By Adrienne Connelly

As a kid growing up in a solidly atheist household (save the one time my dad tried to say grace before a rare family dinner) everything that I learned about the bible I learned from Leonard Cohen. There was a strange and slightly perverse solace that I took in going down to the recently renovated basement, stuffing some pillows into the bottom shelf of the storage cupboard, climbing inside with the lights off and listening to Songs of Leonard Cohen on one of those 1980’s beige and brown plastic fisher-price tape decks. The dark, the mildew smell, and that deep monotone growl singing to me about some night long ago in the Chelsea Hotel. I didn’t know what he was saying, but it was obvious to my 7 year old mind that it was beautiful and a little bit dirty.

I have sent two letters to Leonard Cohen. The first when I was eight. It was brief, it said, “Dear Leonard, my mom is in love with you.” My mother was a bit mad, she said that it wasn’t true. It wasn’t really. I didn’t send it by post, but instead gave it to a woman named Diana, who was from Montreal, and was going to visit an old friend who lived next door to Cohen’s Montreal address.

The second letter was when I was fifteen. It was an offer to Cohen to work a kissing booth at a fundraiser for a feminist health collective run out of my high school. It said “We believe that there is a goldmine of raw sexual tension between young self-righteous feminists and a dirty old mountain poet.”

It was sent c/o the Mount Baldy Zen centre in California.

Not long ago, I ran into Diana at a diner on St. Laurent. She confided that when she was younger she was tormented by the fact that everyone she knew had slept with Leonard Cohen at least once--everyone but her.

When I moved to Montréal, I found myself at the little park across from Cohen’s house, so I sat at the little gazebo and waited. After about an hour a Canada Post truck pulled up and a mail carrier rang the doorbell holding a package. Cohen didn’t answer the door, it was a woman in a crimson robe with a shaved head, and that was enough.

Adrienne Connelly is a video artist and production member for Stranger Theatre. She is currently doing a master's degree in Library Science