A bit more about Noah
In theory, the second Wednesday of the month is supposed to be character backstories, so let’s have a little bit about Noah, shall we?
This is a series of excerpts from a larger parody of an Atlantic profile of Bono I started and abandoned a while back. I’ve long been rolling my eyes at pseudo-intellectual Literary™ profiles of rock stars—I can remember as a kid reading some breathless Rolling Stone piece about Axl Rose where they visited him the day after he had had some tantrum that involved smashing mirrors in his house and the whole genre always seemed ridiculous—but the Bono one from 2022 struck me as particularly overwrought, hence the parody.
But hey… these excepts might be from a piece that’s still a draft, but it also delves a bit into Noah’s back story, so in honor of the brand new Noah book, let’s have a little bit of that, eh? And maybe one of these days I’ll finish this parody and make it a freebie for my newsletter subscribers… maybe… someday…
…During these years, Noah was drowning, clutching at anything to thrive. His self-confidence circled the bowl along with his grades. He desperately yearned to have his peers pay attention to him. He found he could win that attention only by dressing up in increasingly outlandish outfits. On a low-effort day, he might be Bono in tight black leather, sent to the principal’s office for refusing to take off his shades in math class and air humping the mic stands in band class. Other days he showed up in his full-sized home-made Big Bird costume, which had the additional benefit of making it impossible for class bullies like Glen Jenkins to shove him into the too-narrow lockers.
I tell you all of this because there is something about Noah Thorsen: you could call it his “a lot-ness.” There is just a lot about him—so much driven intensity, so much peacocking, so much desire to avoid housework, so much joy and whimsy and irritability. If you watch Noah perform (in one of any number of his tribute bands and community theatre projects over the years), you’ll see a guy making use of his natural voice in a cool, understated way, yet always falling back on that Payne Stewartian crazy costuming. Spend any time with him offstage, and he is immensely entertaining as he fills even the most boring daily task with stories and silliness. Noah is a true maximalist at nearly everything he does… except for dusting… unless Hrefna’s coming to visit.
Musically and in his home life, Noah shows a pattern of overdoing, his lofty goals sometimes exceeding his grasp. One grand outfit after another—gigantic and detailed fully-feathered turkey costumes for Thanksgiving, home economics projects like his Christmas gingerbread-and-candy-cane ode to Coney Island that took up the entire dining room table for three weeks, starting a near-riot at his cover band’s Canada Day noontime performance at Victoria’s Inner Harbour by mooning the crowd and twerking during their cover of Nickelback’s “Photograph.” (Mooning and twerking is Noah’s ode to Vancouver’s underground legends Slow, whose singer Tom Anselmi exposed himself onstage at Expo ’86, leading to a riot… though Anselmi didn’t twerk, as twerking hadn’t yet been invented.)
Some people, particularly Noah’s mother-in-law Agnes Burgoyne, find Noah’s a lot-ness annoying and absurd. He says that even his wife Ruth frequently tells him, “Just stop it, OK?” But Noah insists, “It’s hard for me to turn it off. Unless I’m chilling on the sofa watching The Price Is Right.”
What’s the source of all this nonsense?
One theory is that the nuclear power plant within him was born of the traumas of his youth. Not just the polar bear incident—there was also the time he flooded the basement in an effort to go swimming in winter at the tender age of 4, and the time his sister Olga told him his Soldier Steve action figures were dolls. Noah’s been yearning to fill all those holes, the ones that just couldn’t be made waterproof enough for an indoor basement pool no matter how much duct tape he tried. By this theory, the story of Noah is one of scarcity: a story of a lifetime of trying to find the common sense that was either ripped away or never there in the first place.
Noah himself seems to accept this theory, at least in theory. Success in making people stare is an “outpouring of dysfunction,” though he insists the actual dysfunction is on the part of all the people who are bland and boring. “Really, it shouldn’t be such hard work to find things to wear that aren’t bland and grey. I think people who want to blend in with the background are just obscuring some kinda neurosis or something. That sounds smart, right?”
However, scarcity-minded folks tend to be resentful and unhappy no matter what they achieve. Perhaps it is different in the case of a scarcity of common sense rather than financial scarcity, but in any case, Noah doesn’t seem to have a resentful bone in his body (we will ignore a not-very-family-friendly joke Noah made about what other sort of bones he might have on offer instead.) Noah is usually cheerful, energized—or is that caffeinated?—and gung-ho.
While I spent a few days with Noah in Victoria this spring, an old book came to mind: an analysis of American culture called Class: Style and Status in the USA by the late social critic Paul Fussell, which I mention mostly to show off that I’ve read it and thus am a bona fide intellectual or whatever. At the mention of the book, Noah excused himself to get changed and came back 37 minutes later in an impeccable vintage smoking jacket with a pipe and horned-rim glasses with hair slicked back a la Noël Coward, spouting off nonsense about bourgeois bohemians and the proletariat and moral materialism. After five minutes of this, he stopped, grinned from ear to ear, and said, “Betcha thought I sounded like a real New Yorker reader, huh?”
“I was thinking more The Atlantic.”
“Oh, no! Even I can’t keep a straight face pretending to read that one.”
He pauses, then frowns. “Ruth buys it every so often, though.”
“Oh? Your wife reads The Atlantic?”
“Of course. Whenever they have Bono in it.” He paused, then added, “I much prefer the New Yorker, myself. They have cartoons in that one.”
I nodded. Noah continued, “I mean, they’re not funny cartoons, but still.”
One day I was riding around Victoria with Noah in his beat up Honda Civic, and it dawned on me: Noah’s a little like that. He may be Danish-Canadian, but he’s got a lot of that cartoon-ness in him—part Wile E. Coyote: Genius concocting absurd schemes, part Bono spouting off nonsense and pretending he believes it for up to five minutes…
…He tells me of having finally managed to make friends in school, even forming a band called Fizzy Cream with his old nemesis Glen Jenkins. They went on to spend part of the ’90s travelling around Canada in a beat up Volkswagen van that was perpetually on its last legs, playing for beer money and stale pizza from coast to coast…
…Fizzy Cream was a minor success, having once made it to #30 on the weekly chart at CJAM in Windsor and even having had as many as 42 people show up to one tour stop in Swift Current, Saskatchewan—though that was likely due to a misunderstanding that there would be free ice cream given out at the show when the local paper said the gig was sponsored by the local dairy farmers’ co-op—and it seemed Noah and Glen were on their way. But then Gigi kept complaining that lead guitarist Glen was away so much, plus Glen had gotten more than sick of being stuck in a small space with Noah all the time. Noah, feeling some of the same claustrophobia, replied, “If you quit, I quit.”
And so Fizzy Cream’s bassist and drummer conspired to ditch Glen and Noah on the side of the road ten miles outside of Thunder Bay. Glen’s aunt worked for the railroad and was able to sneak him a ride home on a freight train, but Noah opted to busk and hitchhike his way home over the course of six months instead. A lucky find of a beat-up unicycle for two dollars in a thrift store in Ethelbert, Manitoba led to a surprisingly lucrative new busking act for Noah, and the six months became three years of mailing dirty socks stuffed full of loonies and quarters back to Gigi for his monthly child support for Adam before Noah found his way back to the West Coast where he spent a couple years doing his unicycle-juggling-while-singing act in Vancouver while shacked up with Maria until she, too, had had enough of Noah’s nonsense and kicked him out.
Distraught at yet another failed forever, Noah snuck across the US border and busked his way up and down the West Coast and to Las Vegas, where a night spent drowning his sorrows in complementary casino drinks resulted in waking up the next morning with the mother of all hangovers and a new bride, Denise: a showgirl who’d really just wanted to make her boyfriend Simon jealous. An annulment quickly followed, but once again, Noah maintained a friendship with his ex and now has a place to stay for free whenever he’s in Vegas—though Denise’s card-counting former mother-in-law Hrefna takes her up on that offer far more regularly…
…Noah’s worldly ambitions paid off in a modest way. By the time his marriage with Lisa drifted away, Noah had entered the lofty height of being a local celebrity—a life that doesn’t look much like the sordid simplicity of the Fizzy Cream Volkswagan van years. He lives in his in-laws’ guest house in the chichi neighborhood of Oak Bay. He’s friends with the bartender at Marilena and the guy who cleans the stables for the horsedrawn carriage tours in downtown Victoria. One time he was at the Parliamentary Dining Room for lunch with friends including an aide to the BC premier and, after catching food poisoning from a bad batch of the Polynesian Shrimp Salad, he barfed under the table just like George H.W. Bush. Another time, a scowling Russian diplomat mistook him for the hired help at the old Mayfair Shopping Centre’s Toys R Us and demanded to know where he could buy a teddy bear. And another time, he thought he’d peed his pants while sitting on Gordon Campbell’s sister-in-law’s sofa. The stories never end.
Noah’s entertaining energy is on the same level as all his other energy (except for housework, that one’s low unless he’s feeling threatened, polar bear-style), and as he spews, you realize the guy claims to know everybody in town. He’s so (locally) famous himself that he’s not name-dropping; he just likes to meet people and be met. There is a theory that celebrities love to hang out with other celebrities because deep down, they’re still the sad losers they were in high school and they can’t believe they get to hang out with all these cool people… who are also sad losers, despite being (locally) famous.
Playing Mr. Mom by day and rubbing elbows with local mini-stars by night—you can’t help wondering which way Noah will go. Will he be ruled by his ego or his duty? Can he find inner peace amid all the noise—among the screaming baby and the whining third grader and the mother-in-law furious about the most recent expansion of his vegetable garden into her formerly large lawn? Can he someday become a serious artiste or will he find the prospect of doing cartwheels in his Easter Bunny costume across the lawn of the local CBC affiliate too enticing? If he’s so concerned with his family, why does he spend so much time preening his hair? The final questions at the heart of Noah are the same as for all Canadians: why do you have to say sorry so much? Can you be a true Canadian without ever having played hockey? And will they revoke your citizenship if you prefer Starbucks to Timmy’s?
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