Ep26: Evelyn sweats through the piano bench; Nick has a few words for Mr. Holland (& his opus).

In this episode, Evelyn shares the story of Irv, her first piano teacher: a farmer, musician, painter, poet, and deeply eccentric fixture of her childhood who taught her for years in a tiny overheated room on the family farm. What starts as a loving tribute turns into one of the most gloriously uncomfortable stories in Reverse Jackass history, featuring Evelyn's overactive teenage sweat glands, a wooden piano bench, and a long-term newspaper solution no one ever verbally acknowledged.

What follows is part tribute, part comedy of discomfort, and part meditation on the wonderfully odd people who become permanent fixtures in our memories. Along the way, Nick brings his usual mix of curiosity, jokes, and escalating disbelief, helping turn a very specific small-town Canadian story into something weirdly universal.

Because apparently both countries can agree on this: the people who teach us the most are often the ones we’ll never fully know how to explain.

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Email them at reversejackass@gmail.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

It's reverse.

SPEAKER_00 0:08

I'm just so worked up right now and excited. Nick, I need you to lead us in. I can't, I can't possibly do this myself.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

Folks, tonight's starting lineup has been retired, and we've called in the uh the relief pitcher, me. Welcome to Reverse Jackass Podcast. I'm Nick with me as always is Evelyn, the Canadian Blade. Evelyn, say hello to this wonderful audience of ours. It's an Evelyn episode, and I'm gonna relinquish the controls. Evelyn, take us on a journey.

SPEAKER_00 0:35

Okay, well, it's gonna follow our usual format, a story and a prompt. So I want you to just enjoy the story. I I want to tell you a little bit today about my piano teacher when I was young, my first piano teacher. And he is no longer with us anymore. He passed a few years ago. And uh I I adored him dearly. And so I guess can I use his name on here? I guess I can. Like, I'm not telling bad stories.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

That's the all you're doing is I my general rule is if I'm only paying somebody compliments, then I should be using their name.

SPEAKER_00 1:07

Okay, okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

Well, I'm telling I mean, so okay, but here's where it gets complicated because his name is offensive. Dipshit a hulaan, you changed my life.

SPEAKER_00 1:16

How did you so I'll call him DS DSF is what I'll call. No, so his name was his name was Irv. Okay. Irvin. His name was Irv. Sure. And Irv was now just a little reminder for everyone out there. I grew up on farmland. And so Irv was no exception to this. Irv was a farmer. And he he lived on a farm. He had a big red barn.

SPEAKER_01 1:40

Like he's a farmer. He didn't live on a farm. He lived in a densely populated urban area, but he would commute. He would, he would get his tractor out of the garage, out of the parking garage, and he would head up highway 80. Yeah, nice. Good memory.

SPEAKER_00 1:53

He uh he actually resided mainly in the financial district of Toronto. Uh driving his combine down Lakeshore. Yep. Um, so he was a farmer, and this big red barn, he put a star on it, a star of lights on it every Christmas season. A very humble property, but like very, you know, very cozy, just very typical farm property. Um, so Irv taught my mom piano. Irv also taught me piano, taught my sister for the few years that she took it. But I started piano when I was four, I was almost five.

SPEAKER_01 2:26

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 2:27

And I took piano with Irv all the way until I was 19 years old. Wow, okay. Yeah. And then I went to university and then I had my other teacher that I've referred to in previous episodes of this podcast. So I'd go see Irv every Monday. Piano lessons were Monday nights. And I remember a lot of that time filled with pure panic because I hated practicing. I hated it so hard. And and there were some upon in retrospect. In retrospect, upon reflection. Upon reflection, thank you. Uh, there were some times where I look back and you think, hey, that was kind of a funny story, right? You know, you kind of look back on things you live through, and it's kind of a huh, that's that's cool. What a cool story that'll be for a podcast that I might have down the road with a friend. So here we are. So I had lessons every Monday night. They were an hour. It was always in a small room in Irv's house. So we'd go in the side door. First of all, he had a German shepherd whose dog house was right beside the front door, and that dog scared the full blown hoop right out of me.

SPEAKER_01 3:32

Terrifying dog.

SPEAKER_00 3:33

That dog was very scary to me. So I didn't really love that dog. Uh, he chained it up, like leashed it up every time, chained it up. He had it. He kept it every time I came over for my lesson, which kind of made me feel weird. I was like, why is no one else requiring the special treatment? Is it just me? I think it might have been.

SPEAKER_01 3:54

Because the dog just fucking hates you.

SPEAKER_00 3:56

The dog hated me because I was at that time in my life when I was wearing barbecue sauce as deodorant. I didn't know any better.

SPEAKER_01 4:03

That country living. It doesn't number people.

SPEAKER_00 4:06

You do what you use what you have. That's what we do in the country. So I'd go to lessons, I'd walk up the little stairs. There was a little waiting room there, and uh, then I would go in for my lesson. And this room was so small. Herbs sat at a card table, and he had his his note, you know, his notebook, and that table, I can't tell you what was on it, but it was packed. There was not an inch of bare tabletop on that table, and it filled up, I want to say, 80% of the room of the whole room. Okay. So, and around the perimeter, there, you know, there were like cabinets, the odd like hutch. And then there was this old piano, an old church piano. That's what I grew up learning on. It was one of those really high tops, you know, old piano, wooden bench. And then behind me, I mean Irv kind of sat to my right, and behind me was an organ because he also gave organ lessons.

SPEAKER_01 4:58

Wow. Right. This is sounding more and more like kind of an enormous room when you're talking about it.

SPEAKER_00 5:02

No, no, I need you to understand that there was barely a pathway to the piano.

SPEAKER_01 5:06

Like you go in the door and there's a piano and an organ and a card table, and what sounds like some complicated threshing equipment. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:13

And you're just kind of like sucking it in behind Irv. And Irv was a large man. Sure. Like tall in stature. Sure. I mean, the guy was a wall, but also large, large from maybe the armpits to the knees. Or armpits to the hips, let's just say.

SPEAKER_01 5:29

Like he had a belly on him.

SPEAKER_00 5:32

He did, he really did. So there was there was no there was no wiggle room in this office at all. I play for Irv and he would give me commentary and he'd wheel his wheelie chair over and you know, write stuff on my own.

SPEAKER_01 5:44

It's called a wheelchair, by the way, is the technical term for that. But I'm also starting to get an understanding of why this room was so non-navigable.

SPEAKER_00 5:56

Close. Very close. Okay. Uh so he would wheel over, write stuff on my piano, but normally it would just be me playing and him giving commentary. The other really important thing about this room is that he had the heat turned up that makes Palm Desert feel like subarctic.

SPEAKER_01 6:13

Wow. Okay. This room it out of you.

SPEAKER_00 6:16

Was a sweat lodge. Oh, you don't even understand what you just said because that's where the story's going. Yeah. So in my teens, I'm gonna say 12, 13 years old, and I'm a real sweater. Like, maybe not so much now, but in my teens, like there were shirts underneath the shirts I was wearing because I was right. You gotta like when the sham wow came out, one of my first thoughts was can I get a shirt made out of that material? Because I could really where was that in my teens? Where was that in my shirt?

SPEAKER_01 6:44

Well, and also again, you've talked about using barbecue sauces uh as deodorant. Yeah, and I'm just imagining that's seeping through everything. Do you know what I mean? It's true, but they don't make a clear application barbecue sauce.

SPEAKER_00 6:55

They don't, they don't, and the hypercolor sweatshirts that we were wearing did not absorb it. Oh, wow, as we talked about. Oh, it takes me back. Okay, yeah. So this room was like I go in and immediately sweat is dripping down my face, my back, my pits, like I'm sweating everywhere. One Monday night, I went in wearing a pair of light purple sweatpants. This is very important. I had two pairs of these sweatpants. One was like a dusty rose pink color, one was a nice purple mauve color. I went in with the purple ones this night. I go in, I sit on this bench, I have my lesson for an hour, and I go to stand up, and I can't stand up because my pants have fused to the wooden piano bench. Because I have sweat right through my pants, and now they are that kind of that you get on a well-worn wooden bench. Once I was able to then stand up, and remember, Herb's kind of right, like to my right and behind me. So all he's looking at is my back this whole time, anyway. So I'm standing up. There were two massive wet spots on the back of my pants.

SPEAKER_01 8:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

Huge. And that white, that white uh area on the bench, on the wood bench.

SPEAKER_01 8:15

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:16

My sweat, my sweat basically burned off the varathane. Okay. Okay. So there was a moment when Irv and I both looked at the bench and looked at each other. Like I'm 12, 13, he's about 87 at this point. And we looked at each other and none of us acknowledged it. Like we knew it happened and none of us acknowledged it. And I was mortified and I left because the lesson was over. I come back next Monday, and there, somebody acknowledged it. There is, there are a couple sheets of newspaper on the piano bench. Newspaper? How dignified. On the piano bench. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 9:01

I s I sat on I he's like, You burned me once. Here you go. Yeah, just well, no, he's just like, turn these into pulp, why don't you? Like, can you think of a worse thing to hold up against moisture? Was he out of Kleenex?

SPEAKER_00 9:13

You don't have any tissue paper from Christmas?

SPEAKER_01 9:15

Yeah, I could have sprinkled it with cornstarch, and that would have been a better sitting on kitty litter. He was yeah, he was just he was trying to upset you at this point. He was like, You're gonna walk out of here wearing fucking newspaper.

SPEAKER_00 9:28

Right. It's gonna be like when you go to the doctor's office and you sweat through the paper on the bench and then you get up and it's like stuck in your crack and everything. Like that's that's what this is gonna be. So I sat on that paper and no one said anything. And it happened every single week after that, because I continue to take lessons for seven or eight more years, eight or eight more years. All right, get in there, paper's on the bench, I get in there, and one day the paper wasn't on the bench anymore.

SPEAKER_01 9:54

And Irv was dead, laying there, collapsed over in his wheelchair, just wheeling non-responsive, his body, his lifeless body baking in the 95-degree artificial heat smelled like smelled like a Kenny Rogers roaster. And I sat down and I played the most beautiful requiem for him. It was that at that moment that all the instruction clicked, and I just I I played him off this mortal coil in the most delicate and sensitive way that I knew how. Thank you, Irv.

unknown 10:22

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 10:23

It's like you, it's like you were there. It's like you were there. Did I call it it? You called it. Uh no, there was no paper on the bench, but he told me that I could get my own from the basket near his armchair in the TV room. So I, like a dog who had soiled a carpet, got my own newspaper and henceforth put the newspaper on the bench for myself every Monday for the next eight years. Sweating or not, I went and got my own. Now, fun fact about Irv. Now, do you have something you want to say? Is Irv not a very nice guy? Irv was wonderful. I mean, he was eccentric.

SPEAKER_01 11:02

That story it feels like a counterexample.

SPEAKER_00 11:06

I I know. It really, it really does. And maybe this has maybe this is a real season of conversations you and I have had of me being in my 40s and realizing that I've maybe had some more experiences that are worth unpacking than I tend to realize as I grew up. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 11:22

Okay. I mean it sounds unintentional, but boy. Unintentional for sure. An iota of sensitivity would be lovelier.

SPEAKER_00 11:29

Oh no, that that didn't exist. Irv loved playing gospel music. Irv uh was the musician or was the pianist at the choir, uh just down the road from his house. And a dedicated newspaper subscriber. Loved the petroleum topic. Okay. Uh so there were just many things about Irv that made Irv Irv, right? So he was the farmer, he was my piano teacher, he was a musician, he wrote a lot of his own music, which was always performed at the church, all of these things. And my dad informed me uh this morning when we were chatting that Irv, I think most of his career was spent as an industrial painter, like painting large, large buildings and grain bins and and oil oil um storage units, like things like this. So so Irv, like he was a very eccentric man, as indicated by the newspaper, uh, the hot room, and just all the stories I have. There's just that's really it. So my question for you, Nick, is who is the most eccentric, multifaceted person you have ever encountered?

SPEAKER_01 12:38

Oh, okay. What a great turn.

SPEAKER_00 12:42

Or tell me about a time when you soiled a wooden bench.

SPEAKER_01 12:47

Well, I have a lot of those.

SPEAKER_00 12:48

Although I didn't soil it.

SPEAKER_01 12:50

I didn't soil it. Let me just make it. That's what's so weird about it. Is that like I assume there was sweat throughout that room for him to make such a big fucking deal out of it? It's so weird.

SPEAKER_00 12:59

I was good friends with another one of his students, by the way. And Terry didn't have to sit on a newspaper. We we compared notes. It was just me, me and my overactive adolescent sweat glands.

SPEAKER_01 13:13

Terry, okay. Well, they sound like they need a uh a little visit from not so Saint Nicholas to even the score.

SPEAKER_00 13:22

Oh my gosh, that's your nickname. Nick, we just found it. Oh, really?

SPEAKER_01 13:26

No, that's not so much fun. Oh we can, I mean we could do it if you want. I don't know. If somebody writes it and says they love it, then maybe we'll keep it. It's just a man. We've been punning on Nicholas my whole life.

SPEAKER_00 13:37

Oh, that's I don't know. Okay, okay. Reverse jackass at gmail.com. I did. I did I did not like that. I didn't feel I didn't feel good about that because mainly that's what Irv was thinking I was leaving on his piano bench.

SPEAKER_01 13:52

Okay. Sorry. Talk about your syrup heists, said Irv. I got the evidence right here. I got to call the bounties.

SPEAKER_00 13:59

Worn down, previously veritane, now now not veritaneed piano bench in the print of two butt cheeks of one of the king girls who I also also verithane, I don't know what that is, but it doesn't sound fancy.

SPEAKER_01 14:15

And so my thought is if you're like, well, I gotta protect my verithane. My thought is you buy another can of veritane and you just recoat the isn't that varnish?

SPEAKER_00 14:22

What would you call it?

SPEAKER_01 14:23

Varnish? Varnish, yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 14:25

I think it's the same thing.

SPEAKER_01 14:26

My point is, like, it doesn't sound like it's ermine. Right. Do you know what I mean? Like, like where it's something precious, and you know what I mean? Like, oh, she's sitting on my Fabroger eggs and ruining them. Like, it's like it's a it's a fucking wooden piano bench in a in a barn backhouse, fella. Like, that's nothing too precious about it. Yeah, you're right. The most multifaceted person that I ever uh okay, so there are a handful of them, but I can tell a story about a person from my past. I had a boss, Sandy. Hello, if you ever hear this. Um and Sandy was a person who had done so many things in her life. She had been a fitness model, she started her own business, multiple businesses, she owned her own businesses, she lobbied, like everything you could imagine she had done at some point or another. And she was good at everything. Do you know what I mean? And she was she was without end to her energy. And I mean, like, you know, she was in her 40s when I started working for her, and she was waking up and running three miles in the morning every day. Wow. Um, even if she had three hours of sleep, she was getting up and just running on her treadmill just happy as could be, like a total athlete. And that's that's meaningful. But the thing that I remember the most was that we we had a program that we were running, an educational program, and there was a partnership we were trying to get with a prominent local university that you've heard of. Um, and we were like in talks to do it. And the lawyer said, Okay, so hey, um, send us this information. And where I was like, Okay, I don't give a fuck, we'll send it to them. She was immediately like, no, we're not sending them that. And I was like, why? And she's like, Because I can tell from three moves away that they're trying to figure out what our funding source is so they can go behind our back and and gank it from us. And I was like, Oh, okay. What? So she she pushes back, she says, No, we're not gonna do that. And they like pushed back, and she read the entire contract, like all of the legalees, and she stuffed it back up their asses. Like, tell them on page 36, paragraph five, it says blah, blah, blah. This is a person with no legal education, no experience in the court system, but she could read court documents and she knew when people were trying to fuck with her, and they backed off these lawyers. It was incredible. And it was like she had them dead to rights, and they shut right the fuck up in that moment. And this is somebody where, like, I'm a reasonably smart person and I see a legal document and I go cross-eyed immediately. Yes, she could read them start to finish, first to last, and understand every bit of it, and and also put put expensive lawyers from a prominent university on their heels. Yeah, that was an she was an incredible oh Sandy, you're the is there anybody else that I know? That's a short story. Is there anybody else I know that is multifaceted and can do a bunch of stuff?

SPEAKER_00 17:08

And eccentric, like that's that's the key piece here. Like farmer, piano teacher, industrial painter.

SPEAKER_01 17:17

Yeah. Well, doesn't that feel like Irv's like passion, Irv's moneymaker, and Irv's home life? I mean, that's obviously a lot of knowledge to have, but it's interesting because those those strike me as just a guy who like really went hard in three different avenues of his life rather than those things don't gel together.

SPEAKER_00 17:37

I encountered him years later at a fair, and I I I expressed my gratitude for the learning that I had with him. And I even wrote him a letter. I have, I just found the letter he wrote back. Like this is years and years and years. So yeah, like it was important to me that he knew how much I appreciated that. But it was wild then going into university, being up against, and I'll use that term loosely, but being up against people who had grown up in cities and then learned piano with like professionals, you know. And so so it was it was kind of a like, you know, maybe like a raise your voice kind of moment for me.

SPEAKER_01 18:15

So meaning it was ridiculous and you should have felt bad about it. Okay, so that's where I want to take us in these last couple minutes. Speaking of stuff, is that since my story was a little incomplete, but I also want to say that you persuaded me to watch Mr. Holland's Opus over the weekend. And I can't help but think, I told you this via text, that the main problem with Mr. Holland's Opus is that it didn't have J.K. Simmons from Whiplash. And I was trying to do that. My aunt my wife can't handle this show, can't handle Whiplash and hasn't seen it. But I was trying to explain to her the not my tempo scene. And I like, I also just want to say, and I was thinking about this last night, Mr. Holland is in the best moments of that movie a prick. And I just want to say his his gross enmeshed marriage to music is so pervasive that even when he is trying hard to connect with his hearing-impaired son, sorry, spoiler alert, even when he's trying to, he invites all the members of the son's school for the deaf to a concert, and then he he like makes them sit through a concert and then he does a light show as if to say to them condescendingly, music is like light for the ears. Like, there's no reason to subject these kids to a fucking concert. And yet he forces them all in there and he goes, Here's my son, he's deaf like you. Now watch my light show and these instrumentalists that you can't hope to enjoy. He never, he doesn't like, he doesn't go join events for like he learns a little bit of sign language, but he doesn't like go do hearing impaired people stuff. He doesn't immerse himself in that community. He goes, Look, I'm gonna have a concert that you can't hear, but it's about you. Like, what a dick. And then these are just some of the thoughts. The other thing, and you and I talked about this, is that is that Mr. Holland, his opus lay it on us that he spent his whole life laying out, the whole thing he spent his whole life working on, that had an interlude for the student he had a weird relationship with, is three minutes of music that apparently could be performed without rehearsal by unrelated people from different generations of the school. So they were all just like gather in the auditorium, we'll put some fucking cheap music down, just bring your instruments, and then they all land of this thing. It's very tight. Mr. Holland just gets up, he conducts it. Like, you know how it is with classical music where you don't practice ever, you just like slap it together. Yeah, absolutely. Classical music is the punk rock of shitty music. And as a result, like much like Mr. Holland's opus, the members of these orchestras just show up willy-nilly and go, I'm class of 73. How about you? Oh, I'm class of 78. You know, grab your didri do. Let's play Mr. Holland's Opus. Like, whatever happened to Rowena. Oh, she died in New York. Anyway, all this is to say, Evelyn, keep the music movie suggestions coming because you're three for three here.

SPEAKER_00 21:00

I am three for three. It's I'm so happy about that. And you know, this is a great way to wrap up this episode because the passion you just displayed in the last two and a half minutes is the kind of passion I can only fathom Irv had hoped to bring to each one of his students, Nick. And to know that in a roundabout way, he inadvertently, posthumously bubbled up such such dynamic expression in you just now, in kind of, you know, like I said, a roundabout way. It's yeah, but but he would, I just think he would be so humbled, and I think he would have been so proud and and just thrilled that although you basically have put down everything he stood for, everything.

SPEAKER_01 21:50

Everything.

SPEAKER_00 21:52

And and well, I mean, like probably more. Like he probably you probably insulted him about things he didn't even know he could be insulted about. But to know that you could do that to an old, now dead man. Yeah. I just think there's like how where can we go from here? And the answer is nowhere. And people forget that we're more powerful than the dead.

SPEAKER_01 22:12

Here's my last question for you before we go. Um, what is the piano equivalent of a rim shot? Because I'm imagining that the perfect response would be get up, you both see the sweat, and then you go. But even though the it sounds like it had every other Canadian possession in it, that room did not have a drum kit in it. So what's the like can you sing for me what the piano version of a rim shot would be that you could just kind of play yourself off with?

SPEAKER_00 22:33

Yep, it would go a little something like this: dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun. So good. Yep, there it is. Well, Nick, thank you for your your explosive ending to this.

SPEAKER_01 22:49

Evelyn, thank you, and thank you, Irv, for your for your seminal role in Evelyn's life and musical training.

SPEAKER_00 22:56

Thank you. Because this episode, this theme song happened because I started with Irv when I was four, and then I sweated out all my toxins when I was 13 on his beloved piano bench. The Irv piano sweat lodge. Yeah, it it was. He if that's the case, he should have been charging a lot more than he did. He could have made bank. That could have been his fourth, his fourth investment opportunity.

SPEAKER_01 23:19

He did it for the love of the game.

SPEAKER_00 23:20

He did. That was Irv, lover of the game. Thank you so much for listening to us today on this podcast. I'm Evelyn the Sweaty Canadian Blade. And I'm here with Nick, and we love you and we appreciate you. Nick, do you want to say goodbye to everybody?

SPEAKER_01 23:36

Goodbye, everybody. We do love you, and we will see you very soon.

SPEAKER_00 23:39

Some neighbors are besties.

SPEAKER_01 23:41

Others quarrel bitterly. Stuck together through geography. One of us has nukes, and the other has tokes.

SPEAKER_00 23:51

It's American Canadian diplomacy. It's reverse.