“But your honour.”
The pleading voice coming from my TV stopped me in my tracks. It wasn’t just the voice, though, but the words that seemed familiar.
As I rounded the corner into my bedroom, the first face I saw on my TV was that of James Earl Jones, one of the most heralded actors to ever grace the movie screen, and easily one of the most familiar voices to ever be heard by the human ear.
But it wasn’t his voice I heard earlier. With Jones clearly presiding over some sort of court case, another man, a grey-haired gentleman, was pacing back and forth in front of the judge’s bench, pleading his case.
“Wait a minute,” I thought to myself. “I know that guy. To paraphrase one of Jones’ more famous lines as the voice of Darth Vader, ‘he is my father.’ Or at least he played my father in a play less than two years earlier, and he uttered those same three words, ‘but your honour.’”
I’ve always been interested in the “Six Degrees of Separation” theory which suggests that “any person on Earth can be connected by any other person through a chain of acquaintances with no more than five intermediaries.”
While it’s cool that Don Quiring, my friend for three months while we worked on playwright Lorne Elliott’s Culture Shock at the Theatre Arts Guild in Halifax, served as my one degree of separation from the great James Earl Jones, it has been my experience that the people I meet who provide these close separations are the real prize.
For those not familiar with the play, Culture Shock is the fictional story of Hillyard Philpott (played by me in this case), a simple young Newfoundlander who travels to Montreal in search of fame and fortune, only to become an unwitting accomplice in a bank robbery. His father (played by Don), eventually had to plead my case in front a judge.
Don, who passed away in 2013, was, most importantly, a joy to be around, a funny, generous fellow who struck a fatherly tone offstage as well as on. He was in his mid-60s when I met him and had already lived quite a life and shared his many experiences in our chats offstage. He mentioned doing “a couple small TV things,” but not once did he talk about sharing the big screen with James Earl Jones in the 1999 movie Undercover Angel, whose court scenes were actually shot at the Supreme Court of Canada. He left that as a little surprise I discovered a couple of years later.
Born in Saskatoon, Don enjoyed a long career in the military, living all over Canada, before settling in Ottawa, where he was a senior executive in the federal public service. It was while he lived in Ottawa that he caught the acting bug and spent three decades doing plays with Ottawa Little Theatre. In fact, he and his wife Penny were planning to move back to Ontario shortly after we finished our play.
I discovered in an online search for Penny, herself a longtime executive in the federal public service, that their return to Ontario was interrupted when she was appointed Canadian high commissioner to New Zealand from 2005 to 2009, so I guess Don’s adventures were continuing.
I have a similar one degree of separation from The Great One, Wayne Gretzky, though the lustre there diminishes every time Donald Trump mentions his name. But again, it was the personal encounter that ended up making that meaningful.
Around the time I did the play with Don, I was in Toronto for my niece’s high school graduation. A bunch of us had tickets for a Blue Jays’ afternoon game and had decided to go down to the Skydome (now Rogers Centre) to do some sightseeing and have a bite to eat.
We were hanging around the stadium when I noticed a man standing by himself just outside the box office. It was Walter Gretzky, and we later learned he was there to throw out the ceremonial first pitch. Everything I knew about Walter at that point was that he very approachable and would talk to you all day about hockey. Since I’m often prone to do the same, I thought I’d walk over and introduce myself
Well, the man could not have been more gracious. We spent at least half an hour chatting and, at his suggestion, we took some photos. He was even able to coax my sister Sue to get in the photo, playfully calling her “Suey Sue Sue.”
So, while it can be fun to figure out your degree of separation from famous people, sometimes it’s the people you meet who provide those connections who will leave lasting memories.