5 a 7, or 10: Hotel de la Montagne.

Yesterday evening after work, we made our way over to Hotel de la Montagne for a 5 a 7. The purpose? An end celebration for a summer course Ali took at Concordia on public parks and green spaces in Montreal, and a planning session for the class of eight’s upcoming vitrine installation and vernissage.

The first to enter from a heavy shower, managing to contain the inconspicuous umbrella shake, we got our first look at the place. Preliminary impression: Grand and detailed. No shortage of doors and pathway options leading to lounges, a bar area, a restaurant, boutique. What immediately draws the eye is a handless gold-coloured fairy sitting on a rotating chair over the fountain, below an enormous crystal (or substitute) chandelier. 

A few other key markers like the modern paintings of women (or the same one in different clothing) in baroque-inspired poses (baroque is the only word that comes to mind – what do I know) lining the walls around the bar and life-size statues of baby elephants and my kitsch radar kicks in. The baroque-era lady presiding directly over our table, it was discovered upon closer inspection, seemed to be communicating an ever-so-subtle derogatory visual idiom involving a bird and a hand-signal.

2 for 1 drinks, and we were off to a fast start. Keith’s for me; gin & tonic for the lady. Before long, she and a few others were dancing to some boomer-renaissance party standards provided by a smooth-voiced podium baritone. The group is lively and intellectual, and the odd sights (and people) surrounding us, not to mention the fast approaching vernissage, provide fodder for laughs and relaxed exchange. Ali rarely gets into it. Other than at our wedding, she has never danced of her own volition in my presence. But as I looked over the booth at the floor, there she was doing the Macarena, cutting the space’s average age in half. We vacated the booth at 10 p.m., following a welcome and unforeseen extension to a great evening, resolved to return for an encore one day.

What have I learned through conversations with Ali about her studies in the course? That an intervention in this case is the act of making something visible on a landscape, something that has disappeared, through representation of some kind, mostly performed as an event. A purposeful doing that exhumes a lost dimension, revives forgotten historical fact. See the class blog and prepare to be well educated with some brilliant interventions about some of Montreal’s well- and lesser-known green spaces. I look forward to their unveiling Tuesday evening (June 28).

We took the bus home, a relaxing, breezy departure from driving everywhere. I only take the bus a handful of times a year, Ali even fewer. We walked up Westminster in a refreshing falling mist that glows under streetlamps. No need to deploy the umbrella.