The Colin Mochrie story? Gladly. This is a good story.
So I go to this college, and it can best be described as a little weird. It desperately wants to be Cambridge, but it’s not Cambridge, so it takes out its frustration with not being Cambridge on weird collective mockeries of Cambridge stuff. So far so good.
One of these weird mockeries is the debate club.
It’s hard to even properly call the Literary Institute a debate club – it is a club, and it does debates, but the debates are 100% stand-up comedy in a parliamentary format and the other half is bullshit pantomiming. For instance, every year at matriculation, the club drunkenly rushes the stage, interrupts the ceremony, and calls everyone in the audience a horse’s ass (occasionally while quoting Dune). It also puts on a yearly event called ‘Tuck-Ins’, in which people in the dorms can sign up (or sign their friends up) to have the entire LIT burst into their room, give them bedtime snacks, give them bedtime beer, sing some bedtime songs, and tell them a bedtime story. Except, the LIT never does anything seriously, so the bedtime song was always Barrett’s Privateers and the bedtime story was almost always something we called ‘The Rat Story’. Let me tell you about the Rat Story.
The Rat Story was a piece of… literature… that a LIT member dragged out of the dregs of the internet many years ago. Nobody knows where it came from, and my efforts to find it again were unsuccessful, but good lord, it was bad. It was a page-and-a-half-long Hermione/Wormtail (rat form) smut fic and it was awful. So awful. I’m cringing just thinking about it. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever read, and at this point I basically know it by heart. We read it aloud, from the poorly worded introduction to its horrible closing line (AND HE SCAMPERED AWAY WET! STUNNED! AND THRILLED!) dozens of times in a single night to unsuspecting students. It was an experience.
Now you might be wondering how Colin Mochrie fits into this.
So, one of the other things my college does powerfully and often is pretension. We are the most pretentious college you will ever see, and our college clubs are proof positive of this. Every year, various college clubs send out dozens of official-sounding letters inviting our various favourite well-known-people to attend our meagre college events (I, as president of the James Bond Society, personally invited Barack Obama, Sean Connery, and the Queen to our AGM). However, this year the Comedy Club was riding particularly high, and it sent out quasi-sincere invitations to speak to a variety of Canadian comedians.
And Colin Mochrie showed up, one fateful Tuck-Ins night.
He gave a talk, which was very good, but noticed as the talk finished that many students were rushing away to something in an awful hurry. We explained that it was the night of Tuck Ins, an important and sacred college tradition and that
We would be delighted if he would join us.
And that, my friends, is the story of how I found myself crammed in a dorm room with 20 other people, listening to Colin Mochrie describe Peter Pettigrew’s rat boner to a couple of second years who had no idea what they were getting into.
the universe is not just weirder than we imagine, it’s weirder than we CAN imagine
Tag: stories
Have I ever told you guys the true story of the Revolution Christmas Tree?
This one absolutely 100% happened (unlike the drunk zombie geese story which likely only 35% happened, but maybe I’ll tell you about it one day). It happened to my family when I was 4 y/o.
So imagine Evil Commie Land in the late ‘80s: severe food shortages, no heating (seriously, people slept with their stoves on for heat and sometimes the gas was cut off and came back randomly during the night and carbon monoxide poisoning was a thing). Also large, beautiful, historical chunks of our capital city were being bulldozed into oblivion because our megalomaniac shithead supreme leader wanted to build the biggest fucking thing there was. Anyway, it sucked.
On top of that we were also technically not supposed to celebrate Christmas, because religion is the opiate of the masses etc. etc. But we did anyway, every year and with great enthusiasm, running as we did on the sweet fuel of go ahead and tell a motherfucker they’re not allowed to do something.
So. Christmas. The way we did Christmas back in the day was to make it as secular and proletarian as possible: officially no church services, no religious carols, no Jesus thingy, no calling Santa Claus Santa Claus (we called him Old Man Frost idk)
The only thing we did exactly the same as regular Christmas, in the privacy of our homes, was the Christmas tree. This is how you got a Christmas tree:
- you went to the marketplace where Christmas tree sellers were
- these were not like, official, state-sanctioned commercial workers, but people with the capacity to somehow provide you with 1 pc. coniferous for Proletarian Christmas celebrating purposes
- I have no fucking idea who they were or how they got them
- anyway, you went to the marketplace where Christmas tree sellers were and you talked to one of them and you told them what kind of Christmas tree you wanted (options were: fir/spruce, medium-ish/small)
- you paid them in advance and agreed on a date where you’d come by and pick your Proletarian Christmas tree
- you picked up your Proletarian Christmas tree, brought it home to the family and decorated it with stuff you inherited from your great-grandmother or your mom made out of candy wrappers like 15 years before
- you celebrated Christmas. Proletarianly.
So along comes 1989. Shit boils over and by December 21st, we have a violent revolution right on the streets of our capital city.
Now, I was 4 and my brother was 6 months old and our parents decided that we absolutely cannot go without a regular Christmas in our house, especially now that the world is about to go to shit. We didn’t have anything, presents or nice food or. Anything? Basically. The one thing we had was dad had arranged to get our Christmas tree on the day. So he tells my mom that he’s going to pick it up, and instead of knocking him cold and chaining him to the radiator, like the sensible woman she usually is, my mom goes ok just put on an extra sweater you don’t want to catch a cold haha right?
Let me break this down for you in case there’s any misunderstanding as to what we’re talking about. Outside:
- violent riots
- army
- snipers
- tanks
- plainclothes secret police randomly shooting people dead in the street
- I seriously cannot stress the snipers enough
So off goes my dad to pick up our Christmas tree. And he’s gone for five hours, on a trip that normally takes like 30 minutes at a casual stroll. And the more time passes, the deeper my mother sinks into an all-out nervous breakdown. She’s barely keeping it together, my grandmother is trying to comfort her, while my brother is sleeping quietly, which is a good thing, because at some point there’s a weird rumbling outside our building.
‘What’s that?’ say I, 4 years old and desperate for some straight, no-bullshit answers
‘Nothing,’ says my mom. ‘Nothing’ is the second stupidest thing to say to an observant, intelligent kid who’s been locked up for a week and kept in the dark about shit that’s very obviously happening just outside.
‘No, really, what is that?’ say I, seriously determined to get a straight, no-bullshit answer.
Years later, after piecing bits of memories together, I realized there are only so many ways to skirt around ‘It’s a tank, dear’, which is the single stupidest thing to say to a child who’s been locked up for a week if you expect them not to run outside because they want to see, damn it.
So when my dad finally comes home five hours later, with the goddamn tree, she’s either too exhausted to say much, or doesn’t want to have that conversation in front of her kid, who is seriously right on the brink of smashing something out of frustration.
It wasn’t until I was in highschool that he told me he’d actually been shot at several times, because sneaking around street corners carrying a large tree is not at all suspicious when everyone is so strung up. Any sniper who might have been around absolutely did not think he was probably a revolutionary agent smuggling weapons or w/e instead of a dad trying to make a nice Christmas for his family BECAUSE WHAT THE ACTUAL EVERLOVING FUCK
So this is the story of the Revolution Christmas Tree, aka the story of how my dad almost got shot lugging around an overpriced bit of spruce in the middle of violent street fighting so his kids could have Christmas.
There are some levels of parenting you just can’t beat.
Question of Smoke 