AGO elevation

The prompting that turned a sauntering Saturday stroll into what became a somewhat scary adventure at the Art Gallery of Ontario may have been the promotional AGO pamphlet that fell out of one of our newspapers.

At the same time, I became hesitant because of previous newspaper reports of mob AGO queue scenes caused by freebee admission to the newly reopened art gallery following its protracted, multi-bucks renovation designed by L.A. architect Frank Gehry, the long-ago Torontonian and graduate of the not-far-from-the-AGO Harbord Collegiate Institute.

But as I trudged toward the Dundas Street site, there appeared no mobscenes outside the newly glass-walled building and its frontal “Frank Café” and gift shop. Tickets are back to $10 to $18, depending on your age.

In I go to AGO. With my longstanding membership card, entrance was free and I was able likewise to freely fulfill the compulsion to check my overcoat (nonmembers pay a couple of bucks per coat and backpack or shopping bag).

After a bit of roaming around ground-level nooks-and-crannies galleries, a poster persuades me to view a fifth-floor display. Asked one of the security chaps and he takes me personally to a relevant elevator, ushering me aboard along with two young couples--one visitors from Lansing, Michigan, the other Toronto students.

At 4:25 p.m., somebody punches a button and up we go. We stop at Floor 3. Multibutton play fails to open the elevator doors nor move us up to our destination or back down to ground.

There's a phone button that passenger Ian pushes. A lady at the other end of the phone says that downstairsers will get “a technician” to straighten things out.

It turns out the technician to be summoned is somewhere far from the AGO.

And, as we are told later, it takes them half an hour to get to the AGO--"but this being Saturday. . . . "

We five stucked-ones try to be cool and amuse ourselves. The elevator walls are shiny and chromey--Mirrorous, so I suggest we may pretend to enjoy it as a gallery of self-portraits.

I try to force the elevator doors farther than the three-or-four inches managed. My little key-chain jackknife is spurned by a keyhole for emergency fire controls.

If only glasswaller Gehry had called for glass elevators, I suggest, we could smash our way to freedom.

But as time goes by and the place gets stuffy and nothing is audibly happening--my four co-captives are squatted on the floor--it all gets a trifle troubling. The AGO is supposed to shut down around 5 or 5:30. . . .

Passenger Nicole loans me her cellphone and I call my wife Joan to explain that I may be late getting home with dinner groceries she'd requested because I'm stuck in an elevator.

Shortening all this gabble, we were finally freed at 5:45ish p.m., security men marking our elevated stay of an hour and a quarter by donating one free ticket for a future visit.

Yeh, right. We’ll be back soon to view the fifth-floor gallery show. Waytogo AGO!

--cm 10pm 29-11-08