Yes. That is me after winning a musical theatre award for some number called “Vaudeville.” I was about eleven here.

This year of our antichrist, 2024–one of the most challenging but transformative epochs to date–marks the 45th anniversary of Coquitlam Centre.  What’s that, you may ask with soaring ignorance?  Why, it’s exactly what it sounds like: it’s the centre of Coquitlam.   And today marks its 45th birthday.

Specifically, it’s the timeless mall that stands smack-dab in the middle of the township, anchoring the entire place and serving as the axis around which everything and everyone revolves.  It’s been there since, well, since August 15th, 1979, when there was virtually nothing much happening in Coquitlam except a Chrysler / Dodge dealership (which, after decades of reliability, is soon to be razed to make way for yet more intimidating high-rise apartment buildings, the likes of which have popped up around Skytrain stations everywhere) and some kind of motel, or trailer park (research shows that it was indeed a trailer park).  It was muddy, ungentrified flatland, and the mall shared it with almost nobody else.  

There’s the mall circa 1979, with very little else going on. (Photo credit: City of Coquitlam archives)

I barely remember its early days.  My family moved to Coquitlam in 1981 once our house was built, and young families were setting up shop there since it seemed a safe place to raise kids. Also, having your pick of real estate there must have been like getting it for free; I’m sure my folks paid a scant five figures for their own property back then, and I refuse to consider what it’s worth now. 

I don’t need to spend too much time explaining how Coquitlam is now an affluent, developed, densely-populated official city crammed with enormous SUVs, splendid homes, shopping plazas n’ centres n’ malls n’ strips, an RCMP with zero tolerance for rampant crime and drug use, and a legitimately lovely lake area that hosts one of the most popular Christmas-light festivals in the Lower Mainland.  Unlike Vancouver, where you actually have to pay to shop at the Christmas market, this Coquitlam event is entirely free of charge, and is a community delight.   

The city has changed drastically, indescribably, since I grew up there.  At the time, there wasn’t even a junior high school, or even a senior high school–never mind a middle school, since such a concept did not exist when I was a teenager–so we all had to schlep over to neighbouring Port Moody, the vintage little town next door.  There was no real public transit service running through my part of Coquitlam, save for the dreaded 160 bus that made its very long, slow, meandering way to downtown Vancouver via the seaside Barnet Highway, and creaking down the endless east-west entirety of historical Hastings Street.  It took just over an hour to get from my hometown to the heart of Terminal City, and by the time I was a teenager and began experimenting with LSD, we still had nothing moving us out of Coquitlam except that one bus.  Therefore, you could pop your tab of acid at the start of your journey at the mall, and by the time you hit Granville Street, the bus was somehow made of liquid mercury, the other passengers surely resembled inbred platypi, and your friends’ pupils were pitch-black and the size of hubcaps.  

Ah, yes, dropping acid on the old 160 route headed downtown: nothing will ever spell “I need to get the aitch-ee-double-hockey-sticks out of Coquitlam” more than those questionable adventures we had as grumpy kids who truly believed that promise and adventure lay just past Boundary Road in Burnaby.

It was a small town, you see, but it is no longer such a quaint, unknown little dimple lying among the coastal mountain range.  Whereas once I wanted nothing more than to escape its boring confines and live in Vancouver, now the reverse is true: Coquitlam is a coveted, terrific place to have a decent quality of life, whereas Vancouver is…oh, don’t even get me started.  Do not even get me started.  

The one mainstay in my hometown, the feature that has remained in place and miraculously not been torn down for even more high-rises, is Coquitlam Centre.  Its fabulously late-70s interior (tropical plants, sunken food court constructed by bricklayers, genuine wood-paneled walls) underwent sad, massive renovations several years ago, so it now looks as generic and painful as the ghastly pile of shit known as Metrotown, but its excellent brown facade is still intact.  The mall is still as popular and busy as it ever was when I grew up in Coquitlam during the 80s when it was the main hangout and place to shop, as all malls were during that decade.

Coquitlam Centre’s original food court. Many cigarettes were smoked here, complete with disposable aluminum ashtrays. (Photo credit: City of Coquitlam archives)

I’m so glad.  Once, at an Austrian beer garden, I grabbed an informational pamphlet that quoted some monk who proclaimed: Hops and barley, may God preserve them!  Apart from the beer-making ingredients, that’s how I feel about Coquitlam Centre and its patrons.

In fact, this is me at that Austrian beer garden circa 1998, with my Scottish pal Colin from the hostel.  Oh, just stop it: we all smoked back then.  And I smoked way more at the mall when I was a steamy teen.

Since today is the mall’s official fortieth birthday (today, tomorrow…who cares anymore when you hit forty?), I could spend an entire blog post writing about my various memories of the place, but that would take forever, and nobody on earth would care except me.  I suppose that’s the point of having a blog–I write about whatever I want–but I actually don’t want to do that.  My Coquitlam Centre memories are likely shared by many other people who spent a great deal of their 80s childhood in such a place.  Y’know, things like:

-Going trick-or-treating there one year, which I didn’t even know was a thing you could do, and Sam The Record Man was distributing 45s of Michael Jackson’s B-side single “P.Y.T.” as their Halloween goodie;

-Shoplifting Bic lighters from the counter at Woodward’s Food Floor;

-Buying fingerless lace gloves and rubber bracelets from Boppers, an offshoot of the clothing store Mariposa, because all of us young gals wanted to emulate Madonna’s “Like A Virgin” look;

-Devouring malts from Malt Stop, and goddamn if I cannot find a frozen chocolate malted anywhere now;

-Wandering into Wendy’s Emporium and not understanding why some of the playing cards had depictions of penises all over them;

-Being very proud of the Christmas gift I purchased for my father from Den For Men, which was a brandy glass with his initial “G” etched into it.  My mother put it into the dishwasher one day, destroying it completely, and Dad was genuinely upset by this;

-Working at Zellers for a few months as a floor clerk in the housewares and notions departments, and I still have no idea why sewing and crafts were referred to as “notions.”  The girl who trained me had a severe lisp, a hip coworker of mine turned me onto several alternative bands, and to this day, every single Canadian misses Zellers.  

…but my biggest memory of my legendary, beloved Coquitlam Centre has to be the contest that I took part in, and which I very nearly won.  To be specific, it was a contest in which all I had to do was tap dance, perform mightily, and compete against many other local tap dancers; if I won, I would receive some prize money and be flown to NYC for the final North American competition to do a third-time-step and kick-ball-change against all the winners of their own citywide contests.

I didn’t win, but I came very close.  And that’s why I’m sweltering in a small Vancouver one-bedroom apartment, thinking I’m going to do Great Things someday, instead of choreographing Broadway productions whilst married to an Upper East Side venture capitalist.  

*   *   *   *   *

I was just thirteen years old, and I do mean “just.”  My birthday is towards the end of December, and this contest was held in January of 1989.  I was a good girl, in eighth grade and completely oblivious to the woes, ills, and agonies of the real world; spending nearly all of my extracurricular time as a dancer completely tuned me out and left me uninterested in what adolescence might hold in its sweaty, hairy paw.  I had been immersed in the world of dance for years by this point, taking ballet, jazz (there’s nuthin’ like 80s jazz moves), musical theatre, and tap lessons in all of my spare time.  I would take the bus by myself from my elementary or junior high school to Kirkwood Dance Academy way out in New Westminster, and the only social group I knew or cared about was my fellow terpsichorean wunderkinds.  

I wasn’t excited about or terribly interested in ballet, as I wasn’t thin, delicate, or graceful enough for the art.  Despite my body perpetually wanting to look like a Russian peasant, I tried my best, but my instructor would always say my arm movements were “schmaltzy.”  I would overdo it with the flowy motions, and it never worked out.

I did well in jazz.  Who on earth wouldn’t do well in jazz classes during the 80s?  Flashing your palms, push-turning, rib isolations, hip swivels, and feisty grapevines, all executed to Natalie Cole’s “Jumpstart My Heart” or Pseudo Echo’s version of “Funky Town”?  While wearing a sequinned headband and fuschia spandex?  I’d sign up today!  

Musical theatre wasn’t something I did a lot of, but when I did, I think I excelled.  Twirling a cane while high-kicking and singing “City Lights,” which, in fact, I did quite a few times?  Just you try to stop me from stealing the show from my fellow dancers as we chewed up the stage.  If my teacher gave me a few lines to belt out solo from any group number, I would take it as confirmation that I was the real star, as any performing-arts kid would.

Tap, however, was something that came instantly and naturally to me.  Nobody expected this, least of all me.  Within one year of starting lessons at the age of 10, I was suddenly winning local awards against other little girls who had been tap-dancing since they were tiny. Most children stayed in their black, flat tap shoes until they hit a particular age, but my stunned tap instructor had me in beige heels almost immediately.  Every move, every sound, every routine seemed to make complete sense to me, and as a solidly-built young thing (no, I wasn’t even close to fat, I just wasn’t a ballerina) with a large personality, stomping and creating rhythms and following beats and generating catchy noises with my clickety-clack shoes was the best feeling in the world.  Whatever you might attribute it to, I had it in my system; it’s the same force that took over once I sat behind a drumkit many years later and became a crude version of Keith Moon within mere months.

So when my dance school informed me that there would be a massive tap-dancing competition coming up, I was more than game.  In fact, I was completely certain that I would win the whole thing, as my underaged ego had inflated over the past three years thanks to kicking pretty much everyone else’s ass in my age category in various Tri-City festivals and cheerful battles.    

This particular contest was to promote the new Gregory Hines movie called “Tap.”   Now, that scene I just linked to gives me goosebumps in a way that the whole movie didn’t do when I first saw it.  You couldn’t make a film like that nowadays.  What would be the modern equivalent?  I don’t want to give my thoughts, because someone’s going to call me racist (or, as one of my former Anthropology teachers referred to it, “racialist”), but suffice to say that this is a lost art among a gifted populace that has also been responsible for rock & roll: one of my favourite things in the whole world.  

Bring back tap.  Show everyone how it’s done.  Motivate young people to put on some tap shoes and create unspeakably dazzling symphonies with their feet and bodies.  For Christ’s sake, show everyone how to do everything–the world’s citizens are utterly lost, maniacally giving a girl from a rich family as much money as they can for showboating mediocrity!  

ANYWAY…this was to be an event to be held at the venerable Coquitlam Centre, the hub for all aspiring tappers in the Coquitlam and surrounding areas (and, despite my hometown still being relatively small back then, there were an insane number of dance schools crammed into every available square foot).  The idea was that preliminary contests would take place over a three-day span, with approximately thirty or so dancers competing on those days.  These preliminaries were held in the evening, since every competitor was still a kid and had school to attend.  

The chosen tappers from these three days–of which there would be around six or seven–would go onto the finals on Saturday afternoon and battle it out with each other.  The winner, as I mentioned somewhere above, would receive some money and the opportunity to be flown to NYC to win the ultimate “Tap”-based prize, details of which escape me.  Perhaps a chance to hit the premiere?  Meet Gregory Hines?  Get a role in some musical?  All I know is that this would be a life-changer for the person who won, and all of us were thirsty for victory.

After my designated evening of tap-offs, I easily went on to the Saturday finals.  Oh, and for those of you wondering what sort of dance routine was helping me tappity-tap my way to immortality, I was giving it my all for the instrumental version of “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.”  My mother, who was astonishingly adroit with a sewing machine and had made all of my costumes over the years, fashioned some kind of blue-and-gold leotard with epaulets and a 1940s-era hat, all at the instruction of my tap teacher. 

I can’t believe I have a picture of this, and I really can’t believe I’m going to show it to you, but here we go.  Little Nadya knew her poses and her plastered stage smile in a way nobody should:

Don’t you dare say I give you nothing.  I give you everything, including humiliating photos of my flat-chested, newly-pubescent self.  

…boy, am I tired of writing today.  I had to churn out a couple of articles, write endless emails, then tackle this piece of my own volition.  Also, someone is hauling on a joint beneath my window, and contact high is a real thing.  I think I’m going to wrap it up here for now, because I just don’t have the mental wherewithal to keep going right now.  I will finish this story, though, because walking myself through it has actually been fairly enjoyable, if not sobering, because I now really understand how old I am.  Oh well.  At least I have sexy legs.   

All of this is, however, just a love letter to Coquitlam Centre.  Happy birthday, you sensational middle-aged hipster.  The hours, days, and years of complete happiness you have given me and subsequent generations are unmatched.  

Until next time, when you enthusiastically get to read about a thirteen-year old girl’s tap-dancing competition at a suburban mall–

Nadya Vera.