The tool chick is talking about God. Mag Ruffman stands in an aisle of The Building Box, explaining her "intense Christian period," three years in her 20s (she is now 44) when she remained celibate and tried to do God's work.
I'm not quite sure how we got here. I don't mean to The Building Box, a new home-improvement store in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough. That was Ruffman's suggestion. She is host and creative producer of Anything I Can Do, a do-it-yourself show on the Women's Television Network. She writes a weekly column, called Tool Girl, for The Toronto Sun. She also hosts Men on Women, a talk show about relationships, also on WTN. "I'm just curious to see it," she said on the phone when we were arranging the interview. "And besides, it's a great place to pick up guys," she added, apropos of nothing.
When she arrives, she promptly grabs a big shopping cart. "Take off your coat," she instructs sweetly, smiling her big toothy smile. "Put your purse in here," she says, patting the front section of the cart. Then she heads down an aisle, each one of which is the size of a bowling alley, pushing the cart proudly, head held high, like a mother with a baby carriage. She doesn't want to buy anything. We are tool browsing.
But she's not a tom boy, if that's what you're thinking. Tom boys don't wear bright red lipstick. They don't flick their hair from their faces. They don't stretch their arms out, cat-like, over a cart, as they try to explain themselves. And they certainly don't wear fuzzy rainbow-coloured sweaters. "I just really like being a girl," she tells me for no reason other than (perhaps) that her gender gives her licence to be enthusiastic about everything: the cold, cavernous store, the endless merchandise, all the Thursday-morning shoppers -- not hunky, poster-worthy construction guys at all, but middle-aged parka-clad men who look like they need the distraction of a leaky faucet to fix.
Which doesn't stop Ruffman. Almost everyone she passes in the store recognizes her.
"Aren't you the one who fixes things?" one dusty-looking retired man asks, peering at her over his cart. "Yup," she says giving him a big smile and a little wave. They then talk for five minutes, exchanging stories about routers and table saws. Ruffman is a sexy flirt. (One of the most memorable lines from her first WTN do-it-yourself show, A Repair to Remember, was: "There are so many caulks in the world, it's difficult for a girl to choose the right one.") Watching her move through the store and past her admirers, it's easy to imagine her as a character in a classic Western movie. She'd be called Kitty. She'd own the local saloon, have her long auburn hair piled on top of her head. And underneath her crinoline skirts, she'd have a holster, not with a gun in it, but a power drill.
Ruffman's fix-it preoccupation -- she is a licensed contractor -- is a determination to be resourceful, it seems. Before she gets halfway down the first aisle, she's figuring out how to construct a desk for me on the front of her cart. "There, you can write better with that," she says as she positions a plastic-wrapped pine board she has carefully selected from a shelf. "Comfortable for you?" she smiles with satisfaction, hands on hips, as she observes me taking notes. "Angle okay?"
Somehow, though, the conversation doesn't take the course you'd expect, given the situation. I was all set to do that building-block style of interview, you know, birthplace, childhood, first job, education, motivation, etc. I should have taken my cue from the surroundings, and jumped in, right off the bat, to ask her about her shows, about how she became the tool chick in the first place, about why she finds home repair interesting. (Ruffman is as enthusiastic about plumbing pieces as girlfriends of mine are about jewellery in Holt Renfrew. "Oh, look at these!" she squeals as we pass copper fittings in the plumbing aisle. "They're just like warrior wrist bracelets!")
She did cover all the biographical information eventually, but nothing about Ruffman is linear. Not her career path. Not her love life. And certainly not the way she thinks or talks about herself.
Which is why God figures here, suddenly, among the plywood and the chemical laminates.
"I was having such a hard time, trying to ground myself. I kinda exploded, or imploded maybe. I didn't know what to do with all my energy so I had to ground myself in spiritual matters," she says. Growing up in Richmond Hill, Ont., she had gone to the University of Toronto, to study physical education. By her second year, she was involved in theatre, playing Puck in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. When she graduated, she plunged into musical theatre, and within a year, she won the DuMaurier Search for Stars. With the $5,000 prize money, she mounted a one-woman singing and dancing show called Mag Ruffman Entertains at U of T. A producer saw it, and helped her put it on at a downtown Toronto dinner theatre. It ran for four months. Critics adored her. "They all said I had this star quality," she says, shyly. "I was told I was special." She shrugs her shoulders. "But I was 22 years old, and I had no idea why I was having all this attention."
That's when she decided to trust her "divine" intuition, she says, and did a series of "goofy things." One impulse led her to buy take-out pizzas and leave them in phone booths in downtown Toronto neighborhoods where homeless people would find them. She studied crystals and rocks. "I could see all kinds of things in crystals that others couldn't," she says. Like what? "All kinds of realities. I have an extremely rich imagination, " she says, her heavy eyebrows arching above her eyes. "I am a total seeker," she admits.
Well, that explains a lot about her personality, both on air and off. I didn't want to interview Ruffman because she knows her way around a tool box or because she has a talk show about men. (I mean, let's face it, men are just another project that needs to be figured out, managed, and often repaired. They've got wiring, just like a microwave. Which is sort of how Ruffman approached the talk show, too. "I like to figure stuff out," she says. "And that includes people.") Rather, I wanted to talk to her because there's something very watchable about her, something unrehearsed about her, original.
But is she flaky then? Well, yes and no. She's curious. That's what it is. Not cynical about the world. Just as she throws herself into her shows, so has she let herself be completely open in this interview. It's refreshing. That's what makes her good on television. She's not a typical actor or TV personality who, given the gig, starts acting all, well, hosty, stiff and professional and just the type he or she thinks the audience wants. Ruffman is Ruffman. Or more accurately, Ruffman is Mag (short for Margaret), a cozy, approachable gal who would probably lend you that fuzzy rainbow-coloured sweater should you like it. Surprisingly, her candour is a little unnerving. Is she willing to reveal all her quirky personality traits?
It would seem so. She tells me that when she needs to make decisions, she does what she did from the time she was 3. "I used to put my head under my sweater and say, 'Wait a minute. I have to ask my heart,' " she says, demonstrating her childhood habit. "Well, I don't have to do the sweater thing any more," she quips as she emerges from under her heavy pullover. "But I still consult my heart," she continues guilelessly with one of her trademark Julia-Roberts-style grins.
This leads without a pause, without any shy hesitation, into a description of her husband, Daniel Hunter, who works as her "front-office guy" for Ruffman Entertainment, which produces her two shows in association with others. She met him in San Francisco when she was 32, and reconciled to being single. "I figured I was always going to be one of God's unclaimed treasures," she says brightly. She met Hunter at a party, saw him across the room, and fell in love. They got married three weeks later.
It was Hunter who involved her in construction. He was building houses in California. She was shooting Road to Avonlea at the time, playing the goofy character, Olivia. (She was in the series for seven years until it ended in 1996.) When she visited him, during her breaks in the Avonlea shooting schedule, she accompanied him to his building sites. "Oh, there's nothing like being admitted into the circle of guy humour," she recalls now. "I entered the sacred folds of construction crews," she says with only a smidgen of irony.
Nothing in her life has ever been planned, she says. She has a million ideas for new projects, and is never sure which will come to fruition. What does she love about work? She has always been clear she didn't want children, she says. In fact, even before she met her husband, she'd had her tubes tied. "I like to feel engaged. It's about feeling connected to the world," she responds.
We've finished tool browsing and guy searching, so we head out into the parking lot. A few minutes earlier, I had asked Ruffman if there's anything she's not enthusiastic about. "Oh," she moaned, instantly realizing that she does come across as a Pollyanna in the tool shed of life. "What a horrible question. It's kind of sobering though," she reflected after a moment. "Guess I need to learn to be more discriminating."
But that's not her style. She has an exuberant mind, not a discriminating one. In the parking lot, she approaches my car, one of those retro-looking PT Cruisers with a squarish back end that is slightly higher than the front end. "Know what they call that in biology?" she asks with a sudden wide smile. "That car is presenting," she laughs as she wiggles her own back end.