Tango on the Main

In this award-winning collection from his Montreal Gazette city columns, Joe Fiorito reveals the true heart and soul of a large city. He walks the streets, meeting and talking to the people who make the city tick but never make the front-page news. In Tango on the Main he introduces us to Jackie of the Ritz, Montreal's chambermaid to the stars...the itinerant who reads Tennyson and drinks his daily pint of vodka on the McGill campus...the former featherweight champ who spends his mornings at the gym and his afternoons taking care of his ailing wife -- to name but a few of the memorable characters whose lives he explores.

Joe Fiorito was born in Thunder Bay, Ontario. As a young man in Northern Ontario, he worked in a paper mill, surveyed roads, and laboured in bush camps prior to becoming involved in community development and arts consulting. Fiorito spent five years working with a staff of Inuit journalists at CBC Radio in Iqaluit, NWT before transferring to Regina, where he wrote, produced and directed CBC Radio's highly acclaimed "The Food Show," a weekly program about food and agriculture. Fiorito lived for many years in Montreal, where he first wrote a weekly food column for HOUR, and later signed on as a city columnist for the Montreal Gazette. His first collection, Comfort Me With Apples: Considering the Pleasures of the Table