Eleanor McMahon thinks it’s time to change the conversation around cycling in Ontario.

McMahon is the founder of the Share the Road Cycling Coalition, who will be hosting the fifth annual Ontario Bike Summit this week in Toronto. She says that we need to stop talking about things like bike lanes and other bicycle infrastructure as a zero sum game between cars and bikes.

“We do polling, and our polling tells us that 89 per cent of Ontarians are both drivers and cyclists,” she says. “The notion that it’s cars versus bikes is overblown, and it’s really not working anymore. Deciding to change the conversation means going out of our way to poke holes in that idea and say from the get go ‘We don’t buy into that philosophy, and just because you say it, doesn’t make it true.’ ”

Even with the success of acts like Lonely Island and Flight of the Conchords, people still tend to view musical comedy with some suspicion, and not without reason. Those high-profile success stories aside, at the club level, musical comedy is too often the province of people who aren’t quite good enough to make it as musicians, but not quite funny enough to make it as comedians.

Two local comics, Robert Keller and Rush Zilla, are out to change that perception with their show, Off Key Comedy, which features a wide variety of acts whose only commonality is that they combine music and comedy in one form or another. The third edition of the monthly show will take place on May 23, at Comedy Bar.

Despite the fact that the last show in Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s 2012/2013 season is titled Of a Monstrous Child: A Gaga Musical, Lady Gaga herself takes a secondary role. There are no homages to raw-meat dresses and gold-plated wheelchairs here. Instead, writer and director Alistair Newton uses the House of Gaga as a pathway into the history of the notable performance-art stars that came before her in the pantheon of queer iconography, and how she is and isn’t a construct of all of them put together.

Explorers participating in the Toronto Drain-Bike met beside a spillway in northeast Toronto. The gear they required was actually quite rudimentary: it consisted mainly of a sturdy bike, preferably one with a rear fender; a handlebar mounted LED light; flashlights; and rain boots or hip waders. A willingness to get dirty didn’t hurt, either.
Pulling back a section of steel grating clogged with jetsam from previous downpours, riders quickly slipped undetected into the enormous storm trunk sewer. To appreciate the scale of this underground channel: its dimensions are comparable to the tunnels along the Yonge-University-Spadina subway line.
Lest you worry about the ick factor, the explorers weren’t pedaling through a stream of filthy wastewater. The storm sewer they were in, encasing one of Toronto’s many buried creeks, was constructed in the late 1960s to capture rainwater and snowmelt.
Even for a few of the experienced urban explorers at the outing, this was their first time exploring a drain, let alone riding through one. HI-LITE provided some basic instructions: by sticking to the main route, it’s impossible to get lost. If you do, call out—in the tunnel, echoes reverberate for kilometres. Exiting through a manhole is done only as a last resort.
With this advice, the ride began. LED lights switched on, long shadows instantly covered the tunnel’s damp walls. Underground, flashlights are essential: without them, visibility is close to zero. One hundred metres into the mouth of the sewer, the daylight glow from the grated entrance vanishes entirely. Except for sporadic halos of light penetrating the manhole covers above, as well as light from the dozen ceiling grilles designed to provide flood plain drainage, the sewer is in complete blackness.
The depth of the water was quite minimal, about eight to 10 centimetres. The base of the conduit is, for much of its length, built on a slight angle; though this design provides riders with (some) dry passage, at all times the base remains slippery. At certain points, the sewer becomes tubular. Here, riders must proceed in single file.The impromptu bike lanes will take cyclists on a circuitous route underneath Highway 401. Six kilometres into the sewer, the walls narrow, limiting further passage.
Time to turn around.
The spillway serves as both an entry and exit point. Approximately four hours after going subterraneous, riders reemerge into daylight, wet, dirty, and squinty eyed.
With only a minor wipeout and one waterlogged camera, HI-LITE deemed the two-wheeling, belowground adventure a success. He is already looking forward to next year’s event.
Photos by HI-LITE

Editors’ note: exploring sewers is both illegal and potentially dangerous; this article does not constitute endorsement.