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AN EVENING WITH LEONARD COHEN
April 26, 2013 | Author Robert Landori
LEONARD COHEN In the Fall of 1955 Leonard and I were undergraduates at Montreal’s McGill University. I hated studying Accounting and Economics, but, out of shear hard-headedness, I stuck to the Double Honours programme I had chosen because, as far as I was concerned, failure at anything was not an option. So I had to be careful about what extra-curricular activities to participate in – my free time was very limited. I finally opted for working for the McGill Daily and Debating. It turned out I had a talent for overpowering people with the spoken word and this landed me a place on the McGill Intercollegiate Debating Team. The President of the Debating Society was none other than the great wordsmith and now famous poet-balladeer, Leonard Cohen, who had recently been elected to succeed another Cohen(Douglas – no relation) to that office. One night Leonard and I sallied forth on the Intercollegiate Debating Circuit on behalf of McGill University McGillto match wits with students at Marianapolis College, founded in 1908 by the Congregation of Sisters of Notre Dame as the first bilingual institution of higher learning for English-speaking Catholic women in Quebec. The debate’s topic was “Resolved that the world was a better place at the turn of the Century (1900) than today (1956).” Leonard turned up very formally dressed as always (in a dark grey suit and shirt and tie) and insisted on addressing me throughout the evening as Mr. Landori-Hoffmann. Halfway through the debate one of our opponents (they were defending the Resolution and we were opposing it) postulated that the reason why the world was in better shape “then” than “now” was because there were less condoms available in the world in 1900 than in 1956. This brought the house down and inspired Leonard and me to spectacularly humorous double entendus. Needless to say, we won handsomely. To compensate for our crass insensitivity we invited our worthy opponents for a drink at the bar of the old Berkeley HotelBerkeley Hotel, just down the hill from the College, where we stayed until closing time. Leonard and I walked home together and shared an umbrella (mine). When we reached his home on Belmont Avenue he folded the damned thing (very old, with a lovely green sheen) because it had stopped raining and walked away with it. I have seen neither Leonard nor the umbrella since.