Anyone who knows me knows I have a strange connection to perhaps this country’s most admired band, Rush. It stems from having attended the same high school (Newtonbrook in the Toronto suburb of Willowdale) as Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson (though they were a bit before my time); but it’s more than that.

My life – and travel life in particular – continues to be randomly dotted with an unusual array of six-degree separations, or just plain weird encounters. Band guitarist Lifeson lived on my street, my sister attended school with Geddy’s brother, and industry colleague Joel Kopstick of Uniglobe, who came across me in an old high school yearbook, has similar, even better, stories than me.

And my wife is friends with a cousin of drummer Neil Peart (who came from afar in St. Catharines).

Then there was the guy next door to my hotel room in Maui once who, upon learning where I was from, revealed that he used to be a roadie for the band. Or meeting the president of the Rush fan club, Central America chapter, at World Travel Market in London a few years back.

Similarly, a hotelier in the Britain’s Cotswolds, who I think was unaware that the band was even Canadian, once explained to me that his new eco-conscious hotel was based entirely on Peart’s lyrics.

(No one has ever mentioned Justin Bieber to me, I might observe).

I could go on, but suffice to say these strangely not-infrequent encounters usually begin with being asked, “Do you know the band Rush?” – an out-of-blue question I got just recently from an industry type in California who, it seemed to me, was too young to even know who the band Rush is.

But, as always, I simply smiled and replied: “You have no idea!”

Lyrics

Living on a lighted stage
Approaches the unreal
For those who think and feel
In touch with some reality
Beyond the gilded cage

Cast in this unlikely role,
Ill-equipped to act
With insufficient tact
One must put up barriers
To keep oneself intact

Living in the Limelight
The universal dream
For those who wish to seem
Those who wish to be
Must put aside the alienation
Get on with the fascination
The real relation
The underlying theme

Living in a fisheye lens
Caught in the camera eye
I have no heart to lie
I can’t pretend a stranger
Is a long-awaited friend

All the world’s indeed a stage
And we are merely players
Performers and portrayers
Each another’s audience
Outside the gilded cage

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