LINDALEE TRACEY, FILMMAKER AND WRITER 1957-2006
Director with an uncanny ability to document her own life grew up poor. After becoming the central subject of Not a Love Story: a Film about Pornography, she began making her own films, writes SANDRA MARTIN
A child of poverty, Lindalee Tracey ran away from home as a young teenager, made a living as a stripper and exotic dancer in Montreal and forged an award-winning international career as a writer and documentary filmmaker. Multitalented and driven, almost as though she had a presentiment her time would be short, she had an uncanny ability to document her own life in print and in film. As a journalist, she had an innate talent to connect with people on a visceral level, a quality that made her work controversial and unforgettable.
When her young son, Liam, started asking questions about his dead grandfather, Ms. Tracey decided to make a documentary about the father who had abandoned her as a baby. Abby, I hardly Knew Ya (1995) was a cinematic journey that took her through flop houses and long-term-care facilities, as she sought out her father's drinking buddies, and ended up in the cemetery beside his grave. Although she had intended to mouth conventional bromides about absent fathers while the cameras rolled, she found invective pouring out of her mouth in torrents of rage. Another filmmaker would have yelled cut, composed herself and started again. That might have been professional, but it wouldn't have been authentic -- and authentic was what Lindalee Tracey was all about as a filmmaker, a writer and a person.
"She wanted people to read her work and to react to it. She had an incredible sense of adventure and a very clear idea in her own mind of right and wrong and what she should do to change things," says Lynn Cunningham, the magazine and book editor whom Ms. Tracey credited with having "demanded the truth, however much I winced" as a writer.
"She had a great, raunchy, Rabelaisian sense of humour," says broadcaster Shelagh Rogers, host of Sounds Like Canada on CBC Radio. "And her laugh went on about two minutes longer than mine. And she was a vault. I told her things I told no one else. And those things went nowhere. She was everything you could want in a girlfriend. And her eyes were so beautiful. You just knew you were loved by looking into her eyes."
Those eyes were variously described as sparkling, alive and a mirror into her personality -- mischievous, determined, difficult and passionate. She was theatrical, a trait she used to advantage as a burlesque dancer, and irrepressibly interested in other people, especially the poor and disadvantaged. She would walk down the street and see a panhandler. Instead of passing by with her eyes averted or dropping a loonie from on high into a plastic cup, she would sit down on the curb and have a conversation and then, as likely as not, she would invite her new friend to join her for a meal at the nearest eatery.
Of Irish and Québécois ancestry, Lindalee Tracey was the elder of two children of Abby Tracey, an alcoholic who was in and out of jail, and Yolande Tremblay, a government clerk. Her father took off when she was a few months old, reappeared briefly and left again before her brother Paul was born a year later.
She grew up above a diner in the west end of Ottawa. "There were no trees, no parks, just the incessant rattle and dark belching of warehouses, factories and rag plants," she wrote in her first book, On the Edge: A Journey into the Heart of Canada (1993), which was nominated for the Gordon Montador Award. "I remember a sweet-unknowing before awareness and shame. The cheesy clumps of Kraft dinner and ketchup in the roof of my mouth. The gummy front-yard tar melting to my shoes in summer. The slow creaking of springs as my mother unfolded her hide-a-bed in the living room each safe night." Her father was "a deadbeat, a man I didn't know," while her mother "lived for years without her own room, without new clothes, with constant worry that lined her face early. She was poor so her children wouldn't be."
Ms. Tracey went to D. Roy Kennedy Public School and Woodruff High School in Ottawa. She was a sickly child, and suffered from rheumatic fever in the days before universal health care. Although she was always proud of her mother's frugality and strength, Ms. Tracey was a rebellious teenager who ran away from home when she was 15. She rode the rails until she was picked up in Kamloops, B.C., and sent home. In 1973, she quit school and moved to Montreal, where she began appearing in clubs as a stripper and an exotic dancer. She was 16.
"I just loved stripping; those were grown-up girls with real boobs, and I wanted to do that, too! It was the express lane into adulthood," she explained to Marc Glassman in an interview in the fall, 2006, issue of POV magazine. "We paraded our imperfections. We enjoyed them. . . . The people who came to the clubs were often sorrowful folk; and we talked to them."
She wrote a book, Growing up Naked: My Years in Bump and Grind (1997), about her life as a peeler, working at a club called Eden under the stage name Fonda Peters. She was a runner-up in the Miss Nude Canada contest and was billed as Canada's Top Young Show Exotic on a tour of the United States, before going back to Montreal in 1967 to work in an upscale club called SexOHrama, and eventually organizing an annual fundraising striporama for the Montreal Children's Hospital called Tits for Tots. "Certainly the mid-seventies was the last good time to be a stripper," she wrote in her memoir, "just before television swallowed our imagination, before the corporate agenda made us homogeneous and hard-core pornography spread its numbing venom."
At first, she was a willing participant in a film titled Not a Love Story: a Film about Pornography made in 1981 by Bonnie Sherr Klein and Dorothy Henaut for Studio D, the women's unit of the National Film Board. When she saw the finished film, she felt betrayed and exploited. "I'm reduced to porn queen, me, the softest thing in the film, the stripper who doesn't spread, immortalized as a cheap cliché and the 'articulate' voice of all the live sex girls," she wrote in Growing up Naked.
Director with an uncanny ability to document her own life grew up poor. After becoming the central subject of Not a Love Story: a Film about Pornography, she began making her own films, writes SANDRA MARTIN
A child of poverty, Lindalee Tracey ran away from home as a young teenager, made a living as a stripper and exotic dancer in Montreal and forged an award-winning international career as a writer and documentary filmmaker. Multitalented and driven, almost as though she had a presentiment her time would be short, she had an uncanny ability to document her own life in print and in film. As a journalist, she had an innate talent to connect with people on a visceral level, a quality that made her work controversial and unforgettable.
When her young son, Liam, started asking questions about his dead grandfather, Ms. Tracey decided to make a documentary about the father who had abandoned her as a baby. Abby, I hardly Knew Ya (1995) was a cinematic journey that took her through flop houses and long-term-care facilities, as she sought out her father's drinking buddies, and ended up in the cemetery beside his grave. Although she had intended to mouth conventional bromides about absent fathers while the cameras rolled, she found invective pouring out of her mouth in torrents of rage. Another filmmaker would have yelled cut, composed herself and started again. That might have been professional, but it wouldn't have been authentic -- and authentic was what Lindalee Tracey was all about as a filmmaker, a writer and a person.
"She wanted people to read her work and to react to it. She had an incredible sense of adventure and a very clear idea in her own mind of right and wrong and what she should do to change things," says Lynn Cunningham, the magazine and book editor whom Ms. Tracey credited with having "demanded the truth, however much I winced" as a writer.
"She had a great, raunchy, Rabelaisian sense of humour," says broadcaster Shelagh Rogers, host of Sounds Like Canada on CBC Radio. "And her laugh went on about two minutes longer than mine. And she was a vault. I told her things I told no one else. And those things went nowhere. She was everything you could want in a girlfriend. And her eyes were so beautiful. You just knew you were loved by looking into her eyes."
Those eyes were variously described as sparkling, alive and a mirror into her personality -- mischievous, determined, difficult and passionate. She was theatrical, a trait she used to advantage as a burlesque dancer, and irrepressibly interested in other people, especially the poor and disadvantaged. She would walk down the street and see a panhandler. Instead of passing by with her eyes averted or dropping a loonie from on high into a plastic cup, she would sit down on the curb and have a conversation and then, as likely as not, she would invite her new friend to join her for a meal at the nearest eatery.
Of Irish and Québécois ancestry, Lindalee Tracey was the elder of two children of Abby Tracey, an alcoholic who was in and out of jail, and Yolande Tremblay, a government clerk. Her father took off when she was a few months old, reappeared briefly and left again before her brother Paul was born a year later.
She grew up above a diner in the west end of Ottawa. "There were no trees, no parks, just the incessant rattle and dark belching of warehouses, factories and rag plants," she wrote in her first book, On the Edge: A Journey into the Heart of Canada (1993), which was nominated for the Gordon Montador Award. "I remember a sweet-unknowing before awareness and shame. The cheesy clumps of Kraft dinner and ketchup in the roof of my mouth. The gummy front-yard tar melting to my shoes in summer. The slow creaking of springs as my mother unfolded her hide-a-bed in the living room each safe night." Her father was "a deadbeat, a man I didn't know," while her mother "lived for years without her own room, without new clothes, with constant worry that lined her face early. She was poor so her children wouldn't be."
Ms. Tracey went to D. Roy Kennedy Public School and Woodruff High School in Ottawa. She was a sickly child, and suffered from rheumatic fever in the days before universal health care. Although she was always proud of her mother's frugality and strength, Ms. Tracey was a rebellious teenager who ran away from home when she was 15. She rode the rails until she was picked up in Kamloops, B.C., and sent home. In 1973, she quit school and moved to Montreal, where she began appearing in clubs as a stripper and an exotic dancer. She was 16.
"I just loved stripping; those were grown-up girls with real boobs, and I wanted to do that, too! It was the express lane into adulthood," she explained to Marc Glassman in an interview in the fall, 2006, issue of POV magazine. "We paraded our imperfections. We enjoyed them. . . . The people who came to the clubs were often sorrowful folk; and we talked to them."
She wrote a book, Growing up Naked: My Years in Bump and Grind (1997), about her life as a peeler, working at a club called Eden under the stage name Fonda Peters. She was a runner-up in the Miss Nude Canada contest and was billed as Canada's Top Young Show Exotic on a tour of the United States, before going back to Montreal in 1967 to work in an upscale club called SexOHrama, and eventually organizing an annual fundraising striporama for the Montreal Children's Hospital called Tits for Tots. "Certainly the mid-seventies was the last good time to be a stripper," she wrote in her memoir, "just before television swallowed our imagination, before the corporate agenda made us homogeneous and hard-core pornography spread its numbing venom."
At first, she was a willing participant in a film titled Not a Love Story: a Film about Pornography made in 1981 by Bonnie Sherr Klein and Dorothy Henaut for Studio D, the women's unit of the National Film Board. When she saw the finished film, she felt betrayed and exploited. "I'm reduced to porn queen, me, the softest thing in the film, the stripper who doesn't spread, immortalized as a cheap cliché and the 'articulate' voice of all the live sex girls," she wrote in Growing up Naked.
