Just between you and me | Since Lise Dion almost died, her life tastes better

In the podcast series Just between you and meartists open the doors to their memories, their reflections and their dreams, for a press-free interview.

In the weeks preceding what will remain her final appearance on stage solo, on November 3, 2023 in Saint-Eustache, Lise Dion felt that her body was telling her to slow down. Until the hours before the curtain rose, the comedian vomited, and vomited, and vomited again, the beginnings of the heart attack which would force her to interrupt a show which had barely begun.

Why didn’t she just cancel the performance before the evening started? “We never cancel a show,” she decides with the same firmness as if she rejected the idea of ​​assassinating someone. Ah good ? “Because there are people who have their tickets and you’re supposed to be in good shape. You’re supposed to act like it’s your first time doing the show. You can’t tell the world that you don’t feel. »

Much of who Lise Dion was as an artist is contained in these few sentences. Much of her loyalty to her many followers. Much of her concerns about the sustainability of her career. Much of her almost dangerous ability to forget herself, without which she would never have managed to offer up to 514 performances of her second show, a marathon that caused her to be visited by dark thoughts, she confides. Her farewell tour, more modest, ended at performance 337.

In 35 years of jokes, Lise Dion has taken the stage in every imaginable state. Presenting a show while suffering from bronchitis? “And I’m talking to you about severe bronchitis that makes you pee when you cough!” » Give a seated show? “Yes, but that was my fault. I had scraped my feet with a blade and the blade had stuck into my foot. »

“The worst thing is to cancel a show,” she insists. “When you have to stay home, it’s a nightmare. You don’t have fun on the night you can’t do the show. You’re at home and you think about the disappointed people.”

Factory life

Lise Dion’s humble origins are the stuff of legend, thanks in large part to her breakout performance at the Just for Laughs festival in 1991, in which she donned her Dunkin’ Donuts waitress uniform.

But backbreaking jobs, Lise Dion held more than one before the donuts, in neon, bedspread and drapery factories. The daily life of a factory is the very beginning of its adult life. “Except that I always made funny speeches on the stepladder on Fridays before we finished,” she remembers. Manufacturing jobs were really hard, because there is no humanity, you have to produce. »

Dinner sitting on a conveyor belt, with rats as companions? Lise remembers that too, because despite her 1.2 million tickets sold, and a bank account that we wish her large, it simply cannot be forgotten.

Her respect for her audience is obviously not unrelated to this former life as a factory worker, Lise Dion knowing only too well that paying for a ticket represents for many the fruit of a few sessions of belt tightening.

“When I started making money,” she says, “I said to myself: ‘I’m not going to make my audience sweat with money, never, never, never.’ One day, I bought a small convertible and it took me two years to assume it. It was in the garage, I was proud to have it, but I didn’t dare to drive around with it because I didn’t want to hurt people who don’t have money.”

Embellish the story

Taking a look in the rearview mirror of Lise Dion’s career, it would be tempting to conclude that you just have to believe in your dreams for them to materialize, the moral on which Cinderella stories like hers generally lead.

“But I never believed it, maybe that’s the recipe,” she says, bursting out laughing and looking back on her meeting with the comedian Yves Rousseau.

One evening, while stopping for coffee at Dunkin’, the man who then hosted Just for Laughs Mondays suggested that Lise try her luck as stand-upsomething she had never thought of, despite some amateur theater experiences and a stint at the LaSalle Conservatory where her incarnations ofAntigone were constantly confronted with the hilarity it provoked.

Until then, she had used her comedic power “just to make life easier,” she explains.

Her life will be considerably embellished by the success of her unforgettable G-spot number, in 1995, the triumph from which she will allow herself to no longer take a look at the job offers section of The Press.

So the tour is over, but in a way, at 68 years old, Lise Dion’s life is only just beginning. She has dreams of TV, cinema, writing.

“For me, there was never anything really serious, other than illness or death,” she says, launching into a tirade worthy of a motivator or gospel singer. “Life is fun at the end. Take the time to look at it, take the time to taste it, go get yourself a cone, do something. I was like that before, and since I almost died, life has gotten even better. »

Listen to the full episode on our website