I posted quite a few photos over on my Flickr account, so I won’t offer too much of a travelogue, just some assorted impressions and observations.

We stayed at the Hyatt Regency, which turned out to be remarkably well-located for us. It’s right on top of one of the malls of the Underground City, including a Metro station. We used the Metro extensively on Sunday, going all the way out to Olympic Park, then back into the city to go to Schwartz’s Deli for lunch and then out to Parc Jean-Drapeau to go to the Biosphere. By the end of the day, we were exhausted, but at least we knew that once we got off the subway we were basically at our hotel. It was also easy walking to the Basilica Notre Dame and from there to the rest of Old Montreal/Old Port. The downtown isn’t as compact as Boston (though much more accommodating for automobiles), but isn’t as far removed from other parts of the city as midtown Manhattan is from other parts of New York. The northern part of the island has very little of interest to tourists.

We had absolutely no problem being primarily English speakers. We did not encounter a single waiter, cashier, ticket taker, shopkeeper, or anyone else who did not speak and understand English easily (although some people had some pretty thick Quebec accents). The trick was to say “Hello” instead of “Bonjour” whenever greeted, and this is the cue for the other person to speak English. Clearly, though, this is limited to the city itself. On Monday we drove out towards Sherbrooke to a water park before heading home (about 45 minutes from the city), and the park employees spoke little to no English at all. Later, stopping for lunch at a restaurant near the park, we were once again faced with a waitress who spoke no English and whom I could not understand well enough in French to get a couple of service questions she asked. My comprehension of French is good enough to be able to handle most brief interactions like ordering from a menu or reading instructions, but I just could not make heads or tails of what the waitress was asking. I presume there was some degree of Quebecois idiom involved that was outside my limited knowledge. Overall, though, it was far less intimidating to be in Montreal as an English speaker than it was in Paris, and we did not encounter any of the “I speak English but won’t do it for you” bullshit that used to be the Francophone reaction to Americans in Montreal.

I sweated A LOT. Montreal has a reputation for humid summer weather, and Saturday was a prime example. It was in the low 80s, hazy with periods of overcast, but the dew point must have been 75 degrees. All day long I looked like I had just gotten out of the shower (or needed to get into one quick). We would go into some air-conditioned place and cool off, then go back out and get sweaty all over again. In this particular photo, I have just emerged from a 30-minute multimedia show in the Basilica Notre Dame, which is NOT air conditioned. The weather was better on Sunday, but several of the indoor attractions we visited were hot and humid — the Amazon Rainforest exhibit at the Biodome might as well have been a steam bath, and the aquatic center at the Olympic Stadium was also purposefully warm and humid, though not quite as intensely so.

Yes, Schwartz’s Deli is every bit as good as they say. We went in the middle of the afternoon on Sunday, so we did not have to wait the customary hour for a table, even though the place was still full. We only waited maybe five minutes and shared a table with a young couple to fill it out. I ordered the small plate of the famed smoked meat and still could barely finish it. The smoked meat is beef brisket, but it’s not corned beef. It’s dry rubbed and cured like pastrami. It was simply delicious. Plus, the restaurant is air conditioned.

Bridget never did man up and order poutine, even though it is a routine menu item wherever french fries are served. She kept calling it “putain”, and I would have loved to have seen her ask some fast food worker for THAT.

The Bateau Mouche boat ride was probably the least scenic boat ride I have ever taken, but we really just needed to sit down someplace cool for an hour, and it fit the bill. If you are hot and your feet are tired, take the boat ride. Otherwise, it was the most skippable thing we did all weekend.

The tour of the Olympic Stadium was interesting, but the stadium itself is very depressing. It’s almost never used anymore because the roof collapsed from the weight of too much snow during an auto show a few years ago. It’s too expensive to maintain, impossible to insure, and too large for the lackluster professional sports teams in Montreal. So it sits empty most of the time, with only a small handful of expo shows during the good weather. I remember watching hour after hour of the 1976 Olympics and the crowds in the stadium for the track and field events and wishing so hard that I could be there. It was a weird and sad experience, but I’m very glad we took the tour.

On the tour of the tower, Charlotte and I were with a group of elderly New Zealanders. It must have been their first stop in Montreal, because they didn’t seem to know anything about the rest of the city. There were no tour guides on the observation deck, and I ended up fielding all sorts of questions from the Kiwis. “Where’s that American fella? Ask him what that building is!”

Necessary French vocabulary I picked up: at Starbucks all I needed to know was “venti glace”, though elsewhere it’s “cafe glace” or just “glace” (as long as you’re in a coffee shop). Lots of places serve “moka glace” or “cappucino glace”, but what you get is more like a milkshake than a coffee drink. At the water park we learned that “changing room” is “salle de deshabillage”. All sherbet and sorbet is just “sorbet”, but sherbet is “sorbet de laitier”. “Queue de Castor” is a unique Canadian confection which translates to “beaver tail” in English. It’s a big piece of fried dough topped with gooey sweet stuff like chocolate and bananas, fruit toppings, and so on. How this has not spread here to New England, where we get a ton of Quebec tourists in the summer, is a total mystery.

We really had a very good time. I think we managed to hit most of the family-friendly destinations, so we might until Charlotte’s a little older before we go back, but I’d love to go back for one of the bajillion festivals they have during the summer. Next time, though, I’m bringing an economy-pack of sweatbands and double the number of shirts.

Charlotte made her stage debut Saturday night as Pig Number Three in a play about the trial of the Big Bad Wolf. In this photo, she is delivering her big monologue about how the BBW tried to demean her and her sisters by calling them “pigs”.

The play came at the end of an excruciatingly long evening of plays presented by the local children’s theater group that Charlotte joined a couple of months ago. As an alumnus of children’s theater myself, I realize that small children are not usually all that comfortable on stage, but there was no excuse for the complete lack of preparation on the part of the adults running the program. You can see in the picture that Charlotte has her script with her on stage, but for the most part she knew all her lines cold and was hanging on to the script as a security blanket. Most of the other children, including the older children, who really had no excuse for not knowing their lines, read mechanically from their scripts all evening. It was as if the children had never rehearsed at all and were doing a table reading for the first time. Beyond that, the night of the performances was the first time any of the kids had been on the stage at the middle school, where the show was held, and nobody knew where to stand, where to move, or how to project their voices. On top of that, the people running the show had no idea how to use the lighting or sound systems in the auditorium. The performances began a little after 7:00 p.m. but did not finish until 10:00 p.m. because the plays moved so slowly. Ten o’clock may not be too late for a 12-year-old, but that was way too late for the younger kids like Charlotte.

As you can tell, neither Bridget nor I were terribly impressed with the efforts of the adults. There were a lot of other parents also openly wondering why they paid these people money for such a slipshod program. I don’t think they’ll be around very long.

My own experience on stage began the summer I was twelve going on thirteen (that would be 1976, for those of you trying to figure it out). One of the middle school teachers who was active in the local community theater had convinced the town’s recreation department to let her do a summer theater program for kids. A fair number of the kids who showed up that first summer were themselves the children of other community theater folks, but my brother Tim and I joined because we were looking for something to do for the summer and I had been writing plays to perform at school for several years at that point. We spent every morning for six weeks or so in the auditorium of the old high school, and the play we did that summer was “Snow White”. Like Charlotte’s group, the kids in our group ranged from as young as six or seven to as old as fifteen. Even though I was not the oldest kid, I looked older at 12 than most everyone else, so I played Snow White’s father, the king. In fact, I would be typecast in that part for most of my time as an actor, playing assorted kings in several different shows. The king is not a particularly significant role in “Snow White”, but all the younger kids got the roles of the dwarves, and, let’s face it, I am NO Prince Charming. More importantly, though, our director made us learn our lines, even the little kids, and everyone learned their blocking, learned how to stand on stage and project our voices out into the audience, learned our entrance and exit cues, and generally learned as much stagecraft as you could cram into the brains of a bunch of kids on summer vacation.

Some of us fell deeply in love with theater that summer, and for the next ten years of my life there was scarcely a time when I was not involved in performing or producing some sort of show. Those of us who stuck with the summer program eventually moved on together into the high school drama club and even into the community theater. A few even went on to become theater professionals of one sort or another. The kids I grew up with on stage became my best friends. It is no exaggeration to say that wandering into that auditorium one humid June morning in 1976 transformed my entire life.

I know I am not supposed to push my own passions and dreams onto my child, but I also know that Charlotte has the same little spark inside her that I had. She has been involved in several sport activities the last couple of years, and has fun, but clearly is not all that interested in being an athlete. She also just performed in her annual dance recital for the third year in a row, and likes the thrill of the recital but not the discipline of dancing (although this year she did hip-hop and liked it a lot better than the tap/ballet classes). When she stepped out on stage Saturday night, though, with her nerd glasses and big rubber pig snout, I knew that she was right where she belonged. Well, except that I don’t think she belongs with this particular group. We need to find a different place where she can go and not just have fun but really learn how to perform on stage. In the town where I grew up, there was no such thing as private programs for children’s theater when I was her age, but here there are lots of them.

I grew out of my theater phase when I got to college. I went to Northwestern, which has a huge reputation for its theater program and all the famous actors who came out of there, and my original intention was to study theater. But I was unprepared for the more competitive and unpleasant aspects of a theater program where everybody wanted to be a star (and some people would become stars) and turned my interests elsewhere. I only did one play in college, a horrible production of “Dracula”, though some friends and I had a musical comedy act that we performed all the way through my undergrad years. It’s okay with me if theater is just a childhood pasttime for Charlotte, too. It’s also okay if she decides she’d rather do some other activity, but I suspect that Pig Number Three will turn into quite the ham.

Well, there you have it. Clean-shaven once again.

In the past when I have shaven off the beard, the general consensus is that taking it off made me look younger. This time, though, I think I actually look older with a clean face. It also highlights my jowls and my little chin (not a great combo).

Charlotte was quite taken with the change. She keeps telling me how handsome I look now. On our way home the other day, in fact, she told me “if any hot chicks try to pick you up, I’m gonna tell them you’re married!”

No worries there. The closest I’ve ever gotten to a hot chick is the 3-piece breast-and-wing platter at KFC.

My beard and I have had an on-again-off-again relationship for almost 30 years. I grew my first beard when I was a freshman in college, kept it until my senior year, and since then have gone back and forth between clean-shaven and fur-faced. My wife’s theory is that I “hide” behind my beard when things aren’t going well for me, but I don’t think that would hold up to any real scrutiny. I think it’s more a case of being lazy about shaving and getting to a point after a while of just saying “Fuck it, I’ll grow a beard again!”

The beard I have right now began as one of those ubiquitous IT-guy goatees when I went back to a daily IT job last year. In fact, I started it on the trip to Ireland I took with my brothers last spring by deciding not to bring any shaving gear with me on the trip. So, in a way, it’s really George Bush’s fault, like everything else. I rocked the goatee right up until the beginning of 2008, when the combination of the cold winter weather and a total lack of motivation made me give up making any effort to shave. You can see I skipped a few haircut appointments through the winter, too. (That photo is from early March)

But all good things must come to an end, and so it’s time to scrape my face. It’s coming off this weekend. Summer is not a great time for a big woolly beard anyway, plus I’m still looking for a new job. I even saw one job ad on Craig’s List recently that specifically required applicants not to have any facial hair. I wouldn’t work for a company who made demands like that, but clean-shaven is always workplace-appropriate. Besides, my new plan is to begin a 6-months-on/6-months off routine to coincide with the seasons. Sort of a nod to hibernation, if you will.

This guy got creative with his beard and is working his way through 34 different beard styles. I don’t think I’ll be quite that variable, even with the new rotation scheme.

The online humor site Yankee Pot Roast charts the rise and fall of Fidel Castro as illustrated by his famous beard.

And Florida governor Charlie Crist seems to have developed not just a “beard” but even a sex tape just in time for his Veep bid with John McCain. But that’s a whole different subject.