Casey Tourangeau

T-shirts, movies, podcasts, power chords, and muddled grapes.

This was meant to be a long essay about the creative process, but instead it’s going to be a short note about my friend, Casey Tourangeau, who passed away a couple weeks ago. He hated being the centre of attention, and would absolutely hate that I’m doing this, but there are a few important things that must be committed to the public record.

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He had the best T-shirts, which is how we first met. I’d started a new job, had only been there a few months, hadn’t yet figured out which clique (if any) I belonged to, when suddenly this new guy shows up to a meeting and I can’t stop glancing over at him because he’s wearing this grey T-shirt with a grid of coloured squares over the left breast. This clearly creeps him out, so, when the meeting ends, I have to say something.

I gesture to the shirt and ask him: “Grand Moff?”

He says: “Yeah.”

What a rare thing, to make a childhood friend when you’re no longer a child.

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He was the best person to go see a movie with. He knew how to behave in a movie theatre. He never talked, never shook his popcorn, never stirred his ice. As soon as he stepped inside, he was quiet, respectful. He treated it like church, which, of course, it is.

A few years ago, at the height of the pandemic, I wrote about my five favourite moviegoing experiences, and it’s no coincidence that I was sitting next to Casey for two of them.

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He was always right about movies. Sometimes you’d walk out of a movie thinking it had been pretty good, then you’d look over at Casey and see that look on his face. That’s when you knew for certain that the movie had actually sucked. You wouldn’t admit it, of course. Not at first. You’d debate him about it, sometimes for months, sometimes for years. But there always came a point—often in the middle of the night, laying in bed, staring at the ceiling—when you’d realize: goddammit, he’s right. Because, in the end, he was always was.

You can browse his Letterboxd account to see what I mean. You can also download a full checklist of the films he rated as 5-stars if you want to be as right about movies as he was.

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There was nothing better than when he loved a movie that you loved. He would make you love it more. You wouldn’t think you could, but he’d point out this little detail, or that little flourish, or share some obscure piece of behind-the-scenes trivia, or share a link to a pirated copy of the unreleased alternate version of the musical score, and your depthless feelings for it would somehow grow even deeper.

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He loved kids. Not in the ostentatious way so many people love kids—crouching down and talking baby-talk, giving them treats, talking constantly about how much they love kids. When he was around kids, he said hello, and paid attention to them, and smiled. He held out his finger so babies could grab it. He loved his own kid the most, which everyone knew, because he talked about his kid constantly.

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He turned me onto podcasts long before podcasts were a thing, and the podcast he first recommended to me was Filmspotting. Over the years, we got to know Adam Kempenaar and his various co-hosts, and when they’d end up in the National Capital Region, we’d meet up with them to drink beers and talk about movies. They offered a lovely tribute to Casey on the latest episode, which you can listen to here:

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He turned me onto heavy metal, which I would have thought was impossible, but the fact that someone who loved Cabaret and West Side Story could also love Metallica and Slayer made me take his recommendations seriously, and, sure enough, the album he suggested I start with is still the one I listen to when I’m thirsting for power chords and double-kick beats.

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He cared about doing things right. Not simply so that he could be right, but so that he could create the right outcome. He did this at work, sure, yeah—but more importantly he did this while cooking and making cocktails. He always followed the right processes, always used the right ingredients. He made his own pizza dough three days beforehand so it would be ready for Friday nights. His Manhattans were garnished with maraschino cherries shipped from Italy for fifty bucks a jar. If a recipe called for some obscure liqueur made by Carthusian monks in the mountains of Northern France, he’d somehow get his hands on it.

One of the cocktails he’d been making lately was the Enzoni, which you can find here.

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If you knew Casey, the person I’ve just described might seem unfamiliar to you. We share different parts of ourselves with different people, and the version of him I knew is probably different than the version you did. There is, in truth, no unifying theory of a person—who they really were, what they were really like—just a multitude of experiences, major and minor, observed from a particular angle by those lucky enough to have been there. We carry those observations around, they’re hidden within us, they’re all that’s left. And so, as the weeks/months/years pass, the important thing will be to keep telling stories, keep sharing memories, even if (maybe especially if) the person who is gone hated being the centre of attention.