NOT THE EDITORIAL PAGE

AVONLEA CALLING...

re: Ian Connerty's "Signs Of The Times," July 11.

I feel I owe eye a thank you for being the first publication to print false information about me. I've learned infinitely valuable lessons from the experience. Lessons that even The Sun 's Heather Bird declined to teach me. Fortunately, eve n The Sun is too responsible a paper to just make things up. But not eye.

A recent article about me on a picket line outside the provincial PCs' one-year anniversary bash did not mark the first time I'd been trashed by eye. I've had to bear the Gen-X lashings of its tongue before, but it never put words in my mouth, and , to tell you the truth, I agreed with most of the criticisms. (I've certainly received an undue share of positive media attention for my nauseatingly politically correct activities.) Let's face it. I had a stupid show for seven years and that has now gi ven me a licence to raise my uneducated political voice on a lot of issues I know nothing about. I'm not dumb -- I'm not a genius. But I am sincere about the things I fight for. Almost as sincere as I am in my hatred for bad journalism and arrogant, simp le journalists.

Bird also wrote an article alluding to me, about the day in question, when I was a participant in a very small but vocal picket line outside Varsity Stadium, where Tories, who had finished up another satisfying day of ruining people's lives, were creamin g all over themselves at their success. Before Bird printed the article she tried to contact me through my agent to tell me what it said. It didn't say anything very nice, but it didn't lie. I didn't call her any names like "scum," or "asshole," as the < I>eye reporter would have it. I recited a really lame chant. "Hey Mike, Hey Mike, How many kids will you starve tonight?" (I know, I know, we're working on it.) But that's exactly what appeared in the paper. Nothing more, nothing less. She printed wh at I said.

Later in the evening, as I stood with my friends on the picket line -- union activists, welfare recipients -- a rather creepy-looking guy with bad hair came out of the Tory-filled stadium to approach me and ask if I was Sarah Polley. "Yes," I replied ver y straightly (not embarrassed, as was later reported). "Is this an NDP event?" he asked. "No," I said, "there are only a few NDP people here." Then, in an extremely condescending tone he said, "Are they your friends?"

"Yeah," I said, a bit defensive. "Are those scumbags your friends?"

His face then lit up with a cockiness I haven't seen since OPP officers blew kisses at bloodied demonstrators earlier this year. "No," he said. "But I have your name and I have your quote."

As you can imagine, or maybe you can't, I wasn't shaking in my combat boots. But I didn't know that he was referring to imaginary quotes. If he had said, "No, but I have your name and I have your imaginary quote," I might have reacted differently. But I went about my life quite normally, until my brother phoned me and asked me if I'd rethink screaming "asshole" and "scumbag" at reporters. Maybe this reporter was a prophet. After reading the article which described the picket line as an NDP-organized eve nt, and my activism as a new acting career, those are the exact words that went through my mind.

He muses that perhaps I lost my sweet virginal self on a sound stage somewhere. No. I lost it in the real world. I lost it in a riot at Queen's Park. I lost it in a world of bad journalism.

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