Mary Margaret O'Hara, Where are Ya?

Slowhopes can be expressed in a variety of forms:

Books (What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver)

Movies (Atlantic City, Sideways, The Visitor)

Television Show (The Rockford Files, Hill St. Blues, The Sopranos)

Band (Los Lobos)

Singer/Songwriter (John Hiatt, John Prine)

and girl singer: that would have to be Mary Margaret O’Hara.

You may never have heard of her, except for the fact she’s the sister of SCTV alumnus Catherine O’Hara.

MMO is a kind of cross between early Ricki Lee Jones and some great jazz diva. She moves like a toy running out of batteries, sings like a religious movement, and all at a tempo that perhaps can best be described as alt.Canadian.

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/walkoffame/ohara.html

She was a Toronto art student in the 70’s. Slowhopes first saw her at the Winnipeg Folk Festival, in the mid-1980’s, in a field, in a driving rain, hopped up on (for the first time) magic mushrooms and scotch (easier to sneak in than beer). She was part of a band (we think) called something like the Cuban Fence Porch Climbers, although that was 20-odd years ago and it was, ahem, raining that night.

We remembered, in the fog of our hallucination, and the mood of our whiskey, thinking the gal singing lead for the band was an absoute genius of tempo and tone–but it coulda been the ’shrooms, right?

In the winter of ‘87, we found ourselves in Parkdale, on the way west end of Queen Street in Toronto, at some venue of some sort, quite a bit more clear-headed. MMO had left the band by then, and sang solo, and we were there, waiting to discover it had just been the drugs.

It wasn’t. MMO was the real deal.

And shortly thereafter, she released her solo LP, Miss America, on Virgin Records. Slowhopes loved that record, and spent many a Vancouver rainy night at Birch and 10th Street, holed up in the Shaugnessey Apartments listening to it, predicting all manner of greatness for MMO–but instead, it turned out to be the only real album she ever made.

Despite that fact, MMO continues to be a bit of an urban legend,and Slowhopes really really wishes she’d just make another record.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVFzpE-HQ8w