Blog # 154...June, 2024

Big news these days is a Canadian team joining the WNBA. Women are appearing everywhere in sports now...boxing rings, soccer fields, hockey rinks and now the basketball courts. Goody for them and for us, hope the guys will welcome them gracefully, seeing it as an addition to the sport rather than competition. The team, yet to be named, will play in the Coca Cola Coliseum, that beautiful art deco building hiding on the CNE grounds.

Thinking about women and how circumstances have changed makes me think of our dear treasure Alice Munro. I'm re-reading her stories and realize that emotions are pretty much the same in many ways as they were in the 50's when the stories were set. My  delight in  her writing makes me wonder why I waited so long to really appreciate them.

Back to the Coliseum for a minute though. Originally built in 1921 to house The Royal Winter Fair. it has a personal history for me and hundreds of others who finished every summer with a gig working at Beasley's Bingo. The horses that featured in many Coliseum activities were housed and fed in the adjacent Horse Palace, across from the Bingo where we spent our breaks, smoking and laughing, when we weren't cadging free rides on the roller coaster...we got paid a decent rate for all this fun too! The Coliseum is quite an amazing and little known venue - as well as the horse rings and basketball court, it has stages for concerts and an ice rink for minor league hockey. It's also connected to the Enercare Centre which boasts the largest indoor lake in the world for the annual the Boat Show (installed by our cousin Clint and his crew). How all these things are done beats me. 

Lots of things these days amaze me, some in a good way, others not so much - and I sometimes like writing about them. AI and other technologies are scary but have made life easier and in some cases possible for folks with disabilities. My neighbour Ed is able to live fairly independently in his wheelchair with the assistance of Alexa and some electronics. As an OT and physio, I notice these things, particularly when they're about making art forms more accessible to everyone.

So my ears perked up when I heard about a new device being pioneered at Toronto's Factory Theatre recently. Aimed at hearing impaired individuals, it involves wearing a small fairly light pair of clear glasses, not too conspicuous. There's a small screen in the upper right corner where a video of the play's dialogue being signed by the actors is being projected with the option of subtitles across the bottom. The video is timed to line up exactly with the action on stage. as are the subtitles. It works pretty well, and although I don't understand ASL I spoke to someone after the performance who does and we agreed that it was a significant move forward in accessibility. The play was Tyson's Song, written by Peter Bailey and directed by Ash Knight, Pleiades Theatre's artistic director. Pleiades is dedicated to intersectionality in theatre, a word being used now to mean inclusivity in all realms... nothing gets by me.

So, on to the month of June as the world teeters on the brink of...who knows what, but we seek solace in each other and the art of living as best we can. 

A la prochaine chicane, but wait, I've discovered a brilliant writer - Tan Twan Eng-  more about him and his books in July's blog.

 Blog # 153...May 2024

Hooray hooray, it's finally May and, as promised in #152, I've been to British Columbia and have a few tales to tell about it.

But first, to digress, something about women in history. We've all heard of Cleopatra, Eleanors both Roosevelt and Aquitaine, and our own country's politicians - Flora McDonald  Iona Campagnolo, Alexa Mcdonough, and now the wonderful Jane Philpott, with a great new book about how to fix our healthcare system. But wait a minute, how about the women backstage,  the ones we've never heard about who shaped our world too?  

A new play Women of the Fur Trade takes us back a few hundred years and gives us a peek at the time when settlers were arriving and the place of the women who were already here...those of the First Nations. Born in Winnipeg at the Vault Project, nurtured by the  National Arts Centre in Ottawa and produced last summer at the Stratford Festival, the play introduces us to three women who tell stories - some sad, some hilarious of their daily lives. Although it's set around the mid 1800's their concerns of love, loss, joy and sorrow could be today. And Lois Riel makes a dazzling appearance too.

Now about BC...there's such an indigenous presence there, and just after we arrived in Victoria, we came upon a crowd outside the BC legislative Assembly -  the Haida People in full regalia were celebrating the first reading of the bill recognizing their Aboriginal title throughout Haida Gwaii. Here's a link to more about this and a pic (that I can't seem to load after many tries!)  https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2024IRR0020-000610 

Moving right along, as we did, to Campbell River - about half way up Island, as they say here. It's fishing, logging and mining territory and the town has a great small museum reflecting these important influences on life in the town...the most interesting thing for me was a life sized recreation of a floating house. These were complete dwellings built on wooden rafts, sometimes as many as a dozen, forming communities of workers and their families who could be floated from site to site to follow the work.

We were also aware of the art of survival, people appearing with tents at night after the local patrol had passed, gone in the morning. The climate is much more friendly to living rough and also to being old, so although I was at my usual level of discomfort with the homelessness, I certainly felt at home with the age cohort.

Sorry there are no pics, lots of images in my head but my energy to load them is flagging so I'm going to post this and see you in June.