Every city changes. They rise and fall. Evolve with the times and the tides of the people who roll in and out of them.
Toronto when I was growing up was "The Big Smoke", some place far away where my beloved Maple Leafs played and my dad went once a year for a business conference.
It sounded big and busy but it didn't hold any special attraction.
That changed in 1971 when I got an Actor's Equity Card and Toronto was the place where Canada made most of its television and all of the country's theatres went to look for casts for their plays.
I'd been there for a half a day when I was six and a couple of hours between planes a decade later. I didn't know anybody. Didn't have a clue what it was like.
I fell in love with the place immediately. Mostly because of the people I got to know.
But all cities change. And over time my affection for Toronto changed too. Like all failed marriages, it wasn't any one thing. And not really any blame that could be laid on either side. We just grew apart. Embraced different values. Had different goals. Revised ideas of what would make us happy.
I still love the Leafs. Still read one or two of her newspapers everyday to see how she's doing.
But there's no going back.
And yet, there was a time -- a golden time when it seemed like the perfect place -- a people city.
You can feel the mood of that time perfectly in filmmaker Ed Conroy's documentary of Toronto's "lost anthem" -- the song many of us heard as we switched off the tube and shuffled off to bed. A song that anyone who was there understood implicitly.
Enjoy Your Sunday...
People City: Toronto's Lost Anthem (2017) from Retrontario on Vimeo.
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