The Daily Miracle

Texte de David Sherman (image)
Mise en scène de Guy Sprung
Avec Arthur Holden, Ellen David, Howard Rosenstein, Sheena Gazé-Deslandes, Jean-Guy Bouchard

While a winter storm threatens to shut down the city and the corporate big wigs meet behind closed doors across the hall to decide the fate of the newspaper, four copy editors hammer out tomorrow’s edition.  It's just another night on the news desk, where the battle-scarred and overworked wrestle with fractured syntax and crushed ideals to get the next edition out.  Tempers frayed from layoffs, cutbacks and corroded ambitions; it's a miracle they can get the paper out at all … a miracle that happens every day.

Sherman’s fascination with the industry was triggered at the tender age of 6 when his schoolteacher recommended the class read the newspaper to augment their reading skills.  Magically, The Montreal Star arrived at his doorstep every afternoon.  He would dash home from school to be the first to open those ungainly pages in search of new words and mythic tales of greed, corruption, courage and victory.  By the time he was 17 he was a copy boy at that very same paper.  A few years after graduating from Dawson College, Sherman worked at The Star as circulation manager but eventually quit to write freelance for both The Star and The Gazette and then took a job at the Sherbrooke Record.  Over the years Sherman has been a music critic, feature writer, reporter and finally a copy editor working the desk at The Gazette.