"The only people for me are the mad
ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of
everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace
thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like
spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and
everybody goes 'Awww!'"
– Jack Kerouac
I don’t know if it’s proper Facebook etiquette
or not, but I just had to borrow the Jack Kerouac quote from Phoebe Phoenix’s
site for this story. Why? Because, in my opinion, nothing I could write better
describes this transplanted Aussie than this one-sentence paragraph written by
the King of the Beats…
Ever been to a Fire & Ice Show in the
Whistler towncentre? Ever watched, mesmerized, as the fire dancers twirl and
twist and jump and play with burning apparatuses only inches from their bodies?
Courting disaster, stepping off the edge, pushing the boundaries of the possible
with every move they make? If you have, then you’ve seen Phoebe.
“We killed it this year,” she says, enthusiasm
splashing from every word. “Especially with two towers, you know, the one that
has two groups of spinners with two people on bottom, and one person on top. We
do a lot of two person interweaving moves that no one else is doing.” She
stops. Takes a breath. “It’s a great way to get a ski pass!”
She’s a force of nature. A laughing, talking,
smiling, whirling, wonder of a woman who cherishes every breath she takes...
And I love the paradox that Phoebe represents.
She’s real, grounded, and totally dependable. Yet she plays with fire. She
loves math and numbers and ledgers and deadlines. Yet she considers herself an
artist. She grew up in a semi-tropical environment — the Sunshine Coast
of Queensland — and loved her childhood summers on a sailboat. Yet she
took to the snow like she was born to it — gets up the mountain every day
she can — and snowboarding is now the passion that keeps her in Whistler.
“I have this theory on birth dates,” says the
thirtysomething Pemberton resident with just a hint of a mischievous smile
playing on the edge of her features. “If you’re born in the summer, you’ll turn
out to be a summer person. But if you’re born in the winter, well, winter will
become your thing…”
Is it really that simple? Is that really how
an Aussie non-skier from the tropical northlands ended up spending the last 14
years of her life in Whistler?
Pretty much, she admits, only with a few
unforeseen twists and turns along the way….
“It’s a funny story actually,” she says. “I
was on my way to Europe and stopped off in Toronto to see my Godfather.” The
smile broadens into a wall-to-wall grin. “When I left Brisbane, it was 25
o
C.
When I stepped off the plane in Toronto it was –25
o
C. I didn’t
know what hit me. And I realized: I love the cold!” She laughs. “I’d never seen
snow before landing in Toronto. It blew my cotton socks right off. And it fell
from the sky…”
Dazzled by her first Canadian experience, she
vowed to return. Three years later, the 22 year old got her opportunity. But
this time she landed in Vancouver. “I was planning to spend a week there,” she
explains. “But that week turned into five months.”
Down to her last $400 and with no plan for the
future, she decided to go shopping — “As you do,” she chuckles —
and was offered a job in the first store she visited. “That was my first and
only retail job,” she admits. Little did she know it would change everything.
“One of the guys I worked with invited me to
go camping with him and his friends at the hot springs at Meager Creek,” she
recounts, and giggles. “So there I am, in a car with five gay guys going up
Highway 99 for a weekend camping trip. Suddenly we drive through Whistler. I
was in awe. Where am I? What is this place? It looks like Austria but they all
speak English!”
Phoebe knew, somehow, that this Whistler place
was going to play a role in her life story. “I went straight back to Australia
to make some more money so I could come back to Whistler for the ski season. I
was hanging out with a friend and we were talking about life. I told her: ‘Ask
and you shall receive — that’s how the universe works.’ And to press my
point, I also told her what I was asking for in a partner; someone who was gentle,
strong, kind, hard-working and loved me to death.”
A week later she was back in Canada, back in
Whistler and hanging out at Jimmy D’s. “That’s where I met my husband,” she
says. “And he was exactly what I’d asked for: gentle, strong, kind,
hard-working and he loved me to death.” She smiles, if only just a bit sadly.
“We were married in the fall of ’95, had a construction company, a farm, a
child and 12 happy years later, we divorced…”
Divorced? “He’s a great guy,” she says of her
former husband. “Just not my guy. Besides, my list is a little more detailed
now.”
This parting of ways also led to a name change
— and some might argue a bit of a life change too. “‘Phoenix’ is not the
name I was born with,” she explains with a straight face. “Nor is it the name
on my passport. But the summer of my divorce, I realized I’d become a different
person.” Hence the different name. And given Phoebe’s success with the whole
fire-dancing thing, borrowing her new name from that great mythical bird
associated with rebirth and fire seems entirely appropriate. But nothing is
ever that simple — especially not with Ms Phoenix.
“One of the big reasons I decided to go with
Phoenix,” she says, “is that I found people could never spell Phoebe correctly.
Now, I figured, there was a chance they might get the whole p-h-o-e thing…”
Indeed. And this is the whole secret to
understanding Phoebe. She works with both sides of her brain! Trained in
international business, she runs a bookkeeping and small-business consulting
firm by day — “I work mostly with construction companies and retail
outlets,” she explains — and by night she spins fire, with poi and double
hula hoops and fans and staffs and ropes and…
“My two best subjects in school were
accounting and art,” she says. “But at one of my first shows — back when
I was only 17 — a graphic artist told me: ‘Don’t take a job in graphic
art. It will kill you. Get a straight job and do your art on the side.’ So I
heeded her words and when I went to uni, I focused on commerce and business…”
It has served her well. Especially in helping
her get established at Whistler. But where in the heck did she pull fire
dancing from? It was the summer of 2000, she tells me, and she was attending a
full-moon party. “Lexi Moon was there, spinning fire,” she adds. “And I said to
her: ‘I want to do that!’ She became my Master.”
But it’s not like it was all that foreign to
her training. “I went to a Scottish boarding school in Australia,” she
explains. “And I learned to play the kettle drum and the tenor drum there. It’s
all about the beat, you know. It’s all rhythm — which is the basis for
fire dancing as well. I also have a bit of a gymnastic background, so the moves
she was making were quite familiar to me too.”
Whatever it was — kismet, astral
connection, destiny, or just another great outlet for all her energy —
Phoebe took to fire spinning like an eagle takes to flying. “I did a
personality test once,” she says. “And when the results were analyzed, I was
labeled an introverted extrovert.” She laughs. “And that really explains my
attraction to fire dancing. I would never succeed as a pure dancer, you know.
But because I figure the spectators are looking at the fire when I perform
— and not at me — it totally frees me up to move and dance like no
one is watching.”
And like everything she does, she is fully
committed to her art. Another happy burst of laughter. “Some of my students,”
she says (she now runs regular fire dancing classes in the valley), “were
commenting the other day
‘You’re
so smooth’ and saying how amazing it was that I could spin and carry on a
conversation at the same time. I told them: “If it looks like I’ve done it a
million times, it’s because I have! Now practice!”
The new owner of a townhouse in Pemberton
— “I’m so excited, I just closed on it last Tuesday” — Phoebe
assures me she’s not planning on moving anywhere else anytime soon. “I just
love this place,” she gushes. “It’s paradise. I love the forests. I love the
mountains. I love all the secret spots I’ve discovered over the years.” She
stops speaking. Smiles for me one last time. “You know — the more I
travel, the more I want to stay in this place...”
And I can’t argue with her there.