Tag Archives: Princess Pants

Pure Joy

This is a post about the kindness of strangers and the joy one feels when bringing joy to others.

Backstory

In early 2014 my daughter, Avery (affectionately nicknamed “Princess Pants” or just “Pants” or “Pantalons” if we’re being formal and embracing the French language) was diagnosed with severe idiopathic scoliosis. My wife got the idea to start a family blog so we could chronicle the journey and share our experiences with others going through the same thing and bentbutnotbroken.net was born.

One thing that helped Pants through the whole ordeal (eleven hour surgery and eleven month recovery) was music, specifically the music of Vance Joy and Taylor Swift. Shortly after surgery my wife got tickets to see them play in Toronto and Pants was concerned she wouldn’t be physically up to the challenge. Listening to their music helped motivate her to do her physio exercises and kept her in a good mental state.

Recognizing this, I got the idea to reach out to both artists to see if they’d give Pants a shout-out on Twitter or something. I even mentioned how she wanted to wear a tiara on her last day of school before surgery and how everyone in her class ended up wearing one.

I did not receive a response from Taylor Swift, but a month later Avery got a next-day delivery envelope in the mail with the return address of Vance Joy’s record label and a postmark of Edmonton – the city he had just played in.

I managed to record a video of her opening the envelope. Suffice it to say, she was excited.

Dear Avery,
I find your bravery and strength inspiring. It means a lot to me that you have been listening to my music. I don’t have a tiara on me right now, but I have decided to draw me in one. I’m on your team!
[drawing of a face with a tiara] (Looks more like a crown, sorry lol)

I could not have written a better ending to the story and retelling it brings a tear to my eye, but as it turns out, that wasn’t the end. Fast forward to March 2023, nine years since diagnosis, eight since surgery, and seven and a half since Vance Joy made Pants the happiest girl on the planet.

Pants was studying abroad and took it upon herself to make a solo trip to Barcelona to see Vance Joy play. I reached out to his rep again and asked if there was any way he could do a shout-out for her as an early birthday present. Unfortunately, that particular tour date was already packed with lots of personal stuff for him and there would not be an opportunity. They said they’d see if they could work something out in terms of a birthday card, but that’s when I mentioned that our family would be seeing him at the Sommo Festival in PEI in July.

Hatching A New Plan

After too many emails than I care to admit, Vance Joy’s rep, Rachael, finally agreed to a meet and greet at the festival. This was big news, but keeping it a secret from Pants was going to be a challenge. She was aware I tried to set something up in Spain so there was a good chance she’d put two and two together eventually.

The big day arrived and I got word from Rachael that there would be a small group meet & greet at 5:15. Vance Joy was slotted to be in the culinary tent at 5:00 and Pants really wanted to see him there, so I’d need an excuse to pull her away. My wife and I ended up telling her that I had a friend of a friend on the crew who got us a backstage tour, and as luck would have it, Pants thought that was really cool and “would see Vance Joy perform later anyway”.

Now, at this point, it’s important to mention that only Rachel and my wife, and I (and Pants’ brother) knew that this was a surprise. None of the security people, promotion company folks, or the PR people around knew, so as I was running around trying to figure out where to meet and who to talk to and whatnot, other people part of the meet and greet started to arrive and a bit of a buzz formed in the area where we were standing.

At some point, one of the security people called out, “Are you all here for the Vance Joy meet and greet?” and thankfully Pants was like, “No, we’re here for a backstage tour,” which really confused the person because I had just spoken with her about making sure we were in the right spot for the tour. At that point, however, we had to congregate in a specific area and were going to get instructions on what to do and where to go. So, the jig was up. I turned to face Pants.

“Surprise!”

There were tears. Lots of shaking and crying. She was, to put it mildly, a mess. The security person felt terrible for spoiling the surprise, but it all worked out (rest easy, security lady!) The advanced notice allowed Pants to do her freaking out beforehand so when she got to do the actual meet and greet she was composed and not in tears tripping over her words (in hindsight, I should have factored that in and let her in on the secret).

We told the backstory to the promotions people and they got their Social Media person to interview us, which was pretty cool, and then it was time.

Vance Joy was so friendly, and kind, and Pants got to properly thank him in person for the letter he sent all those years ago. He remembered her and said that he gets a lot of fan mail and can’t reply to all of it, but some stories stick with him, and hers was one. They had a brief chat and then took selfies with me, then my wife, and son, and I got to thank both him and Rachael for making this happen. Seeing the joy it brought Pants meant the world to me.

As we exited the meet and greet area, we were approached by Bianca from Whitecap Entertainment (the promotions company). She said that our story was so heartwarming and unforgettable that they wanted to give us a special gift (hat tip to my wife who ventured outside of her comfort zone and told the story to anyone who would listen): Wristbands for the limited-access pit right at the front of the stage!

We got to watch Vance Joy from as close as you can get and then close out the festival watching Mumford & Sons from the same spot. It was absolutely fantastic. My son and I even got to meet former NFL player and owner of Amazeballs and chef/host of the show Mad Good Food, Derrell Smith.

So, there you have it. The happiest of happy endings for everyone involved.

Special thanks to Rachel from Unified Music Group, the Sommo Festival, Whitecap Entertainment, their awesome employee Bianca Boutilier, and of course Vance Joy.

Marcus Mumford & Maggie Rogers Covering Taylor Swift’s “Cowboy Like Me”

Stanley Butters

Proud Papa

Leave a reply

I’m going to take this opportunity to write about how awesome my kids are.

I realize that most parents say this about their kids and many of them are right. All of them should be blogging about it. Kids who are awesome and do awesome things deserve to be praised from the highest mountains. So here’s my story about a weekend that my kids turned from ordinary to extraordinary in a span of less than twenty-four hours.

For those who don’t know, I have two children with my wife of sixteen years: a 13-year-old girl and a 9-year-old boy. Through some weird nickname wormhole, these two fine little humans are affectionately referred to as “Pants” and “Dude”, which are actually short for “Princess Pants” and “Doodle”, which were actually short for “Princess Paloney Baloney” and “Mister Doodle” (he was 10 lb 9 oz when he was born and when you’re that big they call you Mister).

Anyhow, they’re great kids, but unlike a lot of other kids I know neither of them are crazy interested in competitively doing things. Pants stopped figure skating right before it got really serious (phew!) and Dude had shown only mild interest in such things – until bowling, that is (the funny thing is that we were calling him Dude before he started bowling).

Now we’re calling him The Dude.

This is his third year of 5-pin bowling. For the uninitiated, 5-pin bowling is done with a smaller ball (with no holes in it) and there are, appropriately, five pins which are arranged in a wide “V” shape. Unlike 10-bin bowling where each pin is worth one, in 5-pin the head pin is worth 5, the two beside it are each worth 3, and the two end pins are each worth 2. You get to bowl three balls per frame (instead of two), with the same strike and spare rules as in 10-pin (i.e. your strike counts all pins plus the next two balls with your spare counting all pins plus your next ball). A perfect game is 450.

Dude’s best score is 221 but his average is sitting around 127, which is pretty good for a 9-year-old playing with kids a year older than he is (Bantam age bracket is 7-10). This past weekend Dude went to his regular bowling league game on Saturday while Pants and I were hanging with a friend of mine (more on that later). Turns out he qualified to compete in the Zone Championships the next day at some lanes one city over (20 minutes or so by car). So, Sunday morning my wife packed him up and got him registered. Before he left he said to me, “I feel like I’m going to have a good day.”

Understatement of the year, kid.

With nine frames done in his first game he was below average by enough that it wasn’t looking too good. Then, in the tenth frame he bowled three strikes in a row for his first ever turkey (that’s what you call three strikes in a row in bowling) for a 160. His second game was a 171, followed by a 147 and a consistent 148. After four games he was 92 pins up on the next boy but fatigue started to set in and he rounded out his first five-game set with the only one below his average, carding a 124. His average over the five games was 150.

Even with the sub-par last game, his lead held up and he was crowed the Bantam Boys (Singles) Zone Champion earning him a spot at the Provincial Championships on March 6. We couldn’t be more thrilled. He keeps asking when he can watch the movie The Big Lebowski. If he wins provincials I just might let him.

“The medal doesn’t say first place, but I won, and it’s gold, so that’s okay.” – The Dude

The Dude Abides

Remember how I mentioned Pants and I were hanging with a friend of mine on Saturday while Dude was bowling? Well, this friend is a super rad guy named Jim. Aside from being an all ’round good guy, Jim is also musically inclined. He plays guitar, bass, a little keyboard, and taught himself to play the harmonica the other day – just because. Jim and I played in a little coffee shop trio called Argyle Speedo with our friend Steph a while back. It was fun. I like writing lyrics to stuff Jim creates, though they tend to be on the depressing side, whereas Jim’s wheelhouse tends toward happy fun stuff.

Anyway, Jim was taking an art sabbatical and spending all his non-sleeping time at Kwartzlab and wanted me to hang with him and create stuff one day. I asked if Pants could join us because she recently picked up her guitar for the first time in well over a year (with only 8 months of lessons under her belt) and I thought it would be cool for her to experience the creation of art for no other reason than to create art. Jim being Jim thought this was a top shelf idea and on Saturday around 10:30 in the morning Pants and I met him at the lab. He was upstairs shooting footage for a vlog and had an array of recording equipment and instruments lying around.

We just fiddled with instruments for a bit, with Jim and Avery randomly strumming stuff and me trying to figure out the cajon drum box. After a couple hours of playing some John Lennon, Vance Joy, Axis of Awesome and other random stuff we grabbed a sandwich.

After lunch, we got out the trusty “How to Write a Hit Song” cheat sheets and Avery picked a major key and a chord progression and just started strumming, Jim got the harmonica out and started playing his brand new mouth organ, and I started banging on the cajon. A couple minutes later it sounded like a song.

I was mentioning that I only wrote sad lyrics and this song needed words. Avery, rather shyly, mumbled something. I went to write it down and she was hesitant to repeat it. After some coaxing I got her to give me the line.

“I’d walk backwards to the moon if it meant I could see you smile”

I encouraged her to get more out and Jim reminded us that it didn’t have to rhyme. We played off the action “walk”. What else can you do? Run, jump, leap…

“I’d somersault into outer space if you’d talk to me for a while”

There was discussion on how to properly spell “somersault”, which distracted Jim from the rhyming. And so it went until we had two short verses of four lines each.

I’d walk backward to the moon
If it meant I could see you smile
I’d somersault into outer space
If you’d talk to me for a while

I’d hang upside down from the clouds
To see your sparkling eyes
I’d hold onto you for some amount of time
If we didn’t have to say goodbye

Against the music it was starting to sound even more like a song. It was a song! It was a song that needed a chorus, so back to the cheat sheet we went. Once we had chords we liked for it Jim played around with it a bit and we got working on the lyrics for the chorus.

We tried a few things and scratched out most of them, and with Jim singing them out loud while tinkering with strum patterns we landed on the following:

Backwards somersaults upside down
Holding onto you
Wishing time would come around
So I can stay with you

Ink will fade
But memories last
Memories last
Ink will fade
But memories last
Forever

We gave it a run through and decided to play around with the order of things, stitching it together thusly:

Verse 1
Chorus
Verse 2
Harmonica Solo
Chorus
Last Half of Chorus

With Avery and I singing, me on the cajone, and Jim on his guitar we gave it a spin and it sounded pretty good. Did I mention that there were other people in the lab working on various things? This made me feel a bit self-conscious and I thought it would make Pants clam up for sure, but it wasn’t a problem. She was so focused on this song that the room may as well have been empty.

Jim then did a track just with guitar and then the harmonica solo and then Pants was up for the first vocal track. Jim said it would be weird listening with the headphones and singing into a mic but Pants, who hasn’t had a single voice lesson, wasn’t properly warmed up, and had only sung the lyrics a few times stepped up and gave it a whirl. A little off key and a little screw up on the second verse, she plowed through and got the job done!

Then, it was my turn. Jim was right about singing with headphones on into a mic. I found it really weird and after one verse immediately needed a do over. Second time through, a little off key and with the same screw up (not on purpose) on the second verse we were done.

Pants gave the second verse another shot and improved it a little, then Jim put the bass line on it (or maybe he did that earlier, I can’t remember) and crammed it all into his magic music making app and there was a real life MP3 to show for the day’s efforts. Time had run out and Pants and I had to get going, so there wasn’t the opportunity to do any of the vocal tracks over again. This concerned Pants at first but Jim and I explained that most songs she listens to have had hours and hours of recording and editing. She spent probably 8 minutes, as a first timer no less, laying this track down.

Jim has a great saying: Perfect is the enemy of done.

We got into the car and Pants looked over at me with a big smile on her face.

“That was the most fun I’ve ever had. I can’t believe I just wrote and recorded a song!”

Jim did a bit of editing on the song and asked if I’d ask Pants if she was okay with the song being put out into the world. She said yes, and I could not have been more proud. I made sure she knew it, too. It takes some serious intestinal fortitude to put anything that you know isn’t perfect out into the world, let alone to do that and have all the additional pressures of being a teenage girl and wanting to fit in and be cool. Plus, the internet can be a cruel place.

After she agreed, she looked at me with a smidgen of doubt. I told her that no, it wasn’t perfect and we all made mistakes, but it was a first cut of something wonderful and if anyone wants to give her grief over it that she can tell them to stuff it.

Expect a version done by Woot Suit Riot soon, as well as improved vocal tracks from Avery and I at some point, but for now here it is…

Ink Will Fade by Princess Pants, Andrew and Jim:

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/236335741″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

~ Andrew

My New Hero

Leave a reply

If there’s one thing you can count on when you pick up a book it’s that there will either be someone or something to root for, someone or something to root against, or some combination of the two. It’s what makes the story interesting. It allows the writer to take the reader through a series of ups and downs and showcase all the pitfalls and adversity that the main character faces on the way to achieving, or not achieving, their dramatic need. While certainly there are myriad ways to accomplish this many times it boils down to something simple: protagonist versus antagonist, good versus evil, hero versus villain.

If you ever have a choice, always be Batman.
http://wallpaperswide.com/batman_and_joker-wallpapers.html

I’ve read quite a few books in my day, and seen quite a few movies, and I find myself drawn not as much to the hero as I am the antihero. That’s just a personal preference though and I’m sure there’s a psychologist out there who could explain it. Never the less, I like my heroes (or antiheroes, or villians for that matter) to be based on the types of people I see on a day-to-day basis and on the news – only exaggerated. You could say that I enjoy stories that involve fantastic versions of everyday people.

Sherlock Holmes is a good example. Here’s a man using his wits and ingenuity to fight the evil lurking around the corner (who is also just an exaggerated example of a bad person you could meet on any given day). Iron Man would be another. Tony Stark is a flawed, but thoroughly brilliant and excessively rich man who invents technology to build a virtually indestructible armored suit he wears to fly around in saving the world from harm. I also think this is what draws people to Batman. As the caption in the photo above reads, if you ever have a choice, always be Batman.

If you were to ask me who my two favorite heroes are I’d answer without hesitation: Iron Man and Batman. At least that would have been my answer until January 23, 2015. That day everything changed. If I’m being honest it had been changing for months, but that was the day my answer changed for good. I can even pinpoint the precise moment: 9:40 AM. It was at that exact moment I looked into the eyes of a girl we call Princess Pants (Pants for short) and I realized that the only answer to the question, “Who’s your favorite hero?” that I’m ever going to give is this: my daughter.

I’m not sure how many of you have been following along but my wife, daughter, and I have been blogging about my daughter’s experience with scoliosis. It’s been a terrifying journey and one where I have learned a lot about myself, my wife, family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and kind-hearted strangers from all over the world. But what I have learned from all those people combined pales in comparison to what I learned about my daughter.

You can read about the adventure on the scoliosis blog, and I would encourage you to do so, but it can be summed up thusly:

My daughter’s scoliosis was getting worse and worse by the day. Each week that passed you could visibly see the deterioration. It was just a matter of time before she would be experiencing constant pain and her spine would accordion and look like a flattened “S”. Surgery was required, and on January 20, 2015 that’s exactly what she had. I walked her to the operating room and at 8:20 AM that morning she drifted off to sleep. More than eleven hours later we got word from the surgical team that they were done. Two titanium rods were now permanently screwed into her spine with 27 titanium screws. The surgery was a success but she was under for so long they were keeping her sedated and on a ventilator for another 12-24 hours. Oh, and she needed 6 liters of blood during surgery (just about two full transfusions). Oh, and she was covered from knees to neck in hives from an unknown allergic reaction. At 9:30 AM the morning of the 21st they woke her up and extubated and got her breathing on her own. The hives had disappeared, whatever the allergic reaction was had worked itself through. Three hours later she was sitting in a chair with a Popsicle. The ICU nurse said she was hours ahead of the curve. By 4:00 PM that afternoon she was the healthiest kid in the ICU, and since they needed the beds, she was on her way down to a ward room. She skipped the step-down room altogether. The next day, January 22, she was getting out of bed and sitting up in a chair and eating (albeit very little as the pain meds and anesthetic do some weird stuff to your appetite). On January 23 at 9:40 AM she took her first steps with her newly reinforced spine and that, my friends, is the exact moment I knew.

My daughter was unstoppable.

She’s even wearing a cape!

Now, this is a surgery that’s done quite a bit. Not as many result in rods as long as hers (they cover fourteen vertebrae from T2 down to L4), and not as many have that extra hour and a half in the OR, but it’s a surgery that happens about 10 times a year at this particular hospital and hundreds more times a year across North America. The expectation is the patient gets up and walking quickly, so that she can start healing. She needs to get her muscles moving again and begin to sort out how to live with her new body.

I have to tell you though, after seeing what she went through; after seeing how much pain she was in; after seeing her struggle to do something as trivial as roll onto her side in bed, or lift food to her mouth; after seeing how afraid she was; after seeing all that I saw something that I’d never seen in another person before. It was in her eyes, and it stopped me in my tracks. It was powerful, it was crystal clear, and it simply said this:

I will.

It wasn’t just that she was going to figure out how to walk. Of this there was never any doubt. It was the look in her eyes that said, “Nothing is going to stop me. Ever.“

And I believe her.

If you are interested, here’s a great animated short that explains what they do for the surgery:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBIf4AQj5s0]

And here’s a look at my new hero Princess Pants, before, and after with all her new fancy hardware: