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STEPS TO STARDOM: THE EXHIBIT

The Steps to Stardom exhibit at the Stratford Perth Museum that launched on the Family Day weekend in 2018 was several years in the making. Putting on a display about the Stratford native had been talked about for a number of years, but it wasn’t until I had a conversation with Justin’s grandparents, Bruce and Diane Dale, that it started to become a reality.

That conversation took place in the summer of 2017; Bruce and Diane loved the idea and invited myself and Micaela Fitzsimmons to their house to look at their Justin stuff. On the way there, Micaela, who is our manager of collection and exhibits, and I agreed that this visit would determine if we were going to do an exhibit about the native son and one of the most popular music stars in the world.

If there were just newspaper clippings, scrapbooks, and posters, the usual stuff that proud grandparents collect, we were going to politely pass. Instead, Bruce and Diane’s house was in and of itself a museum. There were Teen Choice surfboards, hundreds of running shoes, countless awards, great photos, stuff from his time as a little kid, personal laptops, backstage passes, a letter from a First Lady…

Game on.

We took pictures of everything, created an inventory of all the items, and then went about building the exhibit. Micaela and I began talking about concepts and the storyline for what was going to be a fairly modest one-room exhibit.

As much as the grandparents were totally on side, we felt we needed Justin’s blessing. Justin sent a text: Go for it. That was good enough for us.

Then emails went back and forth with Scooter Braun and his company to make sure there were no problems with playing Justin’s music, showing the movie Never Say Never, the use of images, and where we would get Bieber merchandise to sell in our gift shop.

For the record, everyone was awesome to work with.

Meanwhile, Galen Simmons from the local newspaper, the Stratford Beacon Herald, dropped by to see what we were doing for exhibits in 2018. It’s something they have done every fall when they are looking for copy on a slow day.

We talked about our refreshed Stratford Festival exhibit.

We were really proud of pulling together a partnership with the Monroe County Museum in Monroeville, Alabama, and we were going to have a travelling exhibit about Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. The Stratford Festival was presenting To Kill a Mockingbird in 2018.

And then I mentioned that we were going to have an exhibit about Justin Bieber. It was literally the third thing I talked about.

What happened next has happened dozens of times since: we were caught totally off-guard by the incredible public and media response to news of the exhibit. The Beacon Herald published the story online that afternoon. Within an hour, the phone began to ring off the hook: the Canadian Press, the CBC, CTV. I came into work Friday morning and there were television crews here. Friday night I was live on CTV and CBC.

When I came into work Monday morning, the first thing I did was see Micaela, who along with our intern, Sara Zilke, was in the process of creating a small one-room exhibit. I said, “We’ve got a problem.”

She responded right away. “I know. I just got off the phone with somebody from India that was asking about the exhibit.”

“We can’t have people coming here from Japan and India to see a one-room exhibit,” said Micaela.

Within a couple of minutes, we decided to move the exhibit into our largest gallery, and for the next few days Micaela and Sara, and occasionally myself, hunkered down to expand the exhibit by about 1,000%. We were in touch with Diane and Bruce, we scoured websites to get ideas from other museums, and we even built models of what the exhibit would look like.

This is a museum that has never been flush with money, but from that day on money was almost no object when it came to this exhibit; we were ordering new display cases, Plexiglas hoods, projectors, monitors, even sheets of steel.

The cornerstone of the exhibit is a re-creation of the front steps of the Stratford Festival’s Avon Theatre. It was there that Justin’s mom Pattie filmed Justin busking and posted the videos on YouTube.

Museums are traditionally pretty quiet places, but the week before the exhibit opened was a week like no other in the hundred and some year history of the Stratford Perth Museum.

We put tickets online for the opening, which was Family Day weekend (February) in Ontario. Again, we were caught off-guard when the weekend was completely sold out with days to go.

With a day to spare, the exhibit was completely ready. We had 500 t-shirts in stock, two cash registers, lots of staff and volunteers lined up. The museum was to open at 10:00 a.m. on Sunday morning.

At 7:00 a.m. I got a text from our custodian: Just so you know, there are people lined up at the museum. Bruce and Diane drove through and took a picture and sent it to me. Kayla Droog, our manager of education and programs, sent a text that said, You might want to get out here.

I pulled up about twenty minutes later to see roughly 150 people lined up outside the door. It was -10C, the third weekend in February in Canada.

Again, from that point on, nothing surprised us.

In 2012, the museum had 853 visitors. For the year. On Family Day weekend 2018, we had over 1,000.

In 2015, the Stratford Festival mounted the Diary of Anne Frank, so the Stratford Perth Museum hosted a travelling exhibit from the Anne Frank House. We broke all of our attendance records that year with just over 11,000 patrons. We felt we would never have another year like that, but Never Say Never. In 2018, the museum had 20,000 visitors.

In April, Justin, along with his grandparents, came to the museum for the first time. He spent about 90 minutes in the exhibit, posed for pictures, and signed a t-shirt for the museum that became part of the exhibit and now hangs in our gift shop. It was a great moment for us when we saw his reaction. He couldn’t have been any nicer. He said thanks half a dozen times, he asked to have his picture taken with Micaela and Sara, the two people who created the exhibit, and I took a picture of the two of us.

I had an Instagram account for a long time but had never posted anything. The picture of Justin and me was my first post, and as the expression goes, my phone blew up!

Throughout the year, the number of people coming to visit never really let up. We ran out of merchandise, ordered more t-shirts and albums, skateboard decks, laminated lanyards, cellphone covers, and key chains.

The sheer number of people coming to the museum was astounding, but what was more amazing was where they were coming from.

It was commonplace to have people here from Brazil and Japan and France, all at the same time. It wasn’t unusual to have groups of people in the exhibit who had never met talking Spanish to one another, or Mandarin or German.

On a Wednesday in October we had a mother and daughter from Blackpool, England; a mother and daughter from Stratford-upon-Avon, England, who brought us a tea towel from a local school; a young woman travelling by herself from Berlin; another young woman travelling by herself from Tokyo; and a family group of nine, three generations from Sydney, Australia. As we often joke, “just another day at the Stratford Perth Museum.”

Every day, someone signs our blackboard and includes a hometown that turns heads. Casablanca, Morocco; Churchill, Manitoba; Key West, Florida; Monroeville, Alabama; or Reykjavík, Iceland.

That is one of the reasons we put a map right by our front door, and on the way out we ask visitors to put in a pin that marks the country they call home. We have run out of pins twice, and the map quite literally has pins on every corner of the map.

The number of pins from Japan, the Philippines, Brazil, France, and Mexico never ceases to amaze us.

And after the exhibit had been around for a few months, we started to see patrons that we recognized as having been here at least once, sometimes two and three times, people from Florida and Indiana and Horseheads, New York.

Needless to say, we are very proud of the Steps to Stardom exhibit and the way it touches people, but we are most proud that Justin also likes the exhibit and finds it comfortable visiting. When he does drop in, we always try to give him his space. He has been here with family, dropped in by himself, he once brought Jaden Smith with him, and then his new wife Hailey, not long after they were married.

We know that this exhibit will not last forever, but it will be forever remembered by the Beliebers and the people who look after and run the Stratford Perth Museum. That is one of the reasons why we have put so many of the items and the narrative that goes with them into this book that will serve as a keepsake both for the museum and its patrons.

When I left the Beacon Herald, lots of people told me I should write a book. I always replied “Never.” Well, Never Say Never.