This segment got its start, back in May, with an e-mail Mark received from one Peter Morey of the CBC. When he first saw the unfamiliar name with the cbc.ca address in his inbox, Mark jumped to the conclusion that someone was finally contacting him about his nomination of the Haines Junction Muffin as one of Canada’s Seven Wonders. Alas, this was not the case.

Instead, Peter was an associate producer trolling for Yukon babysitters to compete for the title of Yukon’s Best Babysitter during a taping of the Saturday morning radio show Go! in early June. Somehow, he’d got wind of Mark’s recent conversion to stay-at-home Dad (or, as Go! put it, “manny”) to a then-eight-month old daughter. After interviewing Mark on the phone, Peter figured there was enough potential to relay Mark’s particulars to producer David Carroll.

After some delay, during which Mark began to wonder whether or not he would actually be called upon to embarrass himself in front of a national radio audience, David finally phoned and left a voice mail message.

Suffice to say, Mark had never met anyone who talked quite like David did. He had a breezy staccato style of talking that was reminiscent of a Hollywood or, in this case, Toronto hipster from the media scene. (No offense David, if you’re ever reading this!) To this day, Mark curses his partner for deleting that message; there, but for the grace of limited storage capacity, goes a great outtake for this page!

At this point, the wheels in Mark’s head started to spin; he tried to imagine what David and the show’s cast and crew, including host Brent Bambury, would make of our little town and territory—so many worlds removed from their happenin’ scene back East.

As he walked home from downtown on May 24, Mark was pondering the upcoming Whitehorse concert by the White Stripes and the conviction, among some locals, that this anomaly was surefire proof that the Yukon’s capital was hip-as-can-be. And that’s when it all came together. To Mark, it seemed that Whitehorse was having its little Sally Field moment: looking out at an oh-so hip and supposedly admiring world and saying “You like me! You really like me!” So this was a perfect occasion—and the Go! crew were the perfect people—to give Whitehorse a check-up on its presumed hipness.

As he hoofed it into Riverdale, Mark drafted the better part of an entire script outline, stopping at various points—including the skateboard park near Robert Campbell Bridge—to madly scribble down notes before the ideas and wording flitted away.

“Hip Check” was born.

The next day, Mark and David finally connected over the phone. When David confirmed that he wanted Mark to appear on the show, Mark immediately agreed—but on one condition. He explained to David, as he’d explained to Peter before, that he and Jesse have their own little segment for local CBC Radio and would love for them to participate in a future segment…. David agreed, quite enthusiastically, in fact.

“Hip Check” was now in motion.

True to David’s word, the whole crew, including Brent, made themselves available for an interview the day after the taping of Go! on June 1. Of course, we had to crash a barbecue at Dave King’s house to make it happen, but he and his wife were entirely polite about it. They even let us eat.

After watching the slick production of Go! at the Yukon Arts Centre, and Brent’s natural abilities as a host and interviewer, Mark felt like a true amateur as he put a series of questions to David, Brent, Peter and producer Kai Black in roundtable fashion. We got a lot of really funny material, some of which we couldn’t actually use in the piece. For example, the outtake “What Happens in Thailand…” stems from a question Mark asked about opium smoking which, according to Wikipedia (where Mark gets all his information), is thought by some, erroneously as it turns out, to have a connection to the origin of the word “hip.” (You can read about it here, if you’re interested.) Eventually, we hope to add another tangential outtake dealing with the semiotic implications of a merger between Go! and Q.

Whether these Go! hipsters actually thought Whitehorse was anything close to “hip,” at least as Yukoners would usually define the term, isn’t clear; what is clear is that none of these gracious Yukon guests was about to go on the record saying it wasn’t. As a result, we got some very unexpected and amusing answers. (There was something about blood in the urinals at the 98, which Brent can thank us for leaving out of the piece and the outtakes!) One thing we’d wanted to do, but didn’t have the time for, was to run our experts through a checklist of Whitehorse cultural features, having them indicate “Go” when something was hip and “no Go” when it wasn’t.

If Mark has learned anything from this experience—and he’s tried hard not to—it’s the need for some healthy skepticism about the opinions and tastes of city slickers, especially when they say such weird things. In the end, does it really matter what people from places that we Whitehorsians consider “hip” think about our city? Rubes can reside in the bosom of hipness (or quasi-hipness). And if you doubt it for a minute, consider that Tim McGraw’s and Faith Hill’s Soul2Soul tour required a second show at Vancouver’s GM Place. As far as we know, there’s no emoticon that can quite capture the body’s reaction to that information.

The rest of the “Hip Check” story was pretty easy to assemble over the summer. We wanted to make the Go! material the focus of the piece—and had a lot of good material—so we only needed a couple of clips from “hip” Whitehorse residents to round out the story. Mark is damn sure that he’s not hip, but the truth is, if Mark wanted to ask a local if Whitehorse is hip, he’d probably start with Jesse. He listens to obscure radio stations in New Zealand. He reads magazines that cost a lot of money. He’s been known to attend parties in a leopard-skin pillbox hat with carry-on luggage packed with martini-fixins. And on top of all this, Definitely Not the Opera once described him as the 2nd coolest guy in the Yukon.

However, the piece seemed to work better if Jesse came off just as uncool as Mark, so we picked on local architect / condo developer / martini bar co-owner / café co-owner Tony Zedda to fill the role of our local hipster. (He’d probably seem even hipper if we just called him Slash…) At the time of the interview—done at a little table outside the Main Street Backerei—Mark had no inkling that Tony’s rhetorical question “What is ‘hip,’ anyway, Mark?” (or something to that effect) would be turned so ruthlessly against him for the set-up of the next joke, which was none other than… Mark’s mom.

Thanks for being a sport, Jan. Everyone knows you deserve a better son than some Tom Green wannabe willing to exploit you for a cheap laugh. But then again… you roll the dice, you pay the price.

(Posted October 03, 2007)