WE HAD FUN IN '91

I am not watching the total (partial in Canada) eclipse of the sun because a) I’m not a keen astronomer, b) I didn’t have time to make a pinhole camera and c) I actually forgot about it. I admit that I’ve peered up at the heavens a couple of times this afternoon, but it kind of looks like business as usual, celestially speaking. Oh well. There’s always 2024.

Where will we be in 2024? Wait: a more conclusive exercise might be to recall where we were for the last total eclipse, which was July 11^th, 1991. Mulroney was Prime Minister, George H.W. Bush was President, and Boris Yeltsin was just sworn in as Russian President. Big movies included “Silence of the Lambs”, “Terminator 2” and the animated “Beauty and the Beast”. Nirvana released “Teen Spirit”. The re-release of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” topped the charts, as did Whitney Houston’s version of “The Star Spangled Banner”. We listened to Janet Jackson, Bryan Adams and Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. We watched “Roseanne” and “Murphy Brown”.  We didn’t quite have the Internet yet, but Tim Berners Lee was working on it. Elizabeth Taylor got married for the 7^th time. We freaked out over Jeffrey Dahmer. Calloway introduced its Big Bertha golf club, for which I will be eternally grateful.

Where was I? I was married, but no kids yet.  I was working at Mix 99.9 in Toronto (now Virgin – funny how something can become a Virgin). I was doing afternoon traffic, and had just started doing a comedy/showbiz bit call Other People’s Business. John was working for a building code consulting firm, and going to school part time for his MBA. We lived in our first house; a Victorian duplex on what was then the wrong side of Roncesvalles. We rented out the first floor to a pleasant French Canadian woman who turned out to be a follower of Raelism, a fringe religion that believes we were created by extraterrestrials, and they’re coming back. Fine, as long as she paid her rent. We didn’t have much money, despite owning a house (or maybe because of it), but, as I recall, we had loads of friends and looked quite fabulous, with some truly awful pictures to prove it. John had a beard. I was a strawberry blonde. We had fun. I have absolutely no memory of a total eclipse on July 11^th, 1991.

How about you? Where, or who were you in 1991? What are your hopes and dreams for 2024? Finally, do you know how to make a pinhole camera?

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