I survived Montreal Fetish Weekend

Next stop, Montreal Fetish Weekend!  Maybe I’ll find those sheep down here somewhere..

Well, I’m back from Montreal Fetish Weekend, and I’m barely alive because of it.  I guess I can still say that I’m glad I went, but somehow this year was more.. grueling.. than ever.

I don’t know. I can’t quite put my finger on it.  Maybe it’s these extended weekend long events.  But in order to squeeze everything in, you end up running at 130% for 3 or 4 days straight.  And in the end, I’m not even sure it’s worth it.

But anyway, allow me to backtrack a bit.  I’m speaking from the point of view of being home now for a week and a week that was pretty crappy too (which I’ll get to in a bit).

But in any event, I decided to go to Montreal this year because of the boost it gives to my career, and for the visibility.  And for one of the most enjoyable experiences, that being the “Exhibitionist Photo Tour”- a flash mob type event where at least a hundred people in fetish clothes descend upon downtown Montreal in broad daylight and proceed to get asked to leave by security over and over.

And the other big reason I came up to Montreal was because there was a good outside chance of being involved in a very appealing video project, one I can’t quite talk about too much at the current time, but as it progresses, I’ll be quite happy to fill you all in on.  Let’s just say my entire weekend was documented on video for something that I think you will all want to see!

My new variation of "Ahoy Tara" made it's debut in Montreal this year!

But anyway, I was invited to be in a fashion show of the designs of  French designer Patrice Catanzaro, whose designs blur the line between fetish and couture.  I love his stuff, and yes, they look good on me too!

If you had told me 15-20 years ago that I would be a runway model, I probably would said you were nuts.  But here I am, walking the runway to cameras flashing.

Sadly I can’t really remember much else that happened that weekend.  Sometimes these weekends (And I’ve done nine of them in Montreal) all become their own universe where you only remember things when you’re in that universe.

I went to Montreal to temporarily escape my troubles at home (remember all the house stuff that still hasn’t happened?  Well, it still hasn’t happened, and worse still, looks like I’m going to have to start it all over again).  Now that I’m back at home and back in that mode again, I actually have a tough time talking about what even happened in Montreal.

But anyway, the least fun I had was at the fetish events, and the most fun I had was doing the little things like being interviewed for the as-yet-unnamed video project about me,  and stuff like that.  Sadly with these weekend long events where you have to do a lot of walking, a LOT of effort and energy is spent on getting ready, walking to the club (and before you say it, taking a cab sorta wouldn’t work as with St Catherine street closed to only foot traffic, and various one way streets, a cab ride ends up going halfway across town in the time you could walk there), socializing, partying afterwards, etc.. there’s not much energy for anything else.

So Sunday was also the other fun event I was looking forward to, the “Exhibitionist Photo Tour”, something like a flash mob where about a hundred of us kinky people dressed in latex and whatever descend upon downtown Montreal in public places until -ahem- security asks us to leave.  And dressing up like a super sexy glowing yellow and baby blue Little Ho Peep has to be the closest thing to an out-of-body experience as one can get, even looking out of place in the own conformity of the group of fetish folk.

And where else could I get a shot like this?

Sadly, by the end of the weekend I was tired of socializing, tired of my friends, tired of the competing egos of everyone, tired of the event coodinators and everyone being fed up with everyone else.  And I knew there was a price to pay when I was finally all by myself again and I was driving home in my car.  I popped in some music I liked on my car stereo and started to sing.  I had no voice.  At least in the upper register.

And that wasn’t the worst of it.  Though I got home Monday night, Tuesday and Wednesday were spent sleeping 16-hour sleep days (as oppposed to 4 or 5 hours a night during the event).  And my Thursday I was deathly ill.  Had I been able to find a thermometer I would have probably found my temperature was like 102 or so.  Thursday morning I woke in a pool of sweat, and woke to the most terrible yet horribly complicated dreams.  The kind where your brain goes round and round in circles and there is no escape, and you just can’t relax, even when you know you should.

I did start feeling better by yesterday, but all the grand plans spoken about in Montreal, all the wonderful momentum gained from the weekend, all was curiously lost in a haze of What the hell happened? and Did I say that?

I don’t think I’ve ever quite experienced my mind switching from one mode to another when changing location as I did this past weekend.  It almost as if I went back to some place I haven’t been to in ages, lets say the city I went to college in, and all of a sudden memories from years ago started flooding back and it was like time had never passed.  It was sort of like that – except it was like that coming home.

So I’m home now, and things are getting back to normal again.. Sadly that means that it’s more of the same shit I’ve been put through with the bank and the mortgage with the Neverending House Purchase Saga.  Which I really need to end soon, so I can move on with what I really want to do. Sadly I’m not the sort of person who can just push something to the side and pretend like everything is going to be fine.  But I’m going to at the very least get back to work on photo shoots, new outfits and all that.

-Tara