Author: carin

stratford in nine acts

~ carin ~ 11 Comments

 
Act One:
—a favourite art gallery that’s in-between exhibits. Nuts.

ACT TWO: a secret path behind said gallery that leads to stairs that lead to the Avon River.
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ACT THREE: swans au naturel.
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ACT FOUR: swans who’ve inadvertently walked into a trap and are now headed for their winter digs. Much hissing when nabbed, especially among the young ones who’ve never been through this before. When asked if the birds enjoy their off season indoor camping arrangement [I asked this hopefully, by the way, with several toes crossed] the handlers said… and I quote: “Nope.”
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ACT FIVE: Stitch, who lost an eye to a mink last year. Seasonal shifts are child’s play to him; no hissy fits, he’s all one-eyed dignity.
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The last time I ordered coffee, some many years ago, I was given a cup of regular instead of decaf and I jangled something frightening. I realize the jangle is part of coffee’s charm but I didn’t care for that “HELLLOOOO!!!! I’M AWAKE NOW!!” feeling and have been a tea girl ever since. Black, white, green, rooibos, lapacho bark, herbals, tisanes, roots, bits of old leather, anything but coffee. Hence, ACT SIX: my favourite retail establishment… more Ohm than Zing.
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ACT 6-A: the colours of course.IMG_4043IMG_4044

No picture to prove this but Pazzo’s petite pizza, greens from Soiled Reputation and a perfect antipasti platter played no paltriness in the pleasure offered by Stratford’s SEVENTH act.

ACT EIGHT… the play. Mary Stuart. Wherein even the slightest facial movements by the astounding Seanna McKenna are a performance in themselves. The story—nutshell version—is about the way we divide up society and allegiances based purely on our passions [culture, religion, morals, values, aesthetics]. The playwright chose to portray this through a fictional meeting between Mary, Queen of Scots [Catholic, beautiful, all joie de vivre and super popular despite being a bit of a tart who murdered one of her three husbands] and Queen Elizabeth [Protestant, not so fun but a dedicated monarch] during which meeting Mary calls Elizabeth a bastard for her illegitimate status and [therefore] dubious right to a throne Mary reckons should be hers. Well, of course it’s never really about the throne, is it? Deeper issues lurk—deceptions, insecurities, jealousy, guilt, politics, family names, bloodlines, history… All that and more than a few good laughs. Yes, it’s true… there are moments of delicious humour. Three thumbs up.
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ACT NINE: homeward. Via pumpkin patches and planes in pale purple skies.
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Applause. Exit right. Fade out…

*five frivolous minutes over roast chicken with ‘ch’ — age 62

~ carin ~ Leave a comment

 
I met ‘ch’ in 1987. We became friends immediately.

She is the most voracious reader I know. She also believes in the protective power of magic sticks when walking through parks late at night… not for wielding but merely to hold, letting the inherent magic do its thing.

She has canoed the Mackenzie River (**or was it the Fraser?), worked in the Sudan and claims France as her country of choice for a nervous breakdown.

Once, walking together along a sidewalk, a black cat crossed our path and without a word to each other—and without any idea that we both had a spontaneous ‘ritual’ for situations like this—I came to a complete stop while ‘ch’ did a pirouette. And then without missing a beat we continued on our way.

Over the years she has introduced me to expressions such as ‘gin memories’, ‘yars, yars, yars’ and, most recently, ‘pearls before swine’.

She has a perfect Lauren Hutton gap between her two front teeth and on any given day, if you phone and ask what she’s having for dinner, the answer will invariably include some form of eggs. She will deny that it’s that often.

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How long could you go without talking?  To myself? Not long. To other people… days.

Do you prefer silence or noise?  Silence.

How many pairs of shoes do you own?  15.

If you won the lottery?  I’d share it, become a secret benefactor, buy things people need, anonymously.

One law you’d make? I’d do something about legalizing drugs, with a drug education component.

Unusual talent? Painting walls.

What do you like to cook?  Soul food type bean dishes.

Have you or would you ever bungee jump? No.

What’s the most dare-devilish thing you’ve done? Nicky-nicky nine doors.

Do you like surprise parties, practical jokes? No and no.

Favourite time of day? Dusk.

What tree would you be? A spooky drooper. (a type of cedar, with spooky droopers)

Best present ever received? A heartfelt thank you.

What do you like on your toast? CheezWhiz

The last thing you drew a picture of? The sunflowers in my garden.

Last thing written in ink. Morning journal notes.

Favourite childhood meal? My mother’s mac and cheese with bacon on the side.

What [past] age was the best? 27

Would you go back to that if you could? No.

Best invention? The wheel.

Describe your childhood bedroom. Shared with sister, double bed, played games when supposed to be sleeping; ‘Fighting Feet” was one.

Afraid of spiders? No. In fact I love them. The non-toxic ones, I mean.

Phobias? None.

Least favourite teacher and why? Geography. Was sent out of the room because I objected to something. Sent to V.P. who understood my position… so it turned out well.

Favourite children’s story? The Grand County Fair.  “…Come to the fair, the grand county fair, with horses and sideshows and fun everywhere.”

Ideal picnic ingredients? My mum’s fried chicken and potato salad.

Is Barbie a negative role model? No.

No???  No. Who takes Barbie seriously?

Best thing about Canada? It’s home.

Best thing about people in general? Connection, when people ‘get’ each other.

What flavour would you be? Lemon.

What colour? Red.

What would you come back as? A more evolved person, hopefully.
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*Five Frivolous Minutes is a series devoted to non-essential questions and answers. It amuses me.
** It was the Mackenzie, I’ve been told. The Fraser has rapids.

today’s colour – pondering pink

~ carin ~ 4 Comments

What comes to mind is Wayson Choy and the story he tells about a workshop led by Carol Shields and how the participants each had to pick a slip of coloured paper from a hat and write about it.  His was pink and he asked if he could switch and Shields said no. But pink means nothing to me, he said, and she said just write and he did and what happened was that pink took him to places he hadn’t thought about before, his childhood and other things he’d forgotten. Turned out he couldn’t stop writing and pretty soon he realized he had something—possibly a book. He said he believes The Jade Peony would never have been written had he been allowed to choose another colour.
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—More pink.
—And some with a splash of yellow…

it really is very bad

~ carin ~ 5 Comments

“‘Talk about a young man’s book!’ I said to myself. ‘What on earth made us take it on?’  It really is very bad; but something of its author’s nature struggles through the clumsiness, and we were in the process of building a list, desperate for new and promising young writers. I must say I congratulate Andre (and myself) for discerning that underpinning of seriousness and honesty… and think we deserve the reward of his turning out to the be the writer he is.”

~ Diana Athill on having re-read, after 45 years, Mordecai Richler’s 1954 debut novel, The Acrobats.  (From Stet: an Editor’s Life, Granta, 2011)

And this—also from Stet—and quite possibly the best comment ever on the subject of gossip:

“They [Brian Moore and his wife Jackie] were both great gossips… I’m talking about gossip in its highest and purest form: a passionate interest, lit by humour but above malice, in human behaviour. We [talked] about writing, but more often we would talk with glee, with awe, with amazement, with horror, with delight, about what people had done and why they had done it. And we munched up our own lives as greedily as we did everyone else’s.”

On advertising books in the 1950’s and 60’s, Athill says there was no such thing, that ‘promotion’ was limited to reviews [which she felt, along with word of mouth, was the better way and that ads were not as effective and mainly done to please the author]. As for being noticed generally… “A novelist had to stab his wife, or something of that sort, to get attention on pages other than those devoted to books.”

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Read Stet this summer on an impossibly comfortable couch in the library at the *unpompously preserved  Cold Comfort Farm, PEI. [*a phrase Athill used to describe the great old Long Island homes, one of which belonged to Brian Moore].
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fwiw friday (liverwurst and screen doors)

~ carin ~ 9 Comments

WHEREIN I RIFF ON MY WORDLESS WEDNESDAY PIC….
because, of course, I wasn’t allowed to speak then.

In this case, a screen door with metal curlicues and a central dog motif. This used to be a popular style—aluminium doors with curlicues and motifs—various dog breeds, swans, horses too. Lots of people had letters to signify the name of their tribe. The house where I grew up had such a door. It was my job to clean the curlicues, but that wasn’t the worst of it. As we were not [alas] dog, horse or swan people, we had a big aluminium M, a constant reminder of a last name I wasn’t crazy about. I thought it was too ethnic. These were the very young days of my youth when being the child of immigrants was an embarrassment. All that salami and homemade jam on my breath when what I coveted was Welch’s Grape Jelly and Campbell’s soup. I longed to be a Brown, a Black, a Smith, a Wilson, people who ate Swanson’s TV dinner instead of goulash. The M was a constant reminder that my people were weird and that my name had to be spelled. And pronounced. And sometimes explained, as in: Makuz? What’s that?

I knew what the question implied. It meant where are you from?  Not me, but my parents, those people with funny accents who fed my friends open-face liverwurst sandwiches on homemade rye for lunch, friends who were often mysteriously ‘not hungry’ next time they came by or, in one spectacular case, who left my house in tears, screaming about being given cat food. When the friend’s mother telephoned a few minutes later, my mum, in broken English, explained about delicatessens. I’m not sure how much was believed but the friend never came over again.

I was pretty sure this never happened to kids named Smith.

Or dog people.
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take a city

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

Take a city. Any city.

Take one that despite its city status has a crazy small town vibe where people still say “Oh, you mean where the Boychyns used to live?” of a house where the Boychyns have not lived for decades. Where everybody seems to have gone to school with somebody that somebody else knows and where possibly one of the best chip trucks in the country is parked on a distinctly unglamorous corner.

And where, because it’s a city, terrible things happen—women and children end up in shelters and young men are sometimes shot. There are daily lineups outside the St. Vincent de Paul soup kitchen and a crowd of smokers huddle outside the Timmy’s. There’s sadness on the streets, insanity too, but if you stop someone for directions chances are you’ll be surprised by kindness, by the thoughtfulness of the answer.

Take a city where you are stuck behind a woman at the corner shop whose husband has a new hip and the cashier wants to know how things are going with Ted. Be prepared to shift about, to be on the verge of muttering unpleasantries when you’re overcome with relief to hear that things are on the mend, that Ted is doing okay. And just as you consider taking up peevishness again, the silver-haired woman turns to you and says “Men, eh! The old farts don’t know how good they’ve got it!”  When she snaps her purse shut with a happy cackle, you can see her kitchen, the apron on a chrome chair, a kettle that’s always just boiled, her whole house smelling of pie and Hamburger Helper… and as she leaves you almost want to shout “Say hello to Ted for me!”

Take this city and its factories, its history of lunch pails, shift work and layoffs, picnics at the lake, fights at the bar, a gallery of fine art. A city where people who live there wouldn’t live anywhere else and those who’ve never visited have crystal clear misconceptions.

Where economic nose dives hit extremely hard. Hard enough to close down small businesses. But not all… people are loyal to old favourites.

And new favourites emerge from the rubble.

Take a city where, among the alleys and row houses, brick bungalows, flats over tattoo parlours, funky cafes, restaurants and thrift shops, among empty storefronts… a group of local artists have invaded, filling spaces behind doors that are normally locked with ‘For Lease’ signs in their windows… filling those spaces with people, art and music.

At least for a short while.
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Take a city that can’t be broke.

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