It all started three years ago with Larry Claypool. Sirish Rao flagged his cab, heard stories from the Vietnam vet who later worked with a landmine program in Cambodia and asked him to pull over so they could just talk.
Then Rao learned about Helen Potrebenko, who drove taxi in Vancouver in the 1970s and published an autobiographical novel called Taxi!
“It’s a brilliant, really sharp scathing commentary on working class life, on the role of women in low-paid dangerous jobs,” said Rao, artistic director and co-founder of the Indian Summer Festival. “Suddenly, it struck me that we have people in Vancouver whose experience driving cabs had led them to create some amazing narratives.
So he created an event called In the Driver’s Seat: Stories from the Cab for the Indian Summer Festival, which runs July 9 to 18.
“We always feel that cab drivers must be psychologists of some kind because you’ve got someone literally on a couch behind you, and as Larry once said, ‘Either they talk to you with the intensity that you would never talk to a stranger, they thought that they would never see you again so they give you everything that’s on their mind, or they forget you exist.’”
Claypool returned to the U.S. from Vietnam and wound up in Kent, Ohio the day the infamous Kent State shootings happened.
“So between that and the war, I’d had my fill of Richard Nixon and the U.S. government and it was time to leave,” Claypool said.
After Ohio, he travelled to the South of France, where he fell in love with French women and then moved to Montreal to meet their Canadian counterparts. He then studied at York University in Toronto, and at In the Driver’s Seat he will read from the novel he’s writing about the unique community he encountered in a high-rise building there.
He will also present photos from his series Larry’s Window, pictures of people on the street and his customers.
Claypool started driving cab as a “pick up, throw away job” in 1978. It’s a job he’s picked up between a five-year stint in South America and eight years in Southeast Asia, working in the wild animal trade.
Four or five current and former cab drivers will speak at the July 10 event at SFU’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts. They’ll talk about their lives and how driving cabs affected their creative output, followed by a Q&A with the audience.
“I kind of felt like sharing the experience I had of being in a cab and then meeting this incredibly gifted storyteller and very interesting human being that I would have only seen in that mirror,” Rao said. “It’s kind of nice to be in the driver’s seat, so to speak, and sit face-to-face and hear them speak about their work and their lives.”
Audiences will encounter Keith McKellar, who became entranced by Vancouver’s neon era when he drove cab in the 1970s. His book Neon Eulogy incorporates line drawings of the disappearing neon in Vancouver and jazz riff tales from the streets.
They’ll also meet Pav Nagra, a 22-year-old full-time business student who started driving cab a year ago and has been developing a standup routine to give his passengers an experience, rather than a mere ride.
“His dad drives cab, his uncle drives cab, so he said that he grew up watching the world through the rear window of a cab and for him, the street is where he feels completely at home,” Rao said.
“He’s got a sort of philosophy of what being a cab driver is and he does want to break some of the stigmas around it because this is what his family does, this is what he does,” Rao continued.
In addition to presenting the stories of cab drivers, Indian Summer is a festival of art, food, music and ideas.
There’s an event called 5 x 15 at the Imperial, July 18, that will feature five speakers, including award-winning journalist Naresh Fernandes talking about the global media landscape, restaurateur Meeru Dhalwala of Vij’s highlighting how insects are a high-protein, sustainable food, and Patrick Stewart of the Nisga’a First Nation speaking about aboriginal culture, colonialism and his punctuation-free 52,000 word PhD thesis in Grammatical Resistance.
“It’s follows on to be a vintage Bollywood dance party, so that’s always a good thing,” Rao said.
The Strings that Bind Us, July 15 at the Orpheum, will feature Ustad Amjad Ali Khan, India’s master of the sarod, a lute-like instrument with 19 fretless strings, playing with his two sons and violinist Jeanette Bernal-Singh of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.
“This idea of worlds meeting is very key to the way we put this festival together,” Rao said.
“Vancouver is for sure an extremely diverse city with a lot of interesting people in it, but perhaps not enough cross-pollination,” Rao said. “We want science and art to meet. We want South Asia and Europe. It doesn’t mean that you find an easy common ground, it means that you actually explore if there is good friction.”
For more information, see indiansummerfest.ca.
