Suzy Says

Our neighbors to the north pick the dumbest times to overcome their national passivity. Legendary bluesman Wilson Pickett, world famous for classic songs like “Mustang Sally” and “Midnight Hour”, was allegedly strip-searched at the Ottawa airport, where customs officials claim they were looking for drugs. Pickett says he may never play Canada again, and I certainly don’t blame him. I have never been strip-searched anywhere (though I came perilously close to it once when returning to Heathrow after a long weekend in Amsterdam), but I have had bad experiences with bureaucratic stupidity at Canadian customs. In fact, I have not been back to Canada since the last incident, in 1994.

We had flown from San Francisco to Toronto, and connected on to Ottawa, scene of Wilson Pickett’s humiliation, spent a few days with my in-laws in Ottawa, and then flew to Boston. Returning home from Boston, we were routed through Toronto, where we had to change planes. We were forced to go through customs in Toronto, even though we were only getting onto a connecting flight home to San Francisco. We damn near missed the flight because the wait in the customs line was so long, and fear of missing our flight and being trapped there led me to make a great big noisy fuss. When we finally got to the front of the line, the stupid customs guy asked us how long we were going to be in Canada. I looked at my watch and said, “Half an hour, unless you make us miss our plane”. After more pointless questioning, we literally ran across the airport and barely made the flight.

Maybe they are worried that people are going to stay there and mooch off their socialized medicine and welfare system, but surely you should not have to go through customs when you have a ticket to the USA in your hand, for a flight leaving that same day, and in our case, within an hour and a half of landing there in the first place. And hey, you go through AMERICAN customs in CANADA, so they know you’re out of there. Time to stop picking on the Yanks, Canadian customs guys, from famous senior citizens to obscure chics like me. You’ll be lucky if Wilson doesn’t sue your sad little asses.

It seems that Whistler (of “Whistler’s Mother” fame) might have had a secret. Whistler is surely one of the most interesting and unclassifiable of artists, and now it seems that he may also have been an arms smuggler. It’s all very circumstantial, but nonetheless intriguing, and it does seem like just the kind of thing he would do, partly because he needed money at this time in his life, and partly because he liked to make trouble and yank people’s chains.

Whistler was bankrupted by a lawsuit he brought against John Ruskin, an art critic who trashed his inventive new style of paintings which Whistler called “Nocturnes”. Personally, I find them beautiful, particularly this one , but Ruskin described these paintings as “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Though Whistler won the lawsuit against Ruskin, he was awarded only a farthing and the cost of the court proceedings bankrupted him.

I’m sure wherever he is, he would love the fact that he’s still in the news and still making trouble.