He followed the voices in his head
By JIM HURCOMB
Focus, drive, passion. Those three words are the mantra that helped
Gordie Brown rise to the top of his profession in the toughest of all professions…showbiz! Born in Saint-Eustache, just outside
Montreal, Gordie moved to Ottawa in the early 80s, where he masqueraded as a mild-mannered political cartoonist at the Ottawa Sunday Herald. He loved to joke around the office, entertaining his co-workers with impressions of some of the celebrities he drew for the paper. He was so good that his friends signed him
up to perform in a local media lip-sync contest at Barrymore’s on Bank street. The competition wasn’t even close. His impression of Michael Jackson blew away the competition and the audience. What started as a lark turned out to be the launching pad for an amazing career. “I got a lot of attention from that,” he
remembers, “and I got a lot of gigs after that, doing kids parties as Michael Jackson at first and then moving on to club shows.”
16 BOUNDER MAGAZINE It wasn’t long until Gordie started
performing at the Beacon Arms Hotel, then the downtown Holiday Inn, and then stepping up to a steady, sell-out gig at the Villa Lucia, where he dazzled crowds with his growing repertoire of impressions and comedy. But local fame wasn’t enough for Gordie
Brown. Ever since he sat in the front row at a Rich Little show at the National Arts Centre, he had showbiz fever, and there was only one place to go to live that dream. “I was thinking, what do people do from
here? I could have gone to Toronto for a year or two, but that would have just wasted time. So I said, why don’t I just go to where I want to be?” Next stop, Las Vegas. With the help of local supporters like
Bruce Hillary, owner of Hillary Cleaners, and Max Keeping, Gordie made some contacts down south, and without hesitation or second thoughts, he was on a plane to Las Vegas. “I didn’t have a backup plan,” he says. “I
www.bounder.ca Photo By PETR MAUR
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