Vancouver Art Gallery director Kathleen Bartels and art auction co-chair Hank Bull prepared for the event to raise a reported $1.2 million.

The Guardian Whale triptych Trace Yeomans donated to the VAG art auction was composed of the worlds most durable fabric, Ultrasuede.

ARTY HEARTIES: As suave as a Ritz head waiter in his tuxedo, artist, administrator and Vancouver Art Gallery trustee Hank Bull co-chaired the gallery’s recent art auction with former board chair Bruce Munro Wright. The $1.2 million reportedly raised from artists’ donations may have surprised even VAG director Kathleen Bartels and chief curator-associate director Daina Augaitis. Had there been a piano there, accomplished jazzer Bull could have played the Gold Diggers of 1937 hit, With Plenty of Money and You (Oh! Baby What I Couldn’t Do). What bidders actually did was pay $275,000 for a Jeff Wall work appraised at $170,000. A Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun painting of aboriginal-masked modern folk, titled Christy Clark And The Kinder-Morgan, near doubled its appraisal at $100,000. A mere 291 more such events would fund the Swiss-designed, wood-clad new gallery proposed for seven blocks east on Georgia Street.

HEADS UP: You could pay $175 million for a recently discovered painting, possibly by Caravaggio, of ancient Israelite Judith beheading Assyrian army commander Holofernes (story, Sun, April 13). But local artist Lilian Broca’s mosaic version was visible for free at the Italian Culture Centre until recently, and will be at Toronto’s Columbus Centre from May 5.

Ruth Rasnic and Jewish National Fund CEO Josh Cooper feted Shirley Barnett at the Negev banquet benefitting a women’s shelter in Israel.

Premier Christy Clark greeted Israels consul general in Canada, DJ Schneeweiss, at the Jewish National Fund’s Negev Dinner head table.

NEGEV NIGHT: Chaired by Ilene-Jo Bellas and Bernice Carmeli and convened by Penny Sprackman and Shirley Schwartz, the Jewish National Fund’s always-sold-out Negev Dinner honoured social worker and senior supporter of community organizations Shirley Barnett. The Four Seasons hotel event benefited the No to Violence Against Women organization’s Vancouver Shelter in Rishon Le Zion, whose Israeli founder, writer-poet-politician Ruth Rasnic, addressed attendees. They included JNF Canada CEO Josh Cooper, Pacific Region president Frank Sirlin, Israeli consul general in Canada DJ Schneeweiss, Jerusalem emissary Ilan Pilo, Premier Christy Clark and many from Vancouver’s Jewish community.

Bruce Langereis came by elevator rather than helicopter for Sun editor Harold Munro’s new-format party on the Vancouver Art Gallery roof.

TAKEOFF TIME: Editor Harold Munro introduced revamped Vancouver Sun print and online platforms at a reception on the Vancouver Art Gallery’s rooftop patio. It was a first visit there for Delta Group president Bruce Langereis, whose firm undertook the across-the-street Rosewood Hotel Georgia and tower development. Still, Langereis has seen the VAG roof often during 700 hours piloting his B-3 Bell Jet Ranger helicopter, sometimes landing on glaciers as you’d expect of a national freestyle skiing champ. He’ll fly the chopper again — with Sun readers aboard — as a prize item in the vancouversun.com/experience contest that includes VAG membership, Bard on the Beach, Coastal Jazz, Canucks and Whitecaps tickets, and other good stuff.

GOING GREEN: At a David Hawksworth-catered soirée this week, Air Canada announced an impending and exclusive Vancouver-Dublin service, albeit without renaming its Rouge division “Vert.”

IN THE SWING: Evening promenaders on Burrard Street cricked their necks as a woman dangled by a slender rope to pirouette high on the Marine Building’s east wall. Was it a set-up, perhaps, for one of Jeff Wall’s seven-figure photographs? A new way to clean windows by swatting them with a five-metre-long blue skirt? Not so. It was merely Georgina Alpen, a member of Julia Taffe’s Aeriosa Dance Society, rehearsing for a TV cosmetics commercial that was to be filmed the following day.

Vancouver Art Gallery board member Asaph Fipke and wife, Hemsa, were backed by a Dana Claxon work that fetched $70,000 at auction.

ACE’S HIGH: Asaph (Ace) Fipke has produced many cartoon TV series as CEO of Nerd Corp and as successor DHX Studios’ chief content officer. The VAG board member looked prime-time animated himself when he and wife Hemsa attended the gallery’s recent auction. Maybe she’d confided something that reflected her name, which in Arabic means “romantic whisperer.” She likely uttered something more down-to-earth when the couple bought West Vancouver’s Eppich House, then lavished time and money on a renovation that mightn’t have upset its testy late architect, Arthur Erickson.

Reopening the Rosewood Hotel Georgias Reflections lounge, Philip Meyer had a reluctant light bulb made shipshape as in his years at sea.

SHARP AYE-AYE: Hotel Georgia managing director Philip Meyer was captain’s steward on the Cunard ocean liner QE2, but could have been lookout. When the hotel’s Reflections lounge reopened recently, Meyer spotted a dead light bulb among many decorating a tree and, in skipper-on-the-bridge fashion, ordered it replaced “now.” The $40 “Edison” bulb replica only needed screwing in. As for lights out, partly open-air Reflections does that at 11 p.m. Mustn’t disturb whole-floor guests like Justin Bieber who, of course, goes bye-byes early.

Coleen Christie and Larry Killam. Her brother and Killam scaled Egypt’s Great Pyramid, after which the latter began developing now-chic Gastown.

POINT TAKEN: VAG auction attendee Larry Killam scaled the Great Pyramid “at first light … using the steps Napoleon’s people had cut.” He meant those made during the soon-to-be French emperor’s abortive 1798-01 invasion and part-occupancy of Egypt. Event MC Coleen Christie said her brother Brian made the climb later. Killam’s next steep ascent was fiscal and local. In 1967, he began buying and renovating properties in now-chi-chi Gastown. None were as old, though, as a 1640 British barn Killam and wife Sherry re-erected as the core of their Southlands house.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: At least the NDP-wooing Leap Manifesto’s authors didn’t adopt the full title of Mao Zedong’s economically disastrous Great Leap Forward that saw perhaps 30 million starve to death.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca 

604-929-8456

Six-year Vancouver Opera board member Julia Kim feted James Wright who will retire after 17 years as the company’s general director. 

Seventeen years of courting later, Wright scanned the QET lobby as the Overture gala began and said: “Next time I come here, I guess I’ll have to pay.”

Long-time video artist Paul Wong was the recipient of the annual $30,000 Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in The Visual Arts. 

Martine Argent and Francesco Aquilini at Vancouver Opera’s Overture benefit for youth, community-engagement and main stage efforts. 

One year after Jessica Yan approached George Macintosh to contribute to victims of Japan’s 2011 tsunami, the two were married. 

ON THE BENCH: Google Alan Day MVP to see that 91-year-old boxer, wrestler and retired fire chief training to bench press his own body weight, which is challenge enough at any age.

Dina Goldstein’s Gods of Surburbia series is exhibited at the SOMA gallery as part of the city-wide Capture Photography Festival.

Jim Cuddy and Anne Lindsay entertained when the Canadian Cancer Society’s Daffodil Ball reportedly raised $1.3 million for research.

Mae Montgomerie and Roger O’Callaghan attended Vancouver Opera’s Overture but without singing or dancing as they could have.

Avant Garde salon owner Jon Paul Holt had to deal with more than hair when Mia Cosco modelled at a Leone and Ferrari-Maserati event. 

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: This sure is cancer-gala season. Hard behind the Daffodil Ball, Ovarian Cancer Canada’s Love Her gala ran April 20, and the Taste For Life benefit for oral cancer April 21.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca

604-929-8456

CASE CLOSED: Corporate executive-turned-management consultant Kathy McLaughlin wasn’t quite 40 when her trials began. Nor were they the kind twin Carol Baird Ellan handled as chief provincial court judge. Kathy’s started with the Hodgkin’s lymphoma that treatment temporarily overcame. When it returned, an auto-immune liver ailment struck McLaughlin, too. Worse, treatment for one could have fatally prejudiced the other.

Kathy McLaughlin, here with twin Carol Baird Ellan, wrote about surviving two illnesses where treating one would make the other more lethal.

Chemotherapy, two liver transplants, other procedures and fierce determination saw her beat baleful odds to survive and write an often-entertaining book titled Back To Life. It’s closing chapter, Taking Control, ends with: “You are in charge … [to] set a positive leadership model for your healing journey ahead. Others will have no choice but to follow.”

A $378,000 Aston Martin backed Cheryl Nakamoto and Sarah McNeill when their ninth Grape Juice gala raised $94,000 for Big Sisters.

WINE’N’WHEELS: Recruitment agency heads Sarah McNeill and Cheryl Nakamoto and realty marketer Cam McNeill’s GrapeJuice wine auction reportedly raised $94,000 for Big Sisters of B.C. Lower Mainland. Nine-year total: $634,000. Maintaining an automotive theme, the locale was the Aston Martin-Bentley showroom, where you’d need $378,209.50 plus tax to uncork the former make’s Vanquish coupe.

AG Hair cofounders Lotte and John Davis’s One Girl Can event reportedly netted $180,000 to educate and house young African women.

HAIR RAISING: AG Hair firm founders Lotte and John Davis netted a reported $180,000 for their One Girl Can charity at an event that almost doubled the 2015 debut’s total. AG’s donations have helped build five African schools since 2008.  Now they’re funding dormitories, washrooms, and scholarships for the likes of poster girl Rahma Godana to attend the University of Nairobi.

US consul general Lynne Platt told Arts Club Theatre chief Bill Millerd her Fourth of July party will be a tribute to Memphis, Tennessee. 

THAT’S ALL RIGHT: U.S. consul general Lynne Platt wore a purple jacket to the Art Club taste-a-thon. Not to mask spilled wine, it commemorated deceased artist Prince. As for Kings, guests should hear two — Elvis and B.B. — when Platt’s Fourth of July party honours Memphis, Tennessee. That beats hours of Nirvana and Pearl Jam were she to celebrate her native Seattle.  

Douglas Chrismas, who opened his Davie Street Ace Gallery at age 17, has his same-name L.A. version in highly complex bankruptcy proceedings.

International author-artist Douglas Coupland began his career by reporting on Beverly Hills gallerist Douglas Chrismas’s legal difficulties.

OFF THE WALL: Dealer Douglas Chrismas astonished locals in 1977 by hosting art star Andy Warhol at his Davie-off-Bidwell Ace Gallery. A decade later, now occupying 30,000-square-foot Beverly Hills premises, Chrismas agreed to pay $650,000 in restitution when indicted on grand-theft charges for selling artworks he didn’t own. That was a career starter for Douglas Coupland, whose magazine report of the case led to him becoming an international author and artist, albeit not represented by Chrismas. The latter’s L.A. gallery is now in Chapter 11 bankruptcy following the much-sued Chrismas’s failure to settle artist and collector debts via a court-ordered $17.5-million payment. Along those lines, the now-late Warhol said of Chrismas: “If he’d just say, ‘I can’t pay you,’ you’d know where you stood.”
SALUD: In bright if hardly Mexican afternoon sunshine, folk on Joe Fortes restaurant’s rooftop patio downed tequila, mescal and Dos Equis lager. It was a warm-up for the fifth annual Vancouver International Tequila Expo that should draw 1,000 to the Hyatt Regency Hotel May 28, co-founder Manuel Otero said.

It’s been 15 years since then-lieutenant governor Garde Gardom called the election that put the Gordon-Campbell-led Liberals into power.

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO: Cigar glowing, cocktail hour approaching, Garde Gardom occupied Government House as our 26th and possibly most exuberant lieutenant-governor. He’d been B.C.’s agent-general in London and Vancouver-Point Grey’s six-term MLA, three times each for the fading Liberal party and for long-powerful Social Credit. Defeated in 1991, Social Credit morphed into the Liberal party that Gordon Wilson had revived. Gardom called the May 16, 2001 election at which, having trapdoored Wilson, the Gordon Campbell-led Liberals won 77 of 79 seats. Gardom then retired to part-author and publish a Vancouver Lawn Tennis & Badminton Club history. One snippet recounts a tournament player beset much as politicians can be: “His underwear hung below his shorts, he failed to earn a single point, and occasionally would turn to spectators witnessing his slaughter and shout, ‘I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid.’”

Peter and Bruno Wall’s fourfold return on a 2013 property purchase meant rubberneckers lost the chance of a spectacular tightrope walk.

HIGH WIRE: Realty-development veterans whistled at a Chinese-immigrant syndicate paying $60 million for Nelson Street property that cost Peter and Bruno Wall $16.8 million in 2013. In a circus-like move, it was then flipped for $68 million. Oddly, Peter Wall had contemplated a true circus act involving the 168-metre tower he’d planned for the site. One quiet Sunday, a tightrope walker might have crossed from its roof to the kitty-corner Wall Centre’s tallest tower. With St. Andrew’s Wesley and First Baptist churches on either side, their congregations might have prayed for the performer’s safe arrival, or otherwise.
DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Let’s hope you remain aloft after Monday’s last-chance income-tax filing.
malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

Frances and Samuel Belzberg received Simon Fraser University’s President’s Distinguished Community Leadership Award this week. 

Former chancellor Morris Wosk and fellow benefactor Jack Diamond, seen in 1999, did much to enhance Simon Fraser University’s development. 

Her name symbol tattooed on her ankle, Laura Duck may re-join natty attendees at Hastings Racecourse’s Deighton Cup party July 16. 

Chair Michael Audain and CEO Neil Chrystal hung a Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun painting in the Polygon development firm’s head office. 

Seeing medals adorning tourney-winning Mission Hill wines, Wolf Blass said they’d ‘all be pinched in five minutes’ in Australia. 

Sophie Gregoire and Justin Trudeau extended their honeymoon in 2005 with a quiet stay at Anthony von Mandl’s Mission Hill Family Winery. 

After an auto accident required long recuperation, Sarazen Brooks became a full-time artist who learned to paint almost as speedily as the car that could have killed her. 

malcolmparry@shaw.ca

604-929-8456

WAY, WAY TO GO: Answering fellow Briton Petula Clark’s pop-song song, John Fairclough does know the road to San Jose. He followed it in 1985 to acquire “the bits” of a 1934 Aston Martin Mark II Ulster car offered there. Rebuilt with a replica body, the diminutive sports-racer barely survived the road to Portland when its transporting trailer broke loose en route to a vintage-racing meet. Five more years of renovation followed. Later still, Fairclough drove the Aston to and from Alaska, wriggling into a doorless driving compartment hardly more commodious than a coffin. Once behind the huge steering wheel and tiny “windscreen,” he was peppered by gravel spraying past those motorcycle-type fenders the British call mudguards. Looking spiffy for the 31st All British Field Meet at VanDusen Botanical Garden, the very valuable Aston Martin has reportedly travelled over a half-million miles with — barring further vicissitudes — plenty more to come.

The passenger door of Nicola and Dr. Robert Follows’ 1930 Bugatti is being modified after opening and ejecting her in a sharp corner. 

UBC Thunderbirds quarterback Michael O’Connor’s Vanier Cup ring pleased Justin Trudeau who’d just displayed offensive lineman tactics of his own. 

Design firm principals Steven and Derick RodRozen’s Georgie and Ovation awards led them to thank clients at an opera-themed reception.

UBC opera students Elena Razlog, Marie Civitarese, Spencer Britten and Tamar Simon sang the lights out at a RodRozen Design event. 

Actress Jenn MacLean-Angus feted eight-month husband John Cassini on his Jessie Theatre Awards lead-actor-large-theatre nomination.

VCC (Vancouver Community College) instructor Grace Yung showed kangaroo loin that faculty and students served at an Aussie-themed B.C. Hospitality Foundation fundraiser.

TIT FOR TAT: Australia is reversing its founding history by deporting British-born convicts back to the mother country.

Martina Govednik sang Carmen’s Habanera and Seguidilla arias to add sizzle at Vancouver Chamber Choir’s fundraising dinner at Dario’s. 

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Two Non-Partisan Association and one Green councillor came together this week to reprise the Kingsmen hit: “Louie, Louie, oh no. Sayin’ we gotta go, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.”

malcolmparry@shaw.ca

604-929-8456

Beauty Night benefit participants Mana Erfani and Kiana Sandres made their relationship as mother and daughter difficult to discern. 

Alex Terziyski and Serbia-team Olympics fencer Hristo Etropolski clashed blades when the ARThritis Soiree raised $285,000 to aid research. 

UH-OH: The sport of fencing has a worrisome-sounding defensive gambit: Beat Parry.

Although utilitarian, the second-floor plumbing pipes in Ross Bonetti’s Livingspace furniture store reflect the facility’s design esthetic. 

Bonetti recently launched the Italian Molteni&C furniture and Dada kitchen-system lines. Droll name aside, the latter has no links with the antibourgeois art movement that surfaced and faded a century ago. It’s worth a visit to Livingspace to see the commodious, full-height Lazy Susan in a Dada display kitchen’s inner corner. Bonetti recently installed 220 kitchens — Arclinea, not Dada — in the near-complete Trump Tower’s residential units, none of which is named the Presidential Suite … yet.

NO MIDDLEMAN: As for home decor, the late Andy Warhol suggested that rather than buy a $200,000 painting, unsure folk should bundle the money and hang it on the wall instead.

Bau-Xi exhibitor Anthony Redpath’s photographs of industrial structures continue the tradition John Vanderpant set here 90 years ago. Photo for the Mac Parry Town Talk column of June 4, 2016. Malcolm Parry/Vancouver Sun. [PNG Merlin Archive]

Backed by his Woman In Striped Dress painting, actress Gabrielle Miller feted James Picard at his exhibition and CKNW Orphans’ Fund benefit. 

Dafne Blanco and David Ng flanked director David Diamond when their Theatre For Living won the BC Liberties Association’s arts award.

Now-Premier Christy Clark was now-Speaker Linda Reid’s health care researcher 20 years ago before being boosted to enter ‘a male-dominated business.’

Former Pierre Trudeau aid Gordon Gibson’s experience with B.C. election-reform failure might have saved Trudeau son Justin much bother today. 

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Those concerned about developers changing the face of Chinatown might ponder the irony of certain overseas investors seemingly doing so in many other neighbourhoods.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca

604-929-8456

SHOW AND MEL: The scene turned upside-down for 600 guests arriving at a recent Terminal City Club event that benefited the Zajac Ranch for Children. That’s because their first glasses of wine were poured by Blink Acro circus-troupe acrobats hanging inverted from the club’s domed ceiling — not something you’d do with hot coffee. More jolly juice was dispensed, food served and live music played in 10 rooms as the fourth-annual Zajac Nights reportedly raised $150,000 toward a five-year target of $500,000.

The money will support camp activities for children whose lives were figuratively turned upside-down by life-threatening or debilitating ailments. Former hotelier Mel Zajac’s own existence was similarly overturned when sons Mel Jr. and Marty died in sport accidents. He founded the Stave Lake ranch and other facilities to memorialize them and to benefit youngsters who, with luck, may grow up to dress stylishly and eat, drink and be merry in support of future hard-luck children.

Daughter Tessa Tanti and mother Joan Stokes feted four-time co-chair Christina Tanti at a Heart & Stroke Foundation fundraiser.

Oncologists Hagen Kennecke and Francois Benard flanked Deborah Roitberg at her BC Cancer Foundation program-launch reception.

B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Bauman addressed Order of Canada and B.C. recipients including Chilliwack band founder Bill Henderson. 

Bauman, Canadian Club president Raymond Greenwood and others marched to the head table as piper Zac Read played The Longest Reign. With fellow SFU Pipe Band members, he’ll seek to win a seventh world championship in Glasgow, Aug. 12-13.

Opening the door at Bob Rennie’s early-morning 60th birthday party, Ian Wallace was faced by a drawing he did of himself in 1983.

At home with Carey Fouks for his 60th birthday, Bob Rennie saw a truck parking lot and disused rail right of way ripe for condo development.

SIXTY YEARS, MUCH ART: Entering Bob Rennie’s 60th birthday party, which began at 7 a.m. recently, artist Ian Wallace expected to see the Armories District home jammed with cultural, corporate, political, entrepreneurial and academic types. And so it was. But the first mug looking back at Wallace was his own in a 1983 drawing of himself. Compulsive collector Rennie has more than 100 other Wallace works, which he’ll exhibit at his Wing Sang building in 2018.

Jeremy Shaw’s short-listing for the National Gallery of Canada’s Sobey Award was good news for his city gallerist, Sarah Macaulay. 

Board chair Nancy Spooner and executive director Rob Gloor greeted guests at a fundraiser for West Vancouver’s Kay Meek Centre. 

Damaged in a December mishap, artist John Horton’s Steveston Lifeboat needs $40,000 from a June 15 event to complete its restoration.

SOS: Having conducted 600 rescues since 1988, feted marine artist John Horton’s 16.2-metre Steveston Lifeboat needed saving itself after a December training accident. Supported by corporations and individuals, the volunteer vessel’s restoration is near complete. A $40,000 shortfall may be resolved June 15 when a Canadian Fishing Company-sponsored event and art auction at the Vancouver Maritime Museum (mary@johnhorton.ca, 604 943-4399) will help Horton rescue more folk endangered at sea.

Vancouver Opera artistic director James Wright was still new to the job in 2001 when founder Irving Guttman said to give it his best shot.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Rueful Canadian Conservatives might caution Hillary Clinton about declaring Donald Trump “just not ready.”

malcolmparry@shaw.ca

604-929-8456

CHUKKER TIME: During his 15 years in England, investment-biz chap Tony Tornquist acquired wife Claudia and a consuming passion. They both did. It was polo, a sport played on 30 fields near their London home. Not so in Vancouver, where only Southlands Riding Club offers a field, albeit far short of the 300-by-160-yard regulation size. The equivalent of five Canadian Football League fields and end zones, such layouts give ponies (horses up to 147.3 cm to the top of the withers) enough space to gallop.

“So, we had to buy some land and make our own, Tony said. Easier to say than pay for. By January, though, they and fellow investors Jay Garnett and Paul Sullivan paid $2 million for eight hectares almost close enough to Boundary Bay for a good whack to set the ball afloat. Their Vancouver Polo Club launched recently with the vancouverpolo.com site advising on dues, games, lessons, boarding and always-welcome spectators. The latter may be left-handed. Not the players, though. International regulations sensibly forbid ponies galloping toward each other with riders swinging long-handled mallets on opposing sides.

Beau Dick donated a carved mask to a Picasso-exhibition-related gala that reportedly raised $500,000 for the Vancouver Art Gallery. 

Kwakwaka’wakw artist Beau Dick’s Bella Coola Mask 2014 backed chair Pamela Richardson at a Vancouver Art Gallery benefit.

THE MUSE HOUR: Some 300 attended a gala for the Vancouver Art Gallery’s four-month exhibition, Picasso: The Artist and His Muses. The $500,000 and change reportedly raised will swell a still-sparse $350-million pot to build a cubist-looking VAG replacement at Georgia and Cambie Street.

Pamela Richardson and Catherine Guadagnuolo chaired the event. The latter was detained by her own construction project: a house in Sicily. Not so Richardson, who is building in town. However, she and husband David did donate for auction a dinner for 12 at their alternate home in Mougins, France, where Picasso, still bedding his many muses, lived from 1961 until his death in 1973.

Kendall Cross, Fiona Winning, Chelah Horsdal and (front) Tracy Starnes and Keegan Connor Tracy dressed Holly Golightly style for golf.

GREEN SCENE: Golfers seldom tee-off in the early-morning rain wearing Audrey Hepburn-style little black dresses and faux gems. But actress Keegan Connor Tracy and her Breakfast at Tiffany’s team did that recently. The 27th Women’s Media Golf Classic and an after-banquet at founder Wendy Lisogar-Cocchia’s Century Plaza hotel reportedly raised $235,000 for the Pacific Autism Family Foundation. Telus donated $100,000. Such a sum could see anyone go lightly to the nearby Tiffany store for real diamonds in the Victoria collection’s pendant-earrings-bracelet-ring foursome.

Singer Jasmine Sandlas and Vancouver International Bhangra Festival artistic director Tarun Nayar attended a U.S. consular reception here.

B.C. Sport Hall of Fame inductee Diane Clement joined husband, sports physician and fellow Olympian Doug who was inducted in 2000. 

Jane Ramirez accompanied W.A.C. Bennett Award winner Arthur Griffiths at the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame’s Banquet of Champions.

CDI founding CEO Colin Brown will study blues with Paul Pigat who co-designed the 6193 Gretsch Synchro Club guitar they’re toting.

CONGRATULAZIONI: Born to Pentecostal ministers, nurtured in a church basement and now heading 8,000-employee Northland Properties, Robert Gaglardi will be named Italian of the Year at the Confratellanza Italo-Canadese Society’s Columbus Day banquet Oct. 1.

Kaeden, Amelia, Mackenzie and Issabella Patel showed their interactive prowess at the opening of papa Neil’s Kabuni design studio. 

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Ottawa could confirm its combat and pipeline shyness by disregarding half-measure Super Hornet fighter jets and equipping the RCAF with ultraslow Solar Impulse aircraft that burn no fuel and couldn’t harm a flea.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

Parkes is reminded of his wife of 17 years Christie by her mermaid tattoo on his forearm.

After six decades as a multi-make auto dealer, Henning Brasso has launched a premium vodka that helps support the Wildlife Rescue Association.

Architects Richard Henriquez and son Gregory saw their firm occupy the basement of the Telus Garden complex it had designed.

Mentees Henrietta Devine, Jennifer Bernard and Lee Murphy backed Forum for Women Entrepreneurs’ chief Lisa Niemetscheck.

Designer Karen Konzuk now enhances her stainless steel and concrete jewellery with diamond-dust surfacing on the latter element.

Former Tory MP Andrew Saxton Jr. received a medal from Hungarian ambassador Balint Odor for promoting bilateral relations. For Malcolm Parry Town Talk column on June 25. [PNG Merlin Archive]

Michel Jacob and Pino Posteraro looked to be arresting fellow restaurateur Hidekazu Tojo when the Japanese government honoured him.

B.C. Professional Fire Fighters Burn Fund director Randy Motkaluk and Dotty Kanke aided a benefit for the Salvation Army’s Kate Booth House.

GHOST TOWN: Pause beside the blue two-floor building at 1255 West Pender Street that has yet to be bulldozed for another commercial or condo tower. Do you hear echoes of Diana Ross and Lionel Richie’s Endless Love? See the dim flash of gold chains from open-shirted men in double-knit suits? Or catch the sweet scent of Harvey Wallbanger cocktails? That was the site of Bud Kanke’s Viva! restaurant-cabaret. Despite being a go-to place that anticipated the meet-and-mate style of his 1985 hit, Joe Fortes, Viva! closed after four years in 1983. The modest building is still there, but who knows for how long.

ROLL BRITANNIA: Will it be onward and upward for the UK or into deep doo-doo? And do the euro and/or pound sterling risk becoming the next bitcoin?

malcolmparry@shaw.ca, 604-929-8456

YOU BET: Hastings Racecourse regulars are accustomed to the Deighton Cup party (July 16 this year) bringing snappy chappies and snugly dressed young women out for a sunny afternoon with the gee-gees. That it’s attracted others was evident recently when the Resource Works Society held a look-alike, if smaller, event called Racing For Resources. With former Sun deputy managing editor Stewart Muir as executive director and two-term Surrey councillor Barinder Rasode as social-responsibility director, the society advocates for the development of resource-based industries and the jobs they offer.

Broadcaster-actress-writer Meena Mann, who emceed, wore a wide-brimmed felt hat rather than one of the “fascinators” that still rule at such events. Fellow broadcaster Arran Henn sported just such a skimmer.

Veteran political strategist Mark Marissen, who recently wed Maryam Atigh, will have 50th-birthday guests represent Good or Evil.

Emergency preparedness minister Naomi Yamamoto feted Asako Okai, Japan’s first female consul general following 43 men since 1889.

His hand injured in a home-renovation mishap, Trevor Guthrie sang at the opening of Christian Chia’s Open Road Audi dealership.

Olympian soccer midfielder Kaylyn Kyle and swimmer Ryan Cochrane were featured at the Omega timepiece firm’s pre-Rio reception.

Ache Brasil troupe member Jina Anika gave samba context to an event that marked Omega’s timing duties at the upcoming Rio Olympics.

Jill Killeen looked as pleased as husband Mike at the CTC News show he anchors being rated first in North American large-market TV.

HOLD ’EM: When independent moviemakers enjoyed their monthly screenings at the ANZA Club recently, a washroom plumbing mishap resulted in bar service being sensibly curtailed. The situation echoed one at a Burnaby plant some years ago when, with overflowing toilets deepening a pool on the floor, a poker devotee dryly cracked: “A full house always takes a flush.”

Arts Club Theatre’s 44-year artistic managing director Bill Millerd saw the production of Onegin win 10 of 11 large-theatre Jessie awards.

After emerging unscathed from combat in Vietnam, Terry Salman was hurt while cycling, then withdrew from the investment firm he founded.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: An article about Sexual Sugar perfume in The Sun June 28 didn’t hint at how some wearers get to take their lumps.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca, 604-929-8456

DOODLE DANDY

U.S. Consul General Lynne Platt’s Fourth of July party was actually held on the fifth. That allowed guests to celebrate alongside and aboard USS Gridley at North Vancouver’s Burrard Dry Dock Pier. The 330-crew destroyer had participated in the multinational Rim of the Pacific Exercise, RIMPAC. Its motto, Fire When Ready, derived from Admiral George Dewey’s command to Capt. Charles Gridley in the 1898 Battle of Manila Bay. Fortunately, that didn’t apply to the 506-foot warship’s forward gun which, given the pier’s alignment, drew a bead on Vancouver city hall. Canadian armed forces personnel present were pleased when Cmdr. Marc D. Crawford recalled an earlier joint exercise in another ocean. “I was truly impressed by Canadian proficiency and professionalism in our Adriatic effort,” he said.

WITHIN WHEELS

Craig Stowe and Nadia Iadisernia are revving up for their seventh-annual Luxury & Supercar Weekend, which will occupy VanDusen Botanical Garden’s 10-hectare Great Lawn Sept. 10-11. Some 8,000 visitors are expected, with perhaps 20 driving away Saturday in an Aston Martin, Ferrari, Rolls-Royce, etc. bought right there. That’s because Adesa Auctions Canada general manager John MacDonald will put 20 such cars under the hammer. No novelty for him. He raised $4.4 million at a dealers-only sale of 40 supercars a fortnight ago, while Adesa reportedly handled 82,000 all-make cars in 2015. There’ll be no Maseratis or McLarens for MacDonald, though. His daily driver is a Ford Expedition SUV.

FAMILY HOME

As in other neighbourhoods, some well kept MacKenzie Heights houses are razed and replaced by less characterful ones two or three times the size. That’s not so with the one to which William and Opal Nightscales brought newborn daughter Linda. Although extended out back, the house faces the street looking as it always has. That changed momentarily this week when a double row of folk formed a wedding arch of ski poles over Linda and husband Dieter Neumueller. They had done exactly the same 50 years earlier outside Knox United Church where the two were married. Today, their daughter Sarah and her daughter Sophie occupy part of the home. With a fourth generation now living there, the modest dwelling wears its past well and, with luck, may do so for generations to come.

OUTWARD BOUND

Artist Callen Schaub literally spun up several paintings in the Winsor Gallery recently. After placing dollops of varicoloured pigment on boards, he rapidly rotated the latter on a table driven by a bicycle crank, chain and other parts. Paint flew outward, of course, some of it over the artist himself. It was part of a debut event for Bombay gin, which can set imbibers spinning quite as effectively as Schaub’s contraption does. 

WHERE’S WOLSKI?

Poland-born, Vancouver-raised Dominika Wolski’s actor-writer-moviemaker career took her to L.A. Her penchant for dressing very lightly might have contributed. Not that there’s much of her to cover. Still, “Paintings that breathe” artist Alexa Meade, whose 2013 TEDGlobal talk was titled “Your body is my canvas,” has done just that. Youtube  video (above) shows how Meade painted then photographed Wolski (now named Juillet) to create the impression of a calendar comprised of two-dimensional vintage pin-ups.

UP IN THE AIR

 Those who like to sail in three dimensions with mountains to spirit them aloft will be at Hope airport July 31. That’s when the Vancouver Soaring Association — vancouversoaring.com — turns 50. The gliding club’s eight amusing rules include the ever-sensible: “Delegate authority. Nobody will listen to you anyway, so they might as well not listen to someone else.”

NO SHOW

West Vancouver resident Parviz Tanavoli’s recent passport confiscation and denial of exit from his birth nation, Iran (Sun, July 5), still generates “Who he?” questions in Canada. Tanavoli, 79, is a celebrated international artist, especially in Tehran, where a huge retrospective exhibition of his sculptures was acclaimed in 2003. His six early books on Persian carpets — he is an authority — are treasured there.

His works are shown in global galleries, but not yet at the Vancouver Art Gallery, where then-director director Brooks Joyner promised him an exhibition. That fizzled in 1996 along with Joyner when a second showing of Andres Serrano’s Piss Pope (few had noticed the first) upset the VAG board.

Imagine the brouhaha in Tehran over a work titled Piss Ayatollah.

Joyner’s successor, Alf Bogusky, iced Tanavoli, too. After his own abrupt departure in 2000 (the board said he resigned), Bogusky addressed an Art Gallery of Calgary audience on the subject, Up Against The Wall: The Public Hanging of Gallery Directors in Canada.

Successor Kathleen Bartels, has avoided that trap door. But she hasn’t shown Tanavoli either.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE

The VAG’s proposed Georgia Street plaza looks pleasantly plain, although I’ll miss that nutty fountain where, fully dressed and with water cascading, I barely beat a seven-month-pregnant woman to the top to win a dozen beer.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca

604-929-8456

ROCK ON: The Beedie Development Group reached billion-dollar status after adopting California’s “tilt-up” wall technique for erecting commercial buildings. As for raising the roof, company founder Keith Beedie’s son, and now president, Ryan did so figuratively at Stanley Park’s open-air Malkin Bowl. That’s where he invited 3,000 friends, colleagues and others to a recent rain-spared Rock’N The Park concert that headlined Huey Lewis & The News. Produced by Catherine and Paul Runnals’ city-based brandLIVE firm, it benefited One, the poverty and preventable-disease advocating organization, the Music Heals Charitable Foundation and generated $50,000 for the Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society.

Dedicating the show to wife Cindy, who urged him to stage it, Beedie echoed Lewis’s lyrics: “Doing it all for my baby for everything she does for me.” What she has done includes delivering three children, including Paige, a guitarist-pianist-singer who is recording a demo album and plans a post-varsity career in music. If that entails performing at a future Beedie concert, she might heed Huey Lewis’s advice in his The Heart of Rock & Roll hit song: “When they play their music, ooh that modern music, they like it with a lot of style. But it’s still that same old back-beat rhythm that really drives ’em wild.” It sure did in Malkin Bowl.

STAY BABY STAY: Even when it’s your sixth time, organizing 22 events over 10 days in seven venues takes serious planning. So it was when Indian Summer Festival managing director Laura Byspalko and artistic director Sirish Rao made July 7 their opening-gala date. By then, though, Byspalko was getting kicks herself from her and Rao’s seemingly unplanned first child, a girl, due July 9. Such babies, like certain entertainers, often arrive late. That being so, Byspalko was at the Roundhouse Community Centre to greet gala-goers although, because of rain, not on its open-air rotunda as hoped. Instead, folk thronged where artists performed and eight restaurants Vikram Vij had recruited, including his own My Shanti, served fare. Meanwhile, the Surya Brass Band played loudly enough to spur the appearance of baby Rao who waited till Wednesday to weigh in at 7.9 pounds.

SHINE! ON: Volume hair salon owner Dean Thullner founded a concert staged by 200 or so medical, showbiz and hair-and-fashion-industry volunteers that reportedly raised some $2 million to benefit a local hospital foundation. “Looking like a million, the show could easily go on the road,” this column reported. But Thullner and the beneficiary parted ways for uncorroborated reasons that the former said would have entailed cutting some gay-related themes from the annual concert’s tableaus. With that relationship ended, Thullner and volunteers have readied a seemingly look-alike show named Shine! Expected to sell out at the previous event’s Commodore ballroom locale Sept. 10, it will benefit the Canadian Mental Health Association and Lions Gate Hospital’s HOpe Centre.

SNAKE EYES: Along the lines of the QE Theatre’s culturally inclined rodents, an exaggeratedly British-accented actress once regaled a New York theatre manager with: “There are mace in my dressing-room wall.” Knowing that stagehands gambled on the other side, he replied: “Madam, those are not mace. They’re dace.”

BIG HAND: It was 1976 when former BCTV news producer Al Clapp overcame opposition, inertia and sparse budgets to stage Habitat Forum on Jericho-waterfront parkland. An informal adjunct to the United Nations Habitat Conference on Human Settlements, it broadened Vancouver’s then-nascent global reputation for environmentalism, sustainability, neighbourly conduct and suchlike. Clapp died in 2013, but his name resurfaced Thursday when UBC’s School of Architecture + Landscape Architecture awarded its inaugural Alan Clapp Prize in Urban Design to Julia Eyerund.

MINUS ONE: Architects’ fondness for the arithmetical + sign in their corporate titles may result in a firm acknowledging a principal partner’s departure by rendering itself as Mullion, Spandrel, Purlin ­– Gable, say.

FAR OUT: Today’s real-estate frenzy has kayoed the investment rule of buying edge-of-town property then waiting for the boundary to move beyond them. Not that Granville-at-57th was Sticksville in 1967 when Peter Wall and Peter Redekop paid $750,000 for the four-hectare Shannon estate. It included the heritage register A-designated mansion that sugar magnate B.T. Rogers built a century ago. Equivalent to 50 large lots, the property was flipped forward by a teacher’s cooperative that had paid $500,000 but couldn’t move in. Redekop did so temporarily. Wall followed, mainly for the Tuesday-night poker games he still holds in downtown’s Wall Centre. Further gambling entailed scrambling to finance rental-apartment development just before a 1970s city council imposed non-conforming zoning. New condos now occupy the site’s eastern half, with 156 more being readied closer to Adera Street. Meanwhile, Wall Financial Corp. recently pocketed $60 million for a Nelson-off-Burrard property — nowhere near the edge of town — that cost $16.8 million in 2013.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca

604-929-8456

DEIGHTON DAY: Promoters Dax Droski, Jordan Kallman and Tyson Villeneuve’s lucky streak seemed to be over when rain threatened their eighth annual Deighton Cup event at Hastings Racecourse recently. It commemorates “Gassy” Jack Deighton whose sometimes-riotous saloon served Vancouver pioneers from 1867 until his death in 1875. But the sun emerged for the Deighton Cup jollities, and more younger attendees than ever occupied the affair’s tented enclosures as well as the entire Exhibition Park facility and sponsored rail-side booths. Men dressed spiffily and women favoured heels, frisky headgear and snug dresses that sometimes evoked the JLo-Kardashian manner. A Maiden Special Weight race opened the running. Mighty Mesa won, with Great Promise and U Better Believeit reflecting the event organizers’ fulfilled hopes for the weather.

Heather Lam, Michelle Mills, Brittany Gorman and Vanessa Yuen ringed Mile’s End Motors’ David Bentil during Deighton Cup festivities.

Image consultant Mandy Carnahan and husband Shawn went the extra mile when attiring themselves for Deighton Cup celebrations. 

Kemi Mathers and Melita Sekgwa found that simple-but-elegant couture worked perfectly well for their Deighton Cup appearances.

Tyson Villeneuve, Dax Droski and Jordan Kallman staged their eighth-annual and biggest-ever Deighton Cup event at Hastings Racecourse.

Here savouring a beer on Main Street, novelist C.C. Humphreys keeps his head clear for a morning writing regimen on Salt Spring Island.

STICK TO IT: Jigme Love and Courtney Watkins kept a hot iron busy in their Mine & Yours fashion-resale boutique recently. The occasion was a Patch Party where attendees had fabric emblems of fruits, flowers, lightning flashes and suchlike fused to their jackets and other garments. The current craze echoes that of hippy-era minibuses or the decals that festoon some current vehicles’ rear ends. In that spirit at least, Watkins sported a smiley-face patch on the seat of her jeans. Love’s only recent adornment was the wedding ring that realty-biz chief technology officer Shane Farkas placed there in May. Single life isn’t a patch on being married, according to Love. “We rarely fight,” she said, adding that she lives here and her spouse in L.A.

Breaking from UBC Masters studies, Sarah Booth and Nicole Zilkie enjoyed Surya Band’s show at Vancouver Art Gallery’s FUSE event. 

Detained artist-author Parviz Tanavoli’s daughter Tandar immediately flew to Tehran to help negotiate his return to Vancouver.

Richard Bell, who shared a Genie nomination with Bramwell Tovey for his film Eighteen, is about to direct the lake-tragedy Brotherhood. 

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Given their mutual reticence, at least we don’t hear Sophie Gregoire Trudeau cribbing speeches by Laureen Harper.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca

604-929-8456

PRIDE INSIDE: TD Bank Group senior VP Mauro Manzi got his usual jump on Pride celebrations by hosting a week-before reception at Celebrities nightclub. As Pride’s six-year presenting sponsor, the bank has committed for three more, Gladstone secondary grad Manzi said. That pleased Oklahoma-born Pride Society president Alan Jernigan. So did the province’s transgender-rights legislation and the city’s Burrard-to-Broughton traffic closure for Friday’s Davie Street Party. In his day job, Charm Games founder Jernigan foresees a 2017 launch for FORM, which will have players “assemble puzzle pieces, unlock doors and open rifts to alternate realities.” Rather like Pride, you might say.

Stephen Murphy joined Western Canada Bank recently to succeed Greg Sprung, who will retire after 10 years as executive VP banking. 

After five at-home years with wife Cheryl and their three sons in West Van, Murphy may spend five days a week in Alberta, where 40 per cent of the bank’s $21.4-billion loan portfolio resides (B.C. 35 per cent, Ontario 12 per cent). National opportunities beckon, too, with the March acquisition of what is now CWB Maxium Financial’s billion-dollar-plus portfolio. Murphy also oversees the $350-million-portfolio CWB Franchise Finance, acquired from GE Capital to serve hospitality-restaurant clients. “We now have more to build off and give more heft to our reach into Ontario,” he said. As for reaching into CWB’s existing base, the longtime commercial banker said: “We might have the loans, but our biggest opportunity is to do more with our business clients.”

A new tool may help. In May, CWB switched to the T24 system that controls all banking operations. “We had grown to the size that, any bigger, we might not have been able to pull it off,” Murphy said of a dramatic revamping that few knew had happened. “You can’t just shut down and say, ‘Come back in a week.’”

Recently made a member of the Order of British Columbia, Red Robinson appeared at an earlier function with 1990 inductee Bryan Adams. 

At a past event, Terminal City writer Heather Faulkner greeted founder Darren Atwater, who now owns London’s feted Wedge Issue pizzeria. 

Here with wife Jenny, Michael Parker has returned from 15 years of restauranting in London to found the franchised Princi Pizza chain. 

Parker may recall his London episode when riding in the oh-so-English 1960 AC Ace roadster papa Jonty restored to win its class in the crème-de-la-crème Pebble Beach concours d’elegance.

Zoe Ferry and Maryam Marissen dressed for each side of the Good and Evil theme the latter’s husband Mark chose for his 50th birthday party.

At this time a decade ago, newly elected prime minister Stephen Harper, wife Laureen and 1,200 supporters attended a Surrey barbecue party. 

Democrats likely wish to find the equivalent of Toto to expose Donald Trump as he did the Wizard of Oz in the film starring Judy Garland.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

Pride’s rainbow has faded for another year. The Honda Celebration of Light? Flash, bang, sayonara. B.C. Day? Back to work everybody, or hit the road in hopes of finding a campsite. But most of August remains for us to take pride in folk of every stripe, to greet others who rocket up to wow us, or simply to feel good about friends, neighbours and others who, like us, find enjoyment in the month that was called Sextillius until Ancient Romans renamed it to honour Emperor Augustus Caesar. Following are such folk who came to this column’s attention in Augusts past.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca, 604-929-8456

2002: At the first such event to be held outside Ottawa, Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson inducted architect Bing Thom, whose Chan Centre had opened earlier at UBC, into the Order of Canada.

2012: Peru-born automation firm head Sandra Higueras (seated left) showed swimwear she designed to aid marginalized women served by the Beauty Night Society Caroline MacGillivray (seated right) founded.

2015: Although Umberto Menghi’s 40-year-old Il Giardino di Umberto restaurant closed seemingly for ever in 2003, he and wife Marion greeted guests at a new iteration’s opening 28 months later.

2011: Costume-partying Tyler Harris produced an engagement ring for Jude Kusnierz at Beaumont Studios which she developed for resident artists, artisans, cultural groups and many community programs.

2002: “It’s a wonderful country to be in,” 85-year-old retired importer-exporter Henry Yip said as the Millennium Gate opened to access the Chinatown where grandfather Yip Sang began building in 1887.

2005: Sir Richard Branson wished Jim Green well as the longtime downtown-east side activist, non-profit housing developer and three-year city councillor embarked upon a second unsuccessful mayoral bid.

2006: At a Thomas and Amy Fung garden party, self made billionaire Jim Pattison chatted with Sam Sullivan who won the 2005 mayoral election and is now Vancouver-False Creek’s Liberal MLA.

2011: Aided here by Michelle Mackay, scientist and fetish fan James Walton had been a craft-beer pioneer in 1994 when he founded highly valued Storm Brewing with equipment he built himself.

2009: “To be shoemaker, you have to be patient,” said four-decade Robson Street craftsman Kung Ho who, though making fewer $3,000-a-pair shoes, applied equal care and skill to those he repaired.

2013: Readying the 13th-annual Whistler Film Festival she co-founded, Shauna Hardy Mishaw said board member and Maverick Award feature director Carl Bessai “truly symbolizes the indie spirit in Canada.”

2010: Wade Grant, Musqueam Nation councillor, economic development coordinator and now special adviser to the premier, would seek but miss election as successor to 14-year chief Ernie Campbell.

2011: Former National Ballet of China star Chun Che feted wife and National Ballet of Canada principal Chan Hon Goh when 34 of her Goh Ballet Academy dancers began a six-city tour of China.

2014: Dressing down for a Livingspace Interiors soirée, designer Brent Beatty escorted companion Thomas Hobbs who raised standards by advising and serving floral and plant-nursery clients for decades.

2015: With 65 years of combined police service between them, Vicki Chu joined husband Jim, the retired Vancouver chief constable and now Aquilini Investment Group VP, at a Fishing For Kids benefit.

2014: Although David Battersby’s declaration of gayness put an end to his and Heather Howat’s marriage, their architectural partnership not only continued but flourished to considerable widespread acclaim.

HEAVEN’S ABOVE: When naming an enterprise further up Main Street, Rachel Zottenberg could have cribbed the MainStreet group’s song, My Main Girl. Instead, the co-owner of the Emerald, Narrow and Uncle Abe’s eatery-drinkeries chose the Pixies hit, Monkey Gone To Heaven. Fitting, too, as her store’s “favourite things” include the mortal remains of many creatures now in mammal or insect Valhalla. Presented in sealed frames, the latter include a plate-sized three-horn rhinoceros beetle that will set you back $98 as well as on your heels. Taxidermy specimens run from mice, birds, stags and Bambis to a $2,100 water buffalo head. The store at Main and 24th, which also offers lollipop-enclosed bugs and help-yourself bowls of dried crickets and mealworms, is play-perfect for 20-month-old son Abraham Labahn. He’d have gone bananas in 2013 had he seen international architect Michael Green’s huge Jell-O sculpture collapse in mama’s overheated Grace gallery, then cascade to the Main-off-Eighth sidewalk.

Nadia Iadisernia and Craig Stowe staged the third-annual Pacific Polo Cup that saw four teams compete at Southlands Riding Club.

Geveen Giorgien and Lindsay Koch promoted eight luxury homes to be built on undeveloped Southlands land that cost $1 an acre in 1889.

The 14th century Great Plague’s recurrence in hospital emergency surgeon Dan Kalla’s 10th novel appeared not to deter friend Tiffany Hoos.

Horses would likely sidestep a real plague outbreak as the fleas that carry the pathogen dislike their smell. Dogs, though familiar with fleas, are essentially unaffected.

Kalla himself is far from immune to Tiffany Hoos, a former University of North Carolina Tar Heels field-hockey centre forward who recently bullied up in the commercial-realty game. Polo ended, the two left to toast their debut year, possibly with Black Plague stout from James Walton’s Storm Brewing concern.

Former stockbroker John Skinner and wife Trish moved to the Okanagan to manage the Painted Rock Family Winery they founded.

Harmony Arts Festival’s Lauren Skinner found Painted Rock wine going well with Thomas Haas’s peach tart with blackberry-honey ice cream.

Former sex-change surgeon Olga Moukhortova and spouse Percy von Lipinksi will move to L.A. to aid singer-daughter Ava Frye’s career.

Britain’s recently deceased third-richest person, the Duke of Westminster, favoured business lunches at Umberto Menghi’s Giardino.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: The $470-million “worker accommodation lodge” at Site C sounds ritzier than the “construction camp” and bare-plywood “bunkhouses” we occupied while building B.C. Hydro’s Terzaghi Dam.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca, 604-929-8456

.  

Cyndi Ankenman greeted Myriam Glotman at a reception for the Cypress Challenge that has raised $2 million to help fight pancreatic cancer. 

“Women have wonderful elbows,” said born-blind Paralympic multi-medalist Donovan Tildseley, here with wine-biz friend Katie Trydal.

BLIND LUCKY: Although born totally blind, Donovan Tildesley, 32, saw his way clear to ride in the recent Cypress Challenge and raise $11,000. That was on a tandem with pal Ryan Dale-Johnson at the handlebars. Their 72-minute climb commemorated Dr. Hugh Tildesley, who succumbed to pancreatic cancer in March after coaching son Donovan to several Paralympics swimming medals and 800- and 1500-metre world freestyle records. A board member of St. George’s school’s Old Boys’ Association, Donovan said its annual golf tournament includes a “beat the blind guy” hole. As for his own polished humour, “The toughest part of being blind is driving and dating,” he deadpanned. His sales job with the Buntain Insurance firm echoes the Frank Crumit song: “For there’s no one with endurance like the man who sells insurance.” That sure fits Donovan Tildesley.

ODD INDEED: Seven police officers with Downtown Eastside beats founded the Odd Squad Production Society in 1997 to make videos that would enhance drug education. They and recent members teamed with the John Volken Academy recently to report on preventing harm and promoting positive decision-making by present-day youth. Speakers included former police officer of the year and gang crime unit member Doug Spencer (now with the Transit police) who addresses 20,000 students annually. He said B.C. provides virtually no funded services for youngsters leaving gangs compared to many offered in Alberta: “But some of these kids have witnessed murders and shootings. You don’t just walk away from that. Some are so broken, they don’t see a way out. I’m certain that, given the chance, they would.”

Audi and Honda owners Randy Wee and Sofia Leposavic played at Open Road Volkswagen’s beach-volleyball tournament and barbecue picnic. 

The old Trans Canada Highway’s Alexandra bridge’s steel-mesh deck lets Fraser Canyon visitors see the river rush directly beneath their feet. 

CTV News anchor Mike Killeen spent a languid birthday afternoon with wife Jill beside an ocean-fronting pool near their home. 

Seen at her birthday celebration, screen actress Zara Durrani earlier impressed hair-restoration conferees with her luxuriant tresses. 

JOHNNY GO LATELY: Global News veteran John Daly will hang up his cleats at a Mahony-Stamps Landing wingding Aug. 31.

The first European to row into Burrard Inlet, Captain George Vancouver

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

CHIME TIME: Christ Church Cathedral dean Peter Elliott took bronze recently. Almost five tonnes of it, in fact, in the form of four bells from the family-owned Paccard Bell Foundry in Annecy, France. There was an Olympics connection, too. The bells commemorate Jack Poole, who headed Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympics bid committee but succumbed to pancreatic cancer shortly before events began. His widow Darlene attended a blessing ceremony for the bells, the largest of which is dedicated to Poole and will sound the concert note of C.

Behind the incense cloud emitted by his censer, Christ Church Cathedral’s Peter Elliott blessed a suite of bells funded by a $2.5-million donation to commemorate Jack Poole.

The late Jack Poole, who dealt to save Christ Church Cathedral from demolition, is seen with wife Darlene, who funded bells in his name. 

For his 2002 Mission Hill Family Winery project, Anthony von Mandl commissioned bells from same foundry Christ Church Cathedral has used. 

George Vergette and Graeme Berglund launched the Ce Soir Noir picnic for black-attired folk that may spur other colour-related celebrations.

IN THE STRETCH: Voice-and-opera professor Nancy Hermiston had front office backing when the UBC Opera Ensemble performed at a dinner-concert developer Peter Wall hosted recently. That’s because newly installed varsity president Santa Ono attended the Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre event. The Vancouver-born former Peabody Conservatory of Music student could have sung along or played cello with the event’s Gala Orchestra. However, a McGill PhD in experimental medicine and post-doctoral Harvard fellowship signalled a different career path.

The ensemble’s performance of Va, Pensiero from Verdi’s Nabucco seemed to welcome longtime expat Ono: “Settle upon the slopes and the hills where, soft and mild, the sweet airs of our native land smell fragrant.”

There was no political scent at the event where Wall welcomed Ono and U.S. Consul-General Lynne Platt rather than earlier campaign beneficiaries Christy Clark and Gregor Robertson. However, he warbled as enthusiastically for soprano Angela Meade as for Jessye Norman at a similar 1992 concert. “It’s like rooting in a race horse,” gambler Wall said then. “And I’ve got a winner.”

David Agler conducted the Gala Orchestra and Nancy Hermiston brought the UBC Opera Ensemble to another concert Peter Wall hosted. 

AT LIFE’S DOOR: Thirteen years ago today, B.C. Cancer Agency radiation and chemotherapy teams began what oncologist David Hay cheerfully called “killing this cancer just before we kill you.” They had two months to obliterate the aggressive esophageal tumour that surgeon John Yee would remove. Had they failed, that deadline might have been literal. But those tender and ever-considerate folk got it done, albeit at the cost of considerable if temporary weight and strength losses. For those starting down or already on that road today, email the address at the end of this column for reminiscences that may hearten you and especially those you love.

Danny Filippone, whose Penthouse club was the subject of Aaron Chapman’s first book, awaits his third, about the 1960s Clark Park gang. 

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Professional photographers may rejoice that our selfie-loving prime minister has at least one cabinet minister willing to blow $6,600 on a few snaps.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

NET GAIN: Past and present hockey players and front-office types attended a Fishing for Kids reception on the Hotel Georgia’s Reflections patio recently. Later, 42 partiers, including Canucks Derek Dorsett and Sven Bäertschi, took off for Langara Island’s Westcoast Fishing Club. Their angling prowess there reportedly added $820,000 to the $7 million previously raised to help the Canucks Autism Network support 2,000 autism-touched families. A 41.6-pound chinook won $200,000 for construction executive Glenn Fereday who, according to event tradition, returned his prize. The results delighted Clara and Paolo Aquilini, who founded the organization and, with other family members, own the Vancouver Canucks team and Rogers Arena.

Clara and Paolo Aquilini founded the Canucks Autism Network that has received close to $8 million from the Fishing for Kids tournament. 

Former Vancouver Canuck Manny Malhotra had Fishing For Kids co-MC Sophie Liu greet him at the Canucks Autism Network benefit. 

Hotel Georgia GM Philip Meyer welcomed Glass Tiger’s Alan Frew who sang at a Fishing for Kids benefit on the hotel’s Reflections patio. 

Until recently, he could have meant month-long Hotel Georgia guest Julia Roberts. Rather than staring from her window, though, she likely reprised the bubble-bath part of that scene in Pretty Woman where, wearing headphones and with Richard Gere watching, she sang along to Prince’s Kiss: “You don’t have to be beautiful to turn me on. I just need your body, baby, from dusk to dawn.”

DREAM ON: “The road doesn’t always have to come to a dark end,” said 19-year-old singer-songwriter Ria Jade who endured eating disorders and severe anxiety en route to hosting Shaw’s third-season eveRIAthing TV program. Youngsters who appear on the show competed in the second annual Wall of Stars concert that Jade presented at the Rio theatre recently. Of that generation, “We can change the world one dream at a time,” she said.

The D word is part of the Kids Dream Big Media Foundation that women’s-prison corrections officer Jaimee Greene and psychiatric nurse Donna Kane founded. Girls in its Academy Angels cheerleading program develop etiquette, public-speaking, leadership and community-service skills, Greene said. As for including sis-boom-bah coaching in her day job, Green referred to an institutional currency substitute by saying: “If someone stole someone else’s Mr. Noodles, it might not be the safest pyramid.”

Plans for Pacific Centre’s Georgia Street plaza do not include a return of the Dutch windmill that Bill Vander Zalm located there for Expo 86. 

SOPHIE SO GOOD: Men who bike-race with hotelier Philip Meyer are often called MAMILS (middle-aged men in Lycra). Global B.C. anchor Sophie Liu’s 18-month relationship with Meyer would likely make her a YWIL, a word only pronounceable by the Welsh. “I’m feeling my legs right now,” Fishing for Kids co-MC Liu said, having earlier pedalled from Squamish to Whistler and back. She felt worse a month ago when a cycling collision with her former spouse fractured her left elbow. That should be a warning to velocipedic mayor Gregor Robertson if he opts to weave through hated car traffic again with ex-wife Amy.

Producer Paul Armstrong led five young directors whose China-shot documentaries will screen at the Vancouver Chinese Film Festival. 

After basing the Kit and Ace chain in Gastown, Shannon, JJ and Chip Wilson saw the latter’s old firm, Lululemon, locate around the corner.

HEAR THE BUZZ? National Honey Month began Thursday.

Today’s airliner berths and night attire were de rigueur for 1930s coast-to-coast passengers who also enjoyed elegant breakfasts in bed.

SHUT-EYE ON HIGH: That report about oh-so-moderne airliner beds and pyjamas (Sun, Aug. 27) might bemuse some mid-1930s New York-L.A. passengers. They reclined beneath the sheets aboard DST (Douglas Sleeper Transport) aircraft that would achieve lasting fame as DC-3s. Slumbering was less serene for me on an upper-deck, lie-flat Tokyo-Vancouver flight when smallish men in large boxer shorts frequently stumbled back and forth to the washroom. But even napping wasn’t feasible on three-hour-20-minute transatlantic flights by supersonic Concorde that included a lengthy repast and related gargling with Laurent-Perrier Grand Siècle champagne.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt might equally have meant today’s putative Republican successor when he said public opinion combined “the unbridled tongue with the unready hand.”

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

HIGH FLYERS: Dueck auto dealer Moray Keith held a showroom party recently to launch Cadillac’s XT5 and CT6 models. Symbolizing manufacturer General Motors’ revival from government bailouts and decades of indifferent models, a large trampoline had gymnasts soar five metres over partygoers’ heads. “We’re trying to get our sales guys to bounce even higher,” Keith said. Watching the rebounders, Vancouver Canucks captain-turned-president of hockey operations Trevor Linden likely shared that view.

Dueck auto dealer Moray Keith threw a party and fashion show to launch two Cadillac models, one of which looked about to crash into him.

Vaunted new models notwithstanding, Keith has collected a dozen classic Cadillacs. The latest is a very-low-mileage 1957 Coupe de Ville. That era’s prominent front-bumper styling inspired the “bullet bra,” a garment not evident when Vancouver Fashion Week designers staged a show on the Dueck sales floor. Among them, Grandy Chu accompanied Andrew Saxton Jr., the former Conservative MP and possible leadership seeker who doubtless hopes the electoral trampoline will bounce him and his party back up again.

Seen on his and henna-decorated Shalina Kajani’s wedding day in 2013, John Daly has retired from a fourth-decade TV news-reporting career.

Global BC sports anchor Squire Barnes and news director-station manager Jill Krop attended John Daly’s wall-to-wall retirement party.

ANCHORS AWEIGH: Television folk celebrated Global reporter John Daly and promotions professional Shalina Kajani’s 2013 wedding in the couple’s penthouse. That lively event was overpowered by a recent wall-to-waller at Mahony & Sons Stamps Landing where, with a poster for the Titanic’s first and last sailing on the wall, colleagues and pals marked Daly’s retirement. On-air tributes included Global New anchors Chris Gailus and Sophie Lui giving the fourth-decade reporter a three-minute sendoff. Promising festivities “from 6 p.m. till dawn,” the party invitation pictured Daly receiving the sole award — reporter of the year — at 1987’s inaugural Jack Webster Awards banquet. A career highlight was his on-the-spot coverage of police raiding then-premier Glen Clark’s home. Now a media heavy himself as president of the Jim Pattison Group and its The News Group North America component, Clark missed a tit-for-tat showing at Daly’s party.

SET-STRAIGHT: Sophie Lui’s surname appeared as Liu in this column Sept. 3. Punsters call that ebacuating one’s vowels.

Movie director Uwe Boll staged a party at his Bauhaus restaurant for his frequent producer, Brightlight Pictures head Shawn Williamson.

PlaceSpeak firm founder Colleen Hardwick and actor Gary Chalk celebrated their third anniversary at Brightlight Pictures’ Bauhaus party.

Global News anchor Chris Gailus and Postmedia crime reporter Kim Bolan attended Global reporter John Daly’s retirement party. 

Chris Haddock and Julia Kwan received the inaugural Daryl Duke prizes for Canadian screenwriting from Lt.-Gov. Iona Campagnolo in 2007.

Gloria Hsu accompanied husband and Taipei Economic and Cultural Office director-general Tom Lee to TAIWANfest celebrations.

MOTHERING WHISTLER: Ganja smoke clouded the screen in 2002 when then-political science student Shauna Hardy Mishaw co-founded the Whistler Film Festival. Although the air has cleared, the purview widened and budgets, attendance and sponsorship increased greatly, she remains as sole executive director.

“We are fundraising for initiatives that will propel us into one of the most important film festivals in the world,” Hardy Mishaw predicted in 2010. During a suitably yeasty fundraiser at Big Rock Brewery recently, she said: “Our festival has presented the work of over 1,000 filmmakers.” One was Coast Salish Talent actor-producer Mary Galloway, whose Unintentional Mother screened in 2015 and who has received the inaugural Kevin Spacey Foundation award for Canadian filmmakers. At the Nov. 30 to Dec. 4 running, “Ten talent programs will serve up to 64 Canadian artists,” Hardy Mishaw said.

ARTSPEAK: “Thoroughly but never didactically, (the artist) scrutinizes dimensions of our telluric existence in terms of the physical, perceptual, and technological interiority that defines us.”

FIRST BITE: The Fishing For Kids tournament has raised close to $8 million for the Canucks Autism Foundation since 2009. For the previous three years, it benefitted B.C. Children’s Hospital Foundation. The Mining Suppliers Association’s Al Cloke and Dave Sharples joined Westcoast Fishing Club’s Brian Legge and Brian and Rick Grange to stage that original angling competition. Their annual event resurfaced in Tofino in 2011 as the Hooked on Miracles tournament that, with related Mining for Miracles programs, has reportedly raised over $25 million for the foundation.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Guess which restaurateur is nicknamed Mr. Grumpy Pants.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456