Last year, I was at the 7th All-American Congress of Esperanto. I was giving my first ever Powerpoint-style presentation in my entire life, in Esperanto, to an international audience, in a lecture hall at the University du Québec ā Montréal, when I noticed a disturbance in the back row.
A man was pleading and entreating a woman, and their whispered conversation was becoming audible. I thought maybe it was the overnight crew from the local radio station, who’d been running a call-in show after midnight in French and Esperanto, but it wasn’t. I was getting ready to ask for quiet, when they suddenly left through one of the hall’s back doors, to sighs of both relief and disappointment. I finished the presentation without further problem, and went on about my day, attending lectures, exercising my very rusty Restaurant French, playing Dungeons and Dragons, trying hard to not draw attention to the fact that I was from Toronto, and so on.
Now, the congress happened to finish on the same weekend as Juste Pour Rire, the Montréal comedy festival. On the final weekend, Rue St Denis near the university was closed to traffic, and occupied by buskers, comedy troupes, expanded restaurant patios, stage presentations, and swirling crowds of revellers. A bunch of us decided to head up the street and take it all in.
There was a giant eyeball at the corner of Rue Ontario, staring over the street. As dusk fell, it proved to be illuminated from within. Multicoloured spotlights turned the street into a surreal playground. Torch-jugglers worked the crowds. A disturbing, even scary, comedian harangued the street outside one restaurant, and I noticed quite a few people were avoiding him.
We came out of the pub, and then we saw the grasshopper.
The grasshopper was a gigantic …puppet, I suppose you could call it, mounted on a wheeled frame and apparently operated by half-a-dozen people. A small generator powered the lights that gave it an unearthly appearance. It towered over the crowd, metres over their heads, and strode through the spectators like a Martian tripod wading the Thames.
Suddenly a man jumped up on it. There was a kind of cockpit or gondola underneath the thing, which had been unoccupied, and he quickly clambered up into it. A spotlight shone briefly on him and I realized that it was the same man I’d seen in the lecture hall. The grasshopper’s motions became more purposeful, as if it were looking for something… or someone.
The crowds were eating it up. I don’t think they realized that he wasn’t part of the original act. There must have been a microphone and loudhailer built into the grasshopper, or maybe the man was carrying them, because a voice rang out over the street.
“Katherine! Will you marry me!”
A woman about ten metres in front of the grasshopper, smack dab in the middle of the street, froze, then slowly turned around. Her eyes widened as she took in the three-storey-high puppet creation in front of her.
“It’s Dan. I’ve been turned into a giant grasshopper. Will you marry me!”
It was clear that something special was going on. At a tap on my shoulder, I started to translate for my non-English-speaking friends. The crowds grew even heaver, and I felt myself being pushed away from the action. I glimpsed a police officer speaking with one of the puppeteers.
Suddenly a cheer arose from the crowd. I turned and looked, jumping in place to see over the heads of the people in front. The grasshopper was still, and its head was inclined as close to the road as it could get (admittedly about one and a half stories). The woman was crying. The two front legs of the grasshopper were pressed together, almost in an attitude of prayer.
The woman jumped up into the gondola of the grasshopper, and the thing came to life again. I found myself shoved around the corner among my friends, and we had to gather our breaths in the entrance to the Metro station. When we looked again, the man and woman were nowhere to be seen, and the puppeteers were swarming over the structure of the grasshopper.
It’s true! Here’s Rue St-Denis. Here’s the presentation. Here’s Rue St-Denis at night. Here’s the grasshopper.
Would I lie to you?
