Before she was famous, Rita and her kids lived with me on Lorne Ave. Laura was 14 at the time, and funny and feisty, with a real gift for mimicry. Wade was younger. Slight and gentle, he was perfect target for bullies. But, like Rita, he didn’t let himself care.
One Saturday at the secondhand store Wade got a new pair of pants. They were plaid and he loved them. He wore them to school on Monday. When I asked him after school how his day was, he said it was okay, but that the kids had been really mean about his pants. Next morning he came down wearing the plaid pants. I was impressed and said so. Wade shrugged and said, “I like them.”
Down the road, as Rita’s singing performances took off, Wade became his mother’s manager.
Growing up, Rita’s family had been poor. She was born with a cleft palette which meant operations throughout her childhood. When she was able to go to school, she was bullied and mocked for being deformed,
Before she came to live with me in Ottawa, she had been in Toronto. She was part of the Toronto Women’s Caucus and sang at rallies and marches for women’s rights.
It was the mid-70s and the women’s movement was coming into its own. The “women’s lib” movement really made the RCMP nervous. We were seen as one step away from communism. They were so threatened that they sent undercover RCMP agents into the movement, especially to events like a Rita MacNeil benefit concert. Documents from the RCMP released in 2003 claimed that Rita was the leader of the radical feminist movement because she wrote and performed music that was subversive. When the story went public, Rita was asked about it in an interview. She laughed and said “I didn’t know about the surveillance. I would have asked for a ride home!”
Rita’s first album, Born a Woman, was produced by a group of women in Toronto. She went on to make 23 more albums which won dozens of top awards.
Rita was very shy and in the early days she sat down when she sang. Her voice was powerful. Singing a cappella (without any instruments) she could fill a hall or a street rally.
Though she was shy, she did not allow anyone to hassle her or her loved ones. When the staff administering “mother’s allowance” were giving her a bureaucratic runaround, Rita threw their paperwork in their face and told them to shove it.
She and the kids came to my place from one of those low-income places in the boonies of the city that was a hundred miles from the nearest anything.
Every Saturday we took the kids to Neighbourhood Services, our local secondhand store. Saturdays were when the new stuff came in. There would be a line down the block. When the doors opened, despite the crowd, wiry Wade would slip through to the pillows department and snag all the best pillows. By the time we got to him he was piled high with his choices.
We had no furniture, so our 350 pillows, piled every which way, were our couch or our armchair or our sleepover bed, depending on what we needed at that moment. We hosted great women’s parties at Lorne Avenue.
Rita and I shared a job at the Women’s Centre, and cleaned houses together to get by.
Once we were in a department store and Rita was getting a new outfit for an upcoming gig. I was being her runner, bringing different sizes and colours and styles. As I returned to the dressing room with an armload of clothes, the saleswoman stepped front of me and said, “You can’t go in there! This is the ladies change room. Men are not allowed!” When I told her I wasn’t a man, I could feel her recoil in disbelief. The lineup of woman that had grown behind me was muttering impatiently. I heard a sound and turned around to see Rita barreling towards us. She was pissed! She shoved a big pile of clothes into the saleswoman’s arms. “How dare you speak to my friend like that! I won’t be shopping here again.” We flounced out.
One time, when I was visiting her in Cape Breton, Rita took me to the Princess Colliery in Sydney Mines. It had been closed for some years. A group of retired miners did tours. Our guide led us onto the elevator wearing helmets with lights on the front. The elevator cage rattled slowly down into the ground for what seemed like forever. At the bottom we got into a rail car stretching into dark. We rode along and the guide described the working conditions, pointing to an impossibly small recess in the wall that had been a work space. Men spent whole days contorted into cubbyholes like that. The guide and Rita talked the whole time. They had a connection.
Riding home to Big Pond, Rita asked to borrow my cigarette package. She flattened it out and wrote the lyrics to Working Man on the back. It was her biggest hit, and began a relationship with the Men of the Deeps, the miners’ choir. She toured with the Men of the Deeps, and their entry onstage, headlamps lit, singing, was always a hit. They were a wonderful collaboration.
Later, when she had a band and sang all her own songs, she stayed on her feet and wore wonderful hats and rocked the place down. Those hats were her trademark and she always looked gorgeous. After a tune or two she would kick her shoes off. Her audiences loved her. When she did her song I’ll Accept the Rose Tonight there would be a parade of middle-aged men and dykes up to the stage. They left it strewn with roses.
Rita opened a tearoom in the converted schoolhouse she lived in while growing up. Her daughter Laura ran the tearoom. It became a favourite stop for Rita’s fans who were often lined up down the highway. Sometimes when she was in town, she would go downstairs into the tearoom and sing a few songs. Cape Breton loved her.
When Rita died, her funeral was attended by hundreds. She left a letter to Laura and Wade about what she wanted after her death. Laura read these directions at the funeral. She wanted her ashes to be put in a teapot—or two, if necessary. She added that the teapot with her ashes could be used if they ran out of clean ones in the tearoom.
Rita was funny and kind and much loved. She died in 2013, way too young at only 68. She left a wonderful collection of music, soulful and inspiring, that will never go out of style. https://www.ritamacneil.com/
