Review of Dancing Gabe: One Step at a Time written by Daniel Perron
When Dan Perron told me he wrote a book about Dancing Gabe, I thought “oh, sports” Even I, non sports fan that I am, know about Gabe, the ‘Peg’s resident super fan. I lived in Winnipeg for six years and I’m sure Gabe was explained to me at a Goldeyes baseball game.
“Whoa, who’s that guy dancing in the stands?”
“Oh, that’s Dancing Gabe. He dances at sports events.” (Like that was an explanation. It really wasn’t. Oh okay, just a Winnipeg thing.)
Little did I know that Perron’s book would be chock full of things I love. It’s a story! I love stories! You’ll laugh; you’ll cry; as the saying goes. There’s a hero. Actually, there are many heroes and ultimately Gabe proves to be his own hero in a very big way. There certainly are underdog moments and I’m very prone to root for the underdog. It’s a study of personalities and of autism, with a dash of dance, all subjects of interest to me.
As a person who lived with traits along the autism spectrum in the 1960s, Gabriel Langlois could have been condemned to a much bleaker fate and existence. However, he had powerful people on his side, people not powerful in any sense of the word that one would expect, though. He had, and has, the unconditional love of his family, a nun named Sister Georgette and his foster family, the Boissys. Key among these people were three strong women, his mother Angelina (an angel in the true sense of the word), Sister Georgette and Gabe’s foster mother Edith. (Foster mother? Why! You’ll have to read the book!) These three women understood Gabe’s true value as a human being, something that everyone needs.
Perron, in easy to read prose, details Gabe’s early life in Winnipeg. I found myself root root rooting for the home team, Gabe and his family, foster family and the Sister in his dugout. Perron’s research and interview skills come to the fore throughout the book, as he guides the reader through explanations of autism and of a life with Gabe as a young non-communicative child, both frustrated and frustrating, and of his family’s reactions and ways of coping with a high maintenance youngster in the midst of a large family of children.
Fear not, however! Gabe, with the concerted efforts of everyone, including himself, learns many skills along the way to adulthood and is even given his own voice as Perron quotes Gabe from his archive of scribbler diary entries. Perron effectively uses many techniques to paint his portrait of Gabe, cutting back and forth in time, and one is easily drawn into Gabe’s world and is easily drawn to Gabe Langlois.
Read on to learn how Gabe takes his loves of both sports and of dancing like nobody’s watching and mashes them up to create his niche in the ‘Peg as the city’s most recognizable sports fan.
What comes through is that Gabe, even in his struggles with social interactions, has also become a winning guy with a sunny disposition who smiles at everyone (no playing favourites here), even though, as someone living with autistic traits, he may not “know” how to process deep emotional feelings like neural typical people should know how to process them. As Perron writes, Gabe Langlois brings out the best in people, seemingly without the requisite skills to do so, but also seemingly with little effort.
2016 April 05
Kimberley Ann Neyedley
Author of Misfit