No. 240: NORM MACDONALD, TWITTER & ME / We exchanged dozens of dead-of-night messages across two years, but I waited for the right moment before diving into the sensitive stuff.

I'm not killing my account on X for one reason only--I'm hoping Norm Macdonald picks up our conversation where we left off & this whole "death" thing is a work.

Norm, more than misty, after his last spot on Letterman’s Late Show

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YESTERDAY I wrote about sentimental rationale for lingering on X. I compared deleting my account to the burning a scrapbook. If you missed entry, I’ll link it here. Check out: No. 239: ELON MUSK, WILLIAM SHATNER, CHARLIE BROWN, JAMES GARNER, DONAL LOGUE & A CAST OF BILLIONS / Why I'm not deleting my X account, even though I don't use it.

I developed neck spasms from cringing while I typed that entry. I’m truly sheepish about staying on the much slagged social-media platform. With X’s tolerance of hate speech and its politically skewed algorithms, mine is at best a suspect decision and some would consider it morally indefensible. The best I can manage: What I signed up for with Twitter in 2010 ain’t X as we approach the century’s quarter-pole. Maybe that mitigates my position, maybe that only provides a historical context.

Nonetheless If the house is on fire, you flee, even if it’s your house. No time to get all wistful. If you’re racing to the door, but can grab that framed daguerreotype of grandma, go for it. But that’s all. Don’t try to save the TV or anything.

In yesterday’s entry, I wrote about connecting with famous standup comics through Twitter. (Pro tip: Come up with something funny and they’ll jump in there.) I cited a few of the bigger names, Richard Lewis being my longtime favourite. (RIP.) I ran out of room and couldn’t work in Chris Redd, who won an Emmy with Saturday Night Live. When Chris and I spoke after a show at Toronto’s Comedy Bar in 2019 he remembered crowd-working Susan and me at a show in a small room at JFL in Montreal two years earlier, saying that he recorded the show and listened to it dozens of times when working on the material.

In yesterday’s entry I made a point of mentioning that Norm Macdonald was one of my Twitter followers. And today I’m diving in on that.

Norm, well, I sat in the front row of one of his shows at the now-gone and sadly missed Caroline’s in New York, but, no. he didn’t crowd-work me, crowd-work not being a staple of his. I didn’t get a chance to say, “Hey, I’m that guy you follow.”

This screen shot from my Twitter account dates to 2017. After a long illness which he did his best to keep under wraps, Norm died n 2021 at the age of 61. In our case, though, Norm was predeceased by his status as a follower of my account. Twitter follower 2016-2018 … but I’m getting ahead of myself.

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In the 21st century, our interactions were only online, but they were extensive. It started purely out of the blue and the catalyst was his book, Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir. It was pure apocrypha and mockingly so … at least the parts that weren’t true.  A bunch of readers of the book, seeming Norm fanboys all, were trading effusive rave reviews on Twitter, and I tried to get in the spirit of the book, affecting a high literary tone, akin to that of a snooty critic or academic—the tweet is in the Twitter ruins somewhere in the ether, but the payoff line was about “Mr Macdonald’s rich personal history being compromised by wooden writing.”

Then one morning I woke up to this shocker in my email notifications.

“Enjoy your work greatly.” Your honour, I need a ruling: Does this qualify as a blurb? No matter—I’m running with it.

Did he really read me? Did he know my name? I later tried to sort it out. If he was being on the square, he might have read my NHL stuff at the Globe and Mail or ESPN. He was a hockey fan—he had even played a reprobate ex-player named Norm Henderson (a mash-up of Leafs linemates Norm Ullman and Paul Henderson) in The Norm Show.

If I had my wits about me, I would have stayed in character when I replied, like this was a sketch. Yes! And …  In the moment, though, as stunned as I was/am, the house lights came up and I played it straight. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

We went back and forth for a bit. I told Norm that Based on a True Story reminded me of Steven Millhauser’s Edwin Mulhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright, a parody of the literary biography—think of Life of Johnson by James Boswell, except both the subject, a novelist, and the biographer are in grade school. (Spoiler alert: Edwin passes away shortly after completion of his landmark novel, Cartoons.) Intending it as flattery, I told Norm that his lampooning of literary memoir was on a par with Millhauser’s send-up in Edwin Mulhouse. Norm said he wasn’t familiar with the book and took offence—presumedly his indignation was a continued piece of work.

Norm and I went back and forth over a stretch of months. Some of it was public, like this retweet after I congratulated him on flattering reviews.

Some of it was direct messages—okay, a lot of it was direct messages, as these notifications I received by email would indicate.

We mostly went back and forth for weeks. Most of it was Canadian pop culture stuff. I worked in how I served some celebrities as a liquor store clerk. Or at least who passed for a celebrity in Toronto in the 70s and 80s.

And then I puzzled about CBC programming and got a laugh out of him.

Sigh, in retrospect I wish I could take back that lines about aging: “If you get the joke you probably have your doctor on speed dial. I’m running out of friends I can tell that joke to.” This was four years before his death and only after did it come out that he had been diagnosed multiple myeloma in 2013. Made sense: When I had seen him at Caroline’s in 2016 (I think I have the year right) Norm looked very fleshy and swollen, a side effect of myeloma meds.

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After establishing a relationship that consisted of occasional banter across several months, I decided to spring a couple of background facts on Norm that might have been off-putting if I brought them in off the top.