There were, however, numerous colourful characters employed by Cybervoice. Not all of them were necessarily appealing (one that springs to mind is a lady who would wriggle in her chair like an epileptic marlin as she gasped dirty nothings into her headset, prompting many of us to complain to the supervisor, who had the unsavory task of asking the lady to "calm it down for the sake of the others"), but a few were rather interesting. If we ladies were the hos, the switchboard operators were the pimps, and the two biggest pimps in the place were Julian, who seemed to be an impressive connoisseur of music, and Pussyarse, a fellow with an early Beatles haircut and a caustic commentary on absolutely everything… including the women who worked at Cybervoice.

One fine evening - most likely during a weed-fueled coffee break - Julian revealed to me that his band, the wonderfully-named July Fourth Toilet, was going to be performing up at CITR for a show called Radio Thunderbird Hell. Something like that, anyway.

"We're doing this musical called Teen," he told me.

"Teen?!" I exclaimed. "I know Teen!" And did I ever know Teen. My senior high school had actually staged a production of this overlooked masterpiece, replete with earnest dramatizations, multicolored costumes, and "Up With People" choreography. Having been forced to watch it at school a few years prior by a lazy English teacher who had no lesson plan prepared, many of the musical's infuriating hooks were still trapped in my head, and I think I even started singing a few of them to Julian to prove my comprehension of its existence. Perhaps impressed by my knowledge of this obscure opus, he asked if I wanted to participate.

But of course. I had spent many, many years on stage as a child singing myself hoarse and dancing my toes off for the sake of an audience. If I could engage in some sort of performance that didn't involve describing my labia majora to a lascivious Yankee, I was more than a willing participant. Of course, since it was a radio show, clearly there would be no opportunities for me to show off my five years of prepubescent (pre-)Teen(?) dance training, but I would get to sing, and I would get to act, and both of those things appealed to my show-pony nature. Now, whom I would be singing and acting with, I wasn't sure, but I would soon find out.

We had two practices scheduled before the show. Two. Maybe there were more, but I only attended two. It became apparent to me that Perfectionism and Regimentation were two concepts that did not have any place in the J4T performance ethic, which of course, suited me just fine. It seemed that the freer and more spontaneous the delivery, the more entertaining things were bound to be, so long as the entire piece was held together through sheer exuberance and personality which each person in the band appeared to have by the bucketful.

There was Julian, of course, who was like the impossibly-conceived love child of Bob Dylan and John Lennon if reared by the Monkees. There was his roommate Robert, an enthusiastic, outgoing guy in polyester who always seemed to be raving about some new vinyl he had scouted out. There was this lady Jay McLaughlin, who had her own brand of sartorial splendour and made every word she uttered / barked sound as if it was of the utmost importance. There was the aforementioned Pussyarse, who sounded like James Spader, except much more odious. There were a few other people named Kim, jody, Andre and Mark who seemed to balance out the intensity of the other four.

I met most of them at our first practice, and any nervousness I may have had - though I didn't really have any, being dosed up on various chemicals at the time - dissipated upon our initial meeting. They all seemed entirely comfortable enough with themselves to accept me into their fray, despite my being a) significantly younger than them, b) prone to smoking cigarettes moodily in order to gain attention, and c) in the process of weaning myself off my Bauhaus-and-black-hair phase. They were all kind, friendly, and down to earth, and seemed to legitimately enjoy each other's company.

Let's talk shop: the tale of Teen consists of six squeaky-clean kids on the cusp of pubescence, mostly preparing for the "big dance", all the while navigating the shoals and pitfalls of their burgeoning hormones and budding bodies. Parents! Weekends! Getting rides! Tying up the phone line! Developing romantic feelings for acquaintances with whom they once had safe and harmless platonic relationships (as told in the heart-cockle-warming "When A Friendship Turns To Love")! I was given the role of Mary, and I inexplicably decided to give Mary the most atrocious British accent ever attempted by anyone, anywhere, at any time. This was doubtlessly because, while verbally performing a reverse-cowgirl upon many callers at work, I would take on phony accents out of stoned boredom, and this practice had become almost second nature to me.

There were some extraordinary numbers, which we all learned cheerfully and haphazardly: the opening and closing titular anthem. The angst-plagued "Saturday Blue." The coming-of-age canticle "Becoming Thirteen." The sprightly group effort "On The Telephone." Then there was "It's Alright To Cry," which happened to be Mary's (a.k.a. my) solo, and which I had no choice but to sing. During our first rehearsal, I infused it with the pathos and ennui that only an authentic teenager like myself could. I reached into my sternum and dredged up all the pent-up emotions stored there, and forced myself to confront them through a raw vocal delivery. I invoked all available and willing deities to grant me the spiritual wherewithal to rip myself open and expose my true being for all to hear, judgment be damned.

Actually, I was stoned and self-conscious and had no way of executing this song except to interpret it as a power ballad, and I sounded probably more like a glam-rock fool than I ever wanted to, and will ever want to again. I didn't want to come across as bashful or childish to this colourful troupe of merry-makers, so I just did what I could; everyone else was so gregarious, and so seemingly fearless, and I refused to be the asshole. Nobody wants to be the asshole. (Except, as I will explain in a moment, I actually became the asshole for about three minutes while en route to CITR).

We practiced two solid run-throughs of mind-blowing scripted lines ("I guess being a teenager means you have to learn things all by yourself"), Toilet-added ones ("Let go of my ears, I know what I'm doing!"), and numerous arias celebrating a human rite of passage that didn't resemble anything even remotely close to what you or I went through between the ages of twelve and twenty. Nonetheless, J4T packed up their guitars, noisemakers, hand drums, and samplers, and prepared to assault Vancouver's eardrums with their glorious trademarked cacophony. Considering the way Teen had been written / composed in its organic state, this truly was musical revisionism at its finest.

Jay, Julian, Robert, Pussyarse and I piled into my Honda and we drove up to UBC. And here is where I became an asshole of Olympus Mons-like proportions: I actually played Kate Bush at one point during the journey, and I didn't even have the decency of exposing anyone in the car to her weirder, more appealing stuff. Instead, it was the unrelenting, maudlin stream of treacle known as "This Woman's Work." At best, half of my passengers should have leapt from the car mid-journey, but they actually tolerated it, though I'm fairly certain I heard some uncomfortable shifting-around in the seats behind me. To this day, where I'm presently gritting my teeth and craving a cigarette just by revealing this information, I am grateful that the band did not strangle me; not because Kate Bush is necessarily bad, but rather because here was an artistic collective based on fun and absurdity, joyfully headed towards a lighthearted live performance on-air, and I was subjecting them to a British lady wailing about her lot in life atop minor-key piano chords. Do you see what adolescence, Zoloft, weed and talking dirty will do to your faculties?

Mea culpa, Toilet, thirteen years overdue.

We piled into CITR, got set up, and for some sort of warm-up, the group decided to sing "Band On The Run" (which, with some shame, I admit I did not know the lyrics to), as well as some other number called "Sniff Sniff Poo Pah Pah Doo," which I recently discovered is from the Toilets' beloved Rock Fantasy LP. Quite literally the minute everyone finished singing that song, Nardwuar the Human Serviette burst into the space wearing a hockey jersey and sneered, "okay, I don't know if you guys are going for a Dylan '65, or Beck '94 sound, but…." If I wasn't mistaken, this somewhat deflated everyone's mood, unless that was simply a creeper effect from my Kate Bush assault in the car.

I don't particularly recall any major blunders or obstacles during the performance, which mostly seemed like a blur. I do, however, recall Jay grabbing a couple slices of pizza after the show, and as she was ascending the staircase back up to CITR, a couple of jocks gaped at her, no doubt because of her characteristically flamboyant garb. She stared back at them and said "y'know, to me, YOU guys look pretty fucking weird," which seemed to validate everyone's entire purpose for being. At least in my mind, anyway.

I had asked my then-boyfriend to tape record our live performance, but since he was generally unable to do much more than stand around looking smolderingly hot, he couldn't find the correct station, and when I returned home, he had nothing but a cassette full of static to reward me with. Luckily, I was gifted with a proper recording a day or two later, and it provided me with hours of enjoyment. I was very proud of how it turned out.

Unfortunately, not long afterwards, Julian and Pussyarse got sacked from Cybervoice for reasons still unclear to me, though Julian's parting words to our boss - "you're an asshole. Do you even read? I bet you don't even read!" - should be etched onto brass plates and mounted above the desks of every manager of every company everywhere. I never really knew what became of the Toilet after that, save for a performance I caught at the Niagara later that year, where all I remember is Robert wearing what seemed to be a hooded sweatsuit and positively murdering Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction."

It almost seems shopworn to wrap up my reminiscences by talking about how my one-time stint with the Toilet was the perfect segue into East Van life after 19 years of suburban death; how my eyes were forced open by the experience because I was exposed to individuals who did whatever they loved to do no matter their age or economic situation; how my first real collaboration with a band gave way to a subsequent obsession with becoming a rock god…but all of those things would be true. Teen crossed the "t" in my final years as a teen, and ushered me into adulthood with a determination to never really grow up. Sure, I'm in my thirties now, I'm a teacher, I've traveled extensively, and I've had more than my fair share of heartbreak, but at my core, I'm still that anal-sex-describing little girl from the suburbs.