I was coerced by a bearded McGill Redman hockey player into jumping in a cab and zipping down to Les Deux Pierrots, nestled in Vieux-Montréal. With a capacity for 700 people, and often meeting that limit, there is always a party on the fly...with an atmosphere similar to Montreal Canadiens playoff games, or more universally, Medieval public-stonings. What to say, what to say - there is a vibe at Les Deux Pierrots, a sense of riding ontop of an avalanche of frenzy.
It breaks down like this: you enter the bar, you slip the $5 cover and tell the
doorman how many are in your party. He takes you down rows of benches to an
opening, where you stand with your friends, facing the stage. There, like Billy
Graham, is a lone singer/guitarist, playing well-known French songs. Maybe that doens't sound like fireworks, but remember, it's a packed house, and people are going CRAZY. It's like nothing you've ever seen; on the catwalk, there are 10- 15 people busting a move, in the back, les boys are chugging pitchers and screaming in mad defiance.
And then, oh then, does the band enter.
Up on the second floor, I was trying to calmly drink a Rhum et Coke. The rhum
came in one glass, over ice, and the coke in its own, seperate, little bottle. 'That's a lotta rhum!' I said, to no one in particular. I sipped chastely from the straw as four French girls nearby sang rabidly to some song about birds. The crowd is having a collective aneursym in apocalyptic fury, and
I am nodding my head to the beat.
And then, oh then, the band plays Joan Jett. And I explode like whirling
octupus, singing and cheering about jukeboxes.
Then appeal of Les Deux Pierrots can be genuinely expressed in the parting
words of my Columbian roommate.
"In my country," she states while carefully selecting her following words, "we do not have places like this." |
