We both work hard like stink from Friday through Sat., preparing the goodies, which I must say are pretty lavish—scones with jam and whipped cream are a popular item and cucumber sandwiches by the hod. Because they eat like refugees, being musicians mostly ….
We seem to specialize in musicians because they are really the most clubbable of the artistic community here ….
Why musicians? It just happens but I suppose there is some deep reason for it. The painters are a very special lot and feel themselves beleaguered because they are trying to drag Toronto taste into the twentieth century and it’s an uphill pull. Sculptors hardly to be found; no call for it except effigies of dead politicians and they are getting very expensive (bronze, of course) and are generally farmed out to somebody in Montreal who specializes in that sort of thing and does it from photographs. Writers—well, we’ve tried with writers but no go; they are so quarrelsome, and they expect booze, which we can’t run to. Certainly not the way writers guzzle it. So it’s musicians, chiefly.
-Robertson Davies (The Cunning Man)
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