When the Junction closed in September of 2012, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do next. The morning after the Grand Finale, I went on a little road trip – just me and my camera. That first year of sobriety had given me so much freedom, and nothing demonstrated it like the open road. Sobriety had also given me the gift of time to figure out the next step – time, and money. But neither were unlimited.
Meanwhile, south of the border, the economy was crashing and the government response seemed to be an unwillingness to renew work visas, even for those who had lived and ran businesses there for years. My uncles were getting deported (well, by this time, they were living there illegally actually). Did I want to move to Calgary with them, they asked. We could open up a business together. They, you see, also would eventually run out of time and money.
And so I made the call to leave behind the friends I’d made and life I’d built, and take a chance on something new. On a snowy day in February 2013, my loser drove me and all my worldly possessions through a snowstorm to Calgary; it certainly wasn’t our first snowstorm together, but in a lot of ways, it was our last.
You see, Evolution Wonderlounge was very close to being a Calgary bar. We certainly looked around. And more than looked! We found some great spaces, even put in a couple offers, but none of them ever actually happened. While we explored our options, I made some trips back to Edmonton, to visit those people I’d just so recently and dramatically said goodbye forever to. And on one of those trips, we learned that the space that had briefly been the gay bar Play was for sale.
I’d never been a Playboy, but I liked the space, and we bought into the dream of the Edmonton Ice District, and what it would do for downtown. (Narrator: it wouldn’t do much for downtown, that’s for sure!) Edmonton at the time had Buddys and Woodys for gay bars, so there was room for another, we thought, and certainly, we felt we could carve out a corner for ourselves. And so we signed a lease, even as a new gay dance club in UpStares opened.
If you’ve seen the bar, you wouldn’t have recognized it then, with its wood pillars, carpet everywhere, cockroach infestation good times. The bar had one working lightbulb when we took over, and it was so sketchy that delivery drivers and cops didn’t even like setting foot inside. Another basement bar, some drag queens said? At least make it white and bright. And white and bright it was! Then again, everything is bright and shiny when it’s new, isn’t it?
Very little about our original plan for the space stayed. The seven-days-a-week lounge, with after-work happy-hour idea was a fantasy that never stood a chance. But what hasn’t changed in the nearly ten years since we opened is our desire to be something that’s not just a bar. It was a family business from day one, and that hasn’t changed; that family has simply expanded to include so many amazing members of this community who I have worked and partied with for so long. With EVO’s ten year anniversary coming up, it really isn’t too soon to start looking back at the moments and people who have made us what we are.
Stay tuned. It’s coming.