A longtime resident of Uxbridge, Ted Barris has written professionally for 40 years - for radio, television, magazines and newspapers. The "Barris Beat" column began in the 1950s when his father Alex wrote for the Globe and Mail. Ted continues the tradition of offering a positive view of his community. He has written 16 non-fiction books of Canadian history and teaches journalism at Centennial College in Toronto.
Celebrity, thy name is Uxbridge
You probably missed it. You can be forgiven because I missed it too. But last Monday the Internet was all a twitter (yes, pun intended) about a birthday event. It's one that your teeny-bopper kids (or grandkids) probably noticed. It appears that music heart-throb Justin Bieber celebrated his 16th birthday by visiting the Son of a Gun Tattoo and Barbershop in Toronto. There he had a tattoo of a seagull inked onto his left hip.
“That's a bad area,” the tattoo artist told MTV News. “Justin was nervous, but then he got into it and it was done. It's very tiny.”
Tiny or not, because this kid is who he is, suddenly that tattoo joint in downtown Toronto has become a Mecca. And everybody who's anybody wants to go there, be there and get tattooed there. It doesn't stop there. This week, I tuned in to CBC Radio's “Ontario Morning.” Coincidentally, last Tuesday morning, host Wei Chen interviewed Eugene Zakreski, the executive director of Stratford Tourism Alliance (STA), about the southwestern Ontario city's campaign to promote itself by featuring Internet stories and downloadable maps of the places Justin Bieber has frequented.
“We've been getting a lot of school tours,” he told CBC, “mostly teenage girls. They want to know where Justin Bieber hung out.”
Consequently, STA has posted 18 known Bieber haunts, including his elementary school, the park where he worked on his skateboarding skills, and even the café where, Zakreski said, “Justin Bieber spilled spaghetti and meatballs on his first date,” an eatery called King's Buffet. By the way, in case you didn't know, as a child Justin Bieber taught himself to play trumpet, piano, drums and guitar. His mother posted a video of one of his performances on YouTube and by the age of 13 he had moved from Stratford to the U.S., was signed to an international record label and had hit songs climbing the music charts all over the world.
“Justin, his fans passionately believe, is homemade,” the New York Times reported.
And that's the cache on which Zakreski's Stratford tourism group hopes to capitalize. They call Bieber's haunts “Stratford's Bieber-iffic map.”
Which got me thinking. Why not promote Uxbridge the same way? Why not show people considering our community as a vacation hotspot that we can show them celebrity haunts too? Examples?
Well, why not showcase the corner of the Uxbridge Public Library in which, each December for years, television and movie star Kenneth Welsh has performed “A Child's Christmas in Wales”? There's always Trinity United Church (formerly the Methodist Church) where, in 1938 at the age of five, internationally renowned pianist Glenn Gould sat at the piano and played two original compositions in concert. Or, how about the country-home door that Academy-Award winning filmmaker Christopher Chapman (since Expo '67) has regularly propped open with his Oscar statue? And what about Lucy Maud Montgomery's favourite spots - the Manse where she wrote, the gardens where she mused? Or what of the classrooms at U.S.S. where humourist Stephen Leacock once taught? No doubt, there are similar haunts that former Toronto mayor, Thomas Foster frequented as he supervised the construction of his unique memorial north of town.
What's good for Justin Bieber and Stratford, it seems to me, must certainly be good for a host of celebrities who've lived, worked and played in and around our community at one time or another.
By coincidence, I was chatting about the connection between celebrity and place while travelling overseas earlier this month. The subject of Kilroy cropped up while I was in Holland. You know the popular expression “Kilroy was here”? Well, a number of us got talking about the mythical Kilroy and how he put so many places in Europe on the map by allegedly placing his well-known graffiti (the pair of hands and a nose just poking over the top of a ledge with the “Kilroy was here” slogan) on liberated buildings, signs, trees and even windows.
For the record, the Kilroy referred to identifies James J. Kilroy, a shipyard inspector who, during the Second World War, apparently used the phrase wherever and whenever he checked the work of riveters on Liberty ships constructed at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts. Kilroy's scrawled approval was later seen by thousands of U.S. soldiers being transported overseas. And they borrowed the slogan and invented the graffiti as proof of their trails and travails. It just seems that Stratford has merely borrowed the “Kilroy was here” phenomenon to help promote itself as a destination for more than just theatregoers.
“While the parents see Shakespeare,” Zakreski said on CBC, “their kids can check out the haunts of their singing hero Justin.”
Who knows? Maybe Justin Bieber or maybe even Kilroy have come through Uxbridge.
