Two memories of Richard Vaughan: 1) Early nineties, outside Theatrebooks, early one Saturday
morning in the spring, we’re both lining up to enter our plays in the recently started
Summerworks theatre festival. In those days, entering the festival involved picking up your
entry form at Theatrebooks near Bloor and Yonge and then racing across town and the Bloor
viaduct to deliver it to Carol Pauker’s house in the Bain St Coop. This is a fact that seems to
have escaped the notice of this fresh-faced young man behind me in line—I, however, have a
getaway car lined up and invite him to join us. He demurs—that’s the mot juste, I think--a long
moment, then jumps in and we scoot over to Riverdale. I remember his worldly, appraising air,
so at odds with those rosy cheeks, and that hesitation, that demurring, that demurral. I thought,
keep this up, kiddo, and neither of us will get in. What was he thinking? Mummy told me not to
get into cars with strangers? Was he waiting for a better offer? He’d just arrived in town but
knew enough, it seemed, to be wary of the volatile cocktail of competition and collaboration that
all art and especially theatre run on. 2) We’re reading our poems at the Idler Pub on Davenport.
My poems have some French words in them but Richard has written entire poems in French and
he’s reading ahead of me. He’s just published or is about to publish his first book of poems.
There are 20 or so people in the audience and, when he starts reading in French, an older drunk
poet, David Donnell, heckles him out of pure red-neck ignorance: “Why you reading in French?
They don’t let us read in English there. They get all the grants and they hate English….” I’m
appalled but Richard has apparently faced this kind of reaction before and is completely
unruffled. He lets Donnell spew his venom a bit longer, trying vainly to rally the audience
against Richard, and then says simply, “This poem is in French. Deal with it.” I can still hear
him say that, hear in it the wisdom and self-knowledge of someone who obviously had to deal
with a lot in his life, and also just the lightest delicious campy lilt to those last three words: “Deal
with it”. It shuts Donnell up completely.
— Richard Sanger, Toronto