good idea Beer, a wealth of info... Today I dug out my copy of Ronald Lee's book, from a box in the attic... so colourful, then again so was that era in Mtl... here's a brief excerpt for any Swiss Hut vets...

"We got in the car and drove over to the Swiss Hut. We drank beer, Marie wine. Kolia, normally a sober character, liked to have his periodic drinking bouts and Jilko, like most Hungarian Gypsies, liked his shasto or mulatni. By nine o'clock a large group had assembled around the semi-circular table on the 'beat' side and Jilko's fiddle, along with somebody's mouth organ, provided us with musical accompaniment for the old French Canadian folk songs like "C'est l'Aviron"

Then Jilko played Gypsy music while I got up and danced while the assembled painters, sculptors, writers yelled their shouts of encouragement. ... Marie started dancing on top of the table. Her high heel shoes made a staccato on the table top, spilling glasses and crushing the packages of cigarettes. The crowd clapped their hands and her skirt twirled , rose and showed us the stiletto on her thigh..

'Christ' I thought happily. 'What savages we are' I realized suddenly, that we were outlaws, not because we were not Canadians, but because we were. Here were people of all origins, almost all of them born in Canada, barring the odd immigrant, enjoying themselves in an old frontier style get-together within the sight of the skyscrapers and the synthetic entertainment of commercialized culture."



.....'Yes, Canada might bask in its Anglo-Canadian myth, Toronto the good, Ottawa the bureaucratic, Vancouver the isolated, and Halifax the deprived. They were all English speaking cities. But here was Le Vieux Montreal, a wayward child of confederation. She could act like a passionate French whore or a militant fishwife ready to lead the mobs to the barricades of revoluton.'   

from Goddam Gypsy circa 'late sixties'