People are strange...

When you're a stranger or when you're familiar. I was interviewed for a magazine called Virus (www.viruszine.com/_noise/2006/march/freepress/) and we started talking about the weird things that people say to each other. This happens minisculely more to me because I was on a television show. It doesn't really MEAN anything more, but people make assumptions about you or feel compelled to talk to you about nothing. Here's an average meeting with a stranger on the subway.

(J.D. reads on the subway platform. A young woman walks up to him and shifts around him, viewing him from as many as angles as possible to confirm his identity.)

Woman: Sorry to bug you, but aren't you on that show?

J.D.: Umm...Metropia?

Woman: Yes, yes!

J.D.: (Laughing) Yes.

Woman: And you play that guy!

J.D.: Garth.

Woman: Yes and you're dating that girl...that girl from the coffee shop!

J.D.: Marisa.

Woman: YES! I really like that show. But what's with your fiance?

(Uncomfortable silence and the train arrives, sparing J.D. from further conversation).

I have tried - on a few occasions - to try and explain that television is fiction. This only seems to confuse most people. To them, I am Garth. I am engaged to a woman that is cheating on me when I should be dating the lovely girl from the coffee shop who flirts shamelessy with me and I with her. It's strange. Even my family talks about that 'horrid' fiance of mine. Now, they know it's television, but they don't believe me when I say that my tv girlfriend is really a lovely woman with an hysterical sense of humour. "I'm sure she has a great sense of humour, but how can she cheat on you like that?" Forget it. God forbid I should end up playing a rapist or a child molestor in some movie. Yikes.

This is a tangent, but it's another instance of people just looking for something to say because I may or may not be famous. The other day, my girlfriend, Sara, was told by a woman (and granted, her musical tastes are probably more in the Gospel/R & B/Soul vein) the following about my singing:

Woman: His voice reminds me of...oooh...that guy...you know, the one with the gravelly voice? Ohh, what's his name. You know, the guy that likes America.

Sara: Bruce Springsteen?

Woman: YES!

For those of you who have heard me sing, you know this is something of a misnomer. I am to Bruce Springsteen as red is to blue. That is to say, completely different. I'll take the remark as a compliment, because the Boss has some serious soul, but I don't think I could sing like him if I tried. I'd have a better chance singing like Bjork (that is to say, strangling a cat inside my mouth while choking on a pair of fighting raccoons.)

We played at Healey's last night and we played 'Worst Case Scenario'. And we got to talking afterwards about an instance we had almost forgot. A woman approached us after we played and wanted to buy a copy of our cd. Of course we consented, because that's one of the points of making a cd. That is, getting people to buy it.

Woman: I really liked that last tune you guys played. What's it called again?

TFP: Worst Case Scenario.

Woman: Yeah. Is it on the record?

TFP: You betcha.

Woman: Great. Do you guys mind if I use it in my show?

TFP: You're in a show?

Woman: I'm an exotic dancer.

(A pause).

TFP: By all means. Use the tune. Make it famous.

And here there's a differing of remembrance (the band is divided into two camps - those that remember her just being a stripper and those that remember mention of some kind of jungle cat that was also in the act). Regardless, fame - in however small a capacity - convinces people to stay strange, strange stuff.