Catherine Dunphy Obituary Writer
The first film Lindalee Tracey made was very personal, extremely powerful and damned good. Her quest to find her father, Abby, who left his family when she was an infant for a life as a rubbie on the mean streets of Ottawa, was nominated for a Genie, in no small part because of the brave filmmaking of its final scene. "I came close so many times to following you into the abyss," she narrated in Abby, I Hardly Knew Ya (1995) as she kneeled by the grave of a man reduced to spiking his morning OJ with shaving lotion by the time he died at 36 — her age then, in '93. "I have a son, " she said, tears slipping down the curves of her open, suddenly vulnerable face as she tenderly offered up a photo of a beautiful, hopeful young boy as if there were someone there that day to receive it. Then — rage and a howl, from the heart, from the gut. "You don't deserve pity," she snarled at the headstone. "You make me very mad, Al — bert." "Nobody can watch that scene and not leave a changed person," said her friend Bernie Farber, head of the Canadian Jewish Congress. They met when the writer/producer/director was filming Hearts of Hate, a documentary about the Canadian white supremacist movement."I have worked with many documentarians, and many operated literally behind the camera," Farber said. "Lindalee operated in front of the camera. She got into the subject, she explored, she pushed, she pulled, and she was so natural it was as if you were speaking to your favourite person. You wanted to talk to Lindalee Tracey. She absorbed everything and she had those eyes that just consumed you."Being interviewed by her was like running a marathon, Farber said. "You let everything out."But then again, so did she."There was never anything guarded about Lindalee," said Peter Raymont, her husband and partner in White Pine Pictures. Together they made scores of award-winning documentaries, videos and television series, all with a social justice bent, including the 26-part documentary television series A Scattering of Seeds, for which Tracey also wrote the book and a website, and Shake Hands with The Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire. The Border, a television pilot that sprang from their 2002 film The Undefended Border, wrapped a few days after Tracey died Oct.19, at 49, of breast cancer. Typical was her last interview, given to POV (Point of View) magazine. It appeared in late September, just as she was entering hospital. "She was so candid in it, talking about being upset by wrongs in the past," said Raymont. "But that's who she was. F--- it, she'd say. Tell the truth. Don't be careful."Her truth was, she had once been a stripper — and had loved it. Her single mother had supported Tracey and her brother on a government clerk's pay.
` Nobody can watch that scene and not leave a changed person 'Bernie Farber, Canadian Jewish Congress
"She was poor so her children wouldn't have to be," Tracey wrote in the introduction to her book about Canada's poor, On The Edge. "Four small rooms above a diner on Clyde Avenue, a gash of gravel on a hump of clanking industry. People were supposed to work here, not live or raise families." By 16, she had left home and was stripping as Fonda Peters in Montreal. "I pull my bra off quickly, almost imperceptibly, sneaking into my nakedness. It is almost beside the point. The audience begins to blur now as I go furiously into myself, feeling every tendon stretch, every searing breath, and the air on my wet skin," she wrote in her 1997 memoir Growing Up Naked. "Her routines were almost slapstick," said her friend Lynn Cunningham. "She would go out with a pair of scissors and cut off a guy's tie." She was runner-up for Miss Nude Canada and the impetus behind Tits for Tots, reportedly a wildly successful stripping fundraiser for the Montreal Children's Hospital.She was featured in Bonnie Sherr Klein's National Film Board documentary Not A Love Story: A Film About Pornography and remained furious about what she perceived to be the film's exploitation of her colleagues and their profession. "I saw (stripping) change from this wonderful carnival to a source of awfulness and exploitation," she told POV.Nevertheless, she went to work in media, as a host on a Montreal television show, later moving to host and co-produce a Montreal radio program. She came to Toronto to work on As It Happens. A habitual multitasker, she began trolling Toronto magazine editors seeking assignments. That's how she met Cunningham, then with Toronto Life. "We hit it off almost immediately. She was really engaging, with a wicked sense of humour, and never shied away from being a trifle outrageous." Cunningham edited Tracey's first story for Toronto Life about migrant workers. Uncounted Canadians won just about every major journalism award in 1991."Lindalee was hanging out under bridges in Buffalo and getting to know the illegal community in Toronto," said Raymont. It was the beginning of their shared preoccupation with what he calls "the real people." She was always stopping and chatting with homeless people — sitting right down on the curb and asking them about their lives. Every Christmas Eve she made up care packages — cookies, cash, a card saying she cared — wrapped them in a kerchief, tied them with string and took son Liam in the car to dole them out. "We'd do it every Christmas and Liam would be embarrassed, but in the end he was extremely proud of her," Raymont said.Tracey was treated for breast cancer in 2001. She made three more films — Burlesque (through Magnolia Movies, a company she established for herself), Bhopal: The Search for Justice and a film about Women's College Hospital — before the cancer came back in the fall of 2003.She tried many alternative therapies, including one at a Tijuana clinic, before she was prescribed Herceptin, a new cancer fighter. "She had this amazing comeback," said Cunningham. Her pain was gone and, triumphant, she and MP Carolyn Bennett lobbied Health Minister George Smitherman to make the drug available under OHIP. (He did.) "She felt wonderful; she thought: `I'm clear. I'm going to live as long as anybody else,'" Raymont said. "Then the headaches started." By September she was in Princess Margaret's palliative care unit. Her room became a place of music and hope as Raymont and friends brought their guitars to her bedside. "Delta Dawn." "City of New Orleans." The night before she died, after everyone had gone, Raymont told her he'd seen that day's rushes of The Border, their pilot. Raymont told her they looked great, that the show was going to be a success. And she smiled. That was her last communication. "She's such a powerful life force, and part of me thought she will survive somehow." "I think many of us will be talking of her in the present tense for a long time," Farber said. Raymont will be in South America next month, starting a new documentary about Chilean writer/activist Ariel Dorfman. "To honour her," he said.
