accompanying instrumentation as if hiding from enemy fire. For whatever reason, she seemed either unwilling or incapable of letting her genius take flight, and so for the course of the evening she kept it safely tethered, like a bird that had chosen to live in it’s cage.
Watching, I thought of my recurrent dreams of flight. Inevitably, as I defy gravity and time and soar through the world, I lose control of my gift and it takes possession of me. Suddenly, I can no longer control where I am going, and it’s a terrifying experience, rendering me completely vulnerable to forces I can neither understand nor control, and I have to wonder if taking the stage and singing is a little bit like that for Mary Margaret O’Hara.