I bought myself a clean notebook (paper kind) and a smooth writing pen, and got to writing Milk and Water.
Because in the past, that is how I penned (literally) my first drafts. These drafts would be incomprehensible to anyone but me, and even I had to rewrite them within a few days or lose them forever.
My method, as it were.
Now, in Milk and Water, Jules Crepeau, French Canadian Director of City Services and Thomas Wells, Anglo President of Laurentian Spring Water are sharing their opinions about life, business and politics and ethics, as they await the possible arrival of David, the Prince of Wales outside a rather shady dance hall in early September 1927. (They are delivering fresh water as there has been a recent typhoid epidemic.) They thrust and parry, they attack and counter attack. They share intimacies, too.
As the speak, a representative sample of Montreal citizenry, elected officials, McGill students, riff-raff and ladies of the evening, pass in and out of the place, which is supposed to be closed as it is after 12 am.
But on one point they will agree: That the Presbyterians are annoying - although both men have to deal with them, my grandfather at the City Improvement League and my husband's grandfather at Westmount dinner parties.
Thomas will say that the Presbyterian ladies are always trying to snare his wife into good works. He'll then tell the story of how she hides bottles of booze under her children's pillows on train trips home to the US. And my grandfather will say how his wife loves to gamble at cards and at Blue Bonnets Raceway.
True stories.
Now, in 1910, 1911, the Presbyterians sent college students out into the streets of Montreal to collect data on the poor. (This is according to Mariana Valverde.) This was because they were afraid the STATE would take over what they perceived as their job, taking care of the poor.
I want to half my grandfather mention this: A certain scholar, Michele Dagenais has said that Montreal in this era was the model for the modern welfare state. And the delivery of fresh water (and removal of waste) figured largely in the evolution of this state for reasons a bit too complicated to explain right here right now (but I have to find a way to condense these key concepts and put them in Milk and Water, my play.)
Neither wife belongs to any Do Gooder Committees, although Jules' wife, Maria, the daughter of a master butcher, never turns down a tramp's request for food at the back door. And she ably nurses the sick, with her home remedies. And she visits old shut ins regularly, often dragging her children with her.
True Story.
Anyway, as this is the Prohibition Era in the US, it all fits in. Indeed, a certain W.E. Raney, a former Ontario Attorney General, has denounced Jules Crepeau personally at the 1926 Senate Hearings on Prohibition. Jules, apparently has too much power over the police and Raney cannot figure out why.
Raney quotes a great deal for the 1925 Coderre Report on Police Corruption and Incompetence.
And in 1927, the summer, my grandfather and family spend their vacation in Atlantic City, instead of Old Orchard Beach. Hmmm.
