The one who was in... - Shawn's Sense with Shawn Loughlin

Let me take you back - all the way back to April of 2019. I was in our nation’s capital with my friend Brett and we were just about to watch The Pigeon King, the darling of the previous Blyth Festival season that was being produced at the National Arts Centre. We were wandering around the centre and stumbled upon quite a to-do in an adjacent hall. There, it turns out, the great Sandra

Oh was receiving the 2019 National Arts Centre Award as part of the year’s Governor General’s Performing Art Awards. 

The star of Killing Eve, Grey’s Anatomy and others was being feted for her life’s work, but, for me, I was in the same building as someone who was in Sideways, one of my favourites. And while it’s certainly not going to make an appearance in the first line of Oh’s obituary, for me, it’s the way and the truth and the life.

I’ve always found that idea funny. That, despite a long and illustrious career, someone may resonate with someone else for a quiet, somewhat unknown performance, but one that means a lot to the fan in question. 

In those early Kevin Smith movies, characters used to talk about Academy Award winner Ben Affleck - who, as part of the joke, was actually in some of those movies - and ragging on his acting, but always being careful to herald his work in little-known Phantoms.

This popped into my head just recently, as I interviewed Severn Thompson for the Blyth Festival special issue. This season, she will be directing Quiet in the Land, one of the great Canadian plays, and she, in her own right, is one of the great Canadian professionals of stage, both on and off, and yet - and yet - I’ve never really talked to her too much about her mom, Anne Anglin. Her father, Paul, I know, I’ve spoken to many times before and I have loved getting to watch him in action and Severn is about as talented of an individual as the Festival has seen in my time in Blyth. But Anne - Anne - was in Scanners. The David Cronenberg movie in which the guy’s head blows up. That Scanners.

I also resisted this urge a few months back when I interviewed Huron County native Kelsey Falconer for the film Fortescue. In it, she plays the lead and the film has since been making the festival rounds as a promising independent project for its stars and creators. And yet, as a person who has loved the show Mad Men for many, many years, it was incredibly hard for me to not elide questions about her current project and talk her ear off about the scene in the Fargo television series she shared with the great Jon Hamm, the star of Mad Men. I wanted to know all about it, yet, I held back and took on the task at hand.

Stars of film and television, our greatest musicians and visual artists and even our best and brightest athletes all have something for which they’ll be best known. Going back to something I wrote earlier in this column, those notable achievements would be something mentioned in the first line of their obituaries; their greatest accomplishments, the thing they did that will most resonate with the world.

And yet, maybe a few paragraphs into that same obituary might be the thing for which you know that person best. Maybe it’s this or maybe it’s that. It’s very likely not going to be Scanners, but hey, different strokes....

On that note, it’s a bit of an interesting exercise to wonder aloud what might be in the first line of your obituary - not to wish your lives away, dear readers. Loving father and husband? Beloved daughter, mother and granddaughter? Business leader and pillar of the community? Worth thinking about now.