Breau’s family won’t attend performance
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/10/2009 (6178 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
NONE of the late Lenny Breau’s immediate Winnipeg family will attend a performance of 5 O’Clock Bells.
"I want you to know that this play is nothing more than exploitation of Lenny and my children," says Valerie St. Germain, the Winnipeg guitar wizard’s first wife.
St. Germain, the mother of two of Breau’s children, Melody and Chet, called after reading a Free Press preview of 5 O’Clock Bells, Pierre Brault’s one-man show that opened Thursday night at MTC Warehouse. Brault, an Ottawa actor/playwright, premiered the Breau bio-play in the nation’s capital in 2008 and toured it to London and Toronto before Winnipeg.
"To open up the paper and to see the picture of the water and the guitar is very, very painful," says St. Germain, 67, during a telephone interview. "We live peacefully in our hometown and ask nothing of anyone. Melody Breau, Lenny’s daughter suffers the most from articles about her father."
Valerie, entertainer Ray St. Germain’s sister, is one of the characters portrayed onstage by Brault.
"I’m not curious at all," St. Germain, a former Eaton’s store model who married Breau in Winnipeg on her 18th birthday, Nov. 14, 1959. "I’ve known about it for a couple of years. My publisher told me about it and said I had a right to know what they are saying. I said I don’t care. He (Brault) can do whatever he wants to do."
She relates how she heard about a CBC The National story on 5 O’Clock Bells and told her children to watch it and was sorry she did.
"This guy comes out and says Lenny Breau didn’t commit suicide, ‘Somebody put their hands around his neck and they choked him to death and threw him in the pool. We’ll I’m not going to let them forget about Lenny Breau.’ That was horrible. That’s their dad."
St. Germain lives with Melody and makes sure there is no computer in her home, to restrict access to speculation about Breau’s death or his darker days when he abused drugs and alcohol. St. Germain wishes his killer would be found.
"I feel bad about it because it leaves open season for people to dredge up all that stuff," she says.
— Kevin Prokosh
