Nov. 21/08: Oh brother! It's Jonathan Torrens from the Trailer Park Boys!

Hi DNTOers! It’s Jonathan Torrens and I’m in the guest host hot seat for the next few weeks. First a quick thanks to Marcy Markusa – the last guest host - for so gently handing off the baton, though she did set the bar pretty high with her excellence in hostery…I have some big Winnipeg winter boots to fill.

Next…Sook-Yin! Whoa! I always knew she was really good at what she does but now that I know exactly what she does, I have a whole new appreciation for her. She’s a truly unique voice (and it’s hard to be anything truly unique nowadays). Sook-Yin – thanks for having me.

So this week’s show is about siblings and why they have such a…hold over us. I’m the youngest of 5 and I’ve spent the week marinating in my own sibling relationships with a hearty nostalgia and a side salad of wistfulness (hold the melancholy).

There were a number of highlights this week…playing tunes by talking Matt Barber (Jill’s brother) and sisters Casey and Jenny from the group Ohbijou…I got to play a great tune by my cousin Luke Doucet…and Our House, by 80’s one-hit wonders Madness which will forever remind me of uh, our house in Sherwood, PEI.

Plus, Jackie Torrens (my sis) tells an hilarious and heartwarming story about the first time we met.

But it was talking to hockey greats Phil and Tony Esposito that provided the biggest highlight. Not because I was talking to them - though that was cool in itself - but because listening to their weary back-and-forthery over a mundane detail of whether so-and-so was going to such-and-such a game tomorrow night, gave so much insight into the real nature of the sibling relationship.

Phil was on the line from Florida, Tony was in Chicago. Through what sounded like irritation, you could hear in their voices more than 60 years of tolerance, patience and understanding. It was cute, in a surly macho athlete kinda way.

See you next week, when the topic is Breaking Points (which could I suppose be called Siblings the Sequel – after all it’s often our siblings who push us to limits that no one else could).