Roy is a saxophone player, and the rumour about Roy that has been rolling around the shores of Lake Chapala, a Mexican retirement hub for Canadian snowbirds, is that he is the man responsible for the iconic party-song: “Tequila.”
“That is our understanding,” Sam Corbeil says. “Roy is a very talented musician, I will say that. But, you know, I’m always a little suspect about whether the ‘Tequila’ story is a truth or not.”
What is a fact, for Sam Corbeil, whose actual name is Mary Beth, though everybody around Lake Chapala knows her as Sam, is that about 50 Canadian retirees living beside the largest lake in Mexico — where it is sunny and warm every single day from May until June — were having a fiesta at the local golf club on Thursday.
The Canadian-consul general in Guadalajara was invited. Roy and his band were playing while the assembled guests were toasting a Canadian first: the formal opening of a Royal Canadian Legion branch — in Lake Chapala, Mexico.
“The American Legion have two branches here,” says Sam’s husband, Frank, whose real name is Frank, and who served three years with the Canadian airborne medical corps in the early 1960s. “The Americans were doing lots of activities and they would involve us, just to be nice, but we felt we wanted our own Legion.
“We wanted to focus on the things that were important to Canadians — Canada Day, Remembrance Day — and we wanted to be active in this community without simply being an adjunct to the Americans.” ....
