Judith Lawrence

Years ago, when I started coming regularly to Hornby Island, I was five minutes into an afternoon tea at the former Shadbolt house when I asked the host and current co-owner, Scott Watson, if there was a TV on.

"There is no TV here," said Scott, adding another row of prawns to the BBQ.

"Well, I know this might sound odd," I said, "but I keep hearing the Mr. Dressup show."

Scott rolled his eyes. "That's Judith Lawrence. She was the voice of one of its puppets."

I returned inside and waited for the voice. When I heard it I peeked over the heads of those in front of me and saw that it was coming from a woman seated in the corner of the living room. Although it was unmistakably the voice of Casey, the woman looked more like Gertrude Stein than any freckle-faced papier-mâché puppet.

On Monday, while en route to he beach, I saw Judith poking at something in her garden. We chatted, and at the end of our conversation she asked if I was coming to hear author-spelunker Dale Chase speak at this Thursday's "Literary Lunch" at the New Horizons Society. I told her I had not planned on it, but now that she mentioned it...

After soup and sandwiches, Judith, who programs the series, started into her welcome. As she was nearing the end, Nym, who was seated beside me, waved to Judith, who, like Scott all those years ago, rolled her eyes and motioned for Nym to join her at the podium. In Nym's hand was a newspaper clipping from the February 13th Globe and Mail, which she read to us:

MOMENT IN TIME

Mr. Dressup premieres

Feb. 13, 1967: When Mr. Dressup launched in 1967, it established a new template for imaginative children's daytime programming. Ernie Coombs had already worked on series such as Butternut Square and MisteRogers (a precursor to Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, with Fred Rogers himself), but Mr. Dressup was Coombs's creation and he put heart and soul into the character. Lovingly simple in tone and execution, Mr. Dressup took viewers into a world of magical stories and non-threatening playtime with puppets Finnegan, a dog, and Casey – an ahead-of-their-time gender-neutral kid – who lived in his backyard treehouse. A dive into the Tickle Trunk, a big red steamer trunk packed with costumes, would inspire new games on screen and in the living rooms of children enthralled by Coombs's spell. The show's bouncy opening refrain is familiar to generations of Canadians – the series lasted for an astounding 29 seasons. It went off the air in 2006, 10 years after the last episode had been made and five years after Coombs's death. When CBC closed its Toronto museum in 2017, Mr. Dressup's easel and treehouse went into storage. Puppets Casey and Finnegan, however, are enjoying retirement in Hornby Island, B.C., with their creator Judith Lawrence.

After Nym's reading, Judith, who was only mildly flustered by our applause (and who, I was later told, improvised Casey's speaking parts), segued easily into her introduction of Dale, whom she first met in 1973 when he was "up a tree -- trimming branches."

As for Dale's talk, we were charmed by his stories and awed by his pictures, which his friend Sonya made available to us on an adjacent monitor. A highlight of the talk came when Dale told a story that had him "deep in a cave, straddling what is known in geological circles as an 'insistent dike,'" at which point a woman seated on the other side of Nym (one of the founders of Vancouver's Press Gang feminist printing collective) quipped: "There's more than a few of those in this room."