East Side Story
Growing Up at the PNE
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A sly, sentimental, and wickedly funny memoir about growing up at the local fair.
The PNE (Pacific National Exhibition) is a Vancouver tradition, an annual fair started in 1910 that is famous for its farm animals, dog trick shows, and amusement park highlighted by Canada’s oldest wooden roller coaster still in existence. In 1980, when Nick Marino was twelve years old, he started working at the PNE and quickly learned that there was more to the fair than winning stuffed animals and eating mini donuts. He had to contend with belligerent bosses, unhinged carnies, and teenage hustlers. In this funny, charming memoir of fair life, Marino revisits the “wild west” of the city’s East Side, home to the PNE, sharing stories from his six summers working at the fair, where arcade bouncers went on midnight roller coaster rides, riots broke out at concerts, and local kids helped themselves to everything. With beguiling and at times poignant humor, he pulls back the curtain on the culture of carnivals and fairs, an unpredictable and eternally young world of players, scammers, and dreamers.
East Side Story is the latest addition to the Robin’s Egg Books series, which features some of the freshest, smartest, and above all, funniest writing on a variety of culturally relevant subjects. Titles in the imprint are curated and edited by comedian, playwright, and author Charles Demers.
This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A book with many images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Comedian and elementary school teacher Marino debuts with a quirky memoir about his time attending and working at the Pacific National Exhibition, a fair-slash-amusement park situated in Hastings Park and Playland in his native Vancouver, Canada. Marino recounts the history of the PNE, which began in 1910, shares fond memories of family trips to the fair in the 1970s, and details his experiences as an employee there for six consecutive summers, beginning in 1980, when he was 12. He dedicates a full chapter to the PNE's legendary wooden roller coaster (Canada's oldest still in operation) and fortifies his amusing, behind-the-tent anecdotes with a hodgepodge of photographs ranging from candid family snaps to historical shots from the Vancouver city archives. Some of the most memorable episodes focus on the seedier aspects of fair life, including organized bingo crime rings and the objectification of contestants in the the annual beauty pageant ("The PNE has since found ways to promote itself without relying on the bodies of high school girls," he notes). While the tone is often wry, Marino doesn't shy away from genuine emotion, underlining how important the fair was to his family in the wake of his mother's death from melanoma in the 1980s. The result is a droll yet moving ode to a Canadian tradition. Photos.
