Cavalia Odysseo creator Norman Latourelle welcomed sponsor Jim Pattison to the circus’s premiere in False Creek’s ‘big top’ tent.

GIDDY UP: None of the Jim Pattison Group’s 23 auto dealerships offer vehicles powered by only 65 horses. But that’s plenty for the Pattison-sponsored Cavalia Odysseo circus running in False Creek’s “big top” tent to March 5. And a run it is, as 12 breeds of stallion and gelding walk, trot, canter and gallop around the tented and sometimes-flooded ring. Meanwhile, a singer reflects Cavalia founder Normand Latourelle’s sentiments with: “The universe is an illusion, infinite poetry, where dreams in a circle caress the thoughts and the world.” Oddly, the show’s most moving moment has horses and riders lie seemingly asleep together as dawn lightens desert dunes on a huge video backdrop. They’re soon moving again, though, with or without riders being whisked aloft to perform on trapeze-style rings. As for balletics, none top Odysseo’s gymnasts whose serial front-and-back-flips at lightning speed — even in shin-deep water — defy more than gravity. Although those acrobatic performers wear no wacky makeup or metre-long shoes, their risible antics echo circus pioneer Phineas “P.T.” Barnum. Knowing that 19th-century audiences saw horses everywhere around them, he said: “Clowns are the pegs on which the circus is hung.”

HOT TO TROT: With ticket demand having already extended Odysseo’s run by two weeks, Jim Pattison could hardly suggest that his old car-salesman inducement system be adapted to sack the least productive horse.

Dennis Duckow photographed a free-flight winner about to take off at Abbotsford Airport’s 2016 The Sky’s No Limit — Girls Fly Too event.

TAKEOFF TIME: Male gymnasts aren’t the only one to soar high in the air — or beyond it. At Abbotsford International Airport, March 11-12, two-mission U.S. astronaut Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper will tell other women (and men) of her 27 days in space that included five space walks. She’ll appear at the sixth annual The Sky’s No Limit — Girls Fly Too, where 15,000 expected attendees will include some who’ll fly — for free — for the first time. Other women will participate in hands-on and passive aviation displays, including a U.S. Boeing B-52H bomber. Founded by 24-year fixed-wing and helicopter pilot Kirsten Brazier to accompany International Women’s Day, the outreach event (www.girlsfly2.com) aims to have women constitute more than today’s 5.8 per cent of Canada’s professional pilots and 2.3 per cent of aircraft engineers.

Dennis Duckow portrayed The Sky’s No Limit — Girls Fly Too founder-pilot Kirsten Brazier beside a vintage Harvard military trainer.

Brazier acknowledges the common perception of such jobs being reserved for men. Addressing that in her 2016 book, A Chick In The Cockpit, jet-airliner captain Erika Armstrong noted that “not a lot of women want to be pilots.” For those who do, “You’ll have to attain the pinpoint focus of a Buddhist monk, trade your soul for flight hours … sacrifice everything and anyone around you for your career, but you can be a pilot, too.”

Margot Paris, Casey Stainsby and Daryl Fretz framed 2008 city-council hopeful Michael Geller who’ll speak on low-rise-high-density Feb. 15.

DOWN TO EARTH: With highrise links going back to the multi-tower 1990s, Bayshore Gardens scheme, architect, planner, developer and one-time city-council candidate Michael Geller will aim lower Feb. 15. His SFU Harbour Centre lecture on how low- and mid-rise buildings achieve high density in Denmark, France, Germany, Holland, etc. should reflect Geller’s authoritative and entertaining global blog.

Jon, Thomas, Heath and Nathan Affolter may hope filmmaking will lead to fame like Warner Bros. studio heads Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack. P

NOT SO CRAZY: After renaming themselves, Polish immigrants Harry, Albert and Sam Wonskolaser and Canadian-born brother Jack starred dog Rin Tin Tin in a 1923 film that cemented their Warner Bros studio’s reputation. Vancouver moviemakers Jon, Heath, Nathan and Thomas Affolter may hope Hollywood lightning will strike again. At least their short The Undertaker’s Son is one of six Crazy 8s contest finalists (from 216 applicants) who’ll have eight days to shoot and edit their movies for judging and a gala screening Feb. 25. Several previous contestants now enjoy professional careers, if not fame.

Crazy 8s executive director Paul Armstrong greeted screen actress Jacqueline Samuda whose pregnancy saw her transition to voice-over roles.

BELLY UP: The British Medical Association insists that expectant mothers be called pregnant people. Screen actors know that either term can mean “unemployed people.” That’s why, with son Griffin Riley due in 2004 and Christian a year later, Jacqueline Samuda began doing well-paid voice-over gigs for animated movies. She then experienced something other pregnant women may. After recording scripted dialogue hours before her first labour, then reviewing it for week-later revisions, “I could certainly hear the breathless element.” Why so? “Having something pressing against your lungs, your bladder and everything else, there’s not a lot of room for breath.” Plenty for a broadened career, though, even for the boys, “who both do voice work, including a recent short (movie) for Pixar.”

Sylvie La Riviere and Kimberley Roseblade’s umbrella fencing in 2015 spurred self-defence instruction at Hastings Street’s Academie Duello.

EN GARDE: Some swordplay students at Devon Boorman’s Academie Duello can now repel attackers with umbrellas. That’s because David McCormick modified bartitsu stick-fighting at a workshop he’ll repeat Feb 26. Practitioners wield standard bumbershoots, not the ones with concealed sword blades. His technique “is simple, effective, and it will protect you,” McCormick promises. It’s a step-up for the West Hastings Street facility, where some already fence with furled umbrellas instead of swords, but now train to do so in earnest.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: However it tries, our weather is less surreally severe than in David Blackwood’s etchings of Newfoundland at the Georgia-at-Hornby Pendulum Gallery. Go see.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

VGH & UBC Hospital Foundation head Barbara Grantham saw the Time To Shine gala Alice Chung chaired reportedly raise $2.88 million.

DAYS OF FUTURE: At only its third running, the recent Time To Shine gala reportedly raised $2.88 million for the VGH & UBC Hospital Foundation. Second-time chair Alice Chung, who’ll stand aside in 2018, saw that sum exceed 2016 donations by $1.2 million, and even top her own $2-million estimate. She and many others welcomed Viva Pharmaceuticals’ ever-philanthropic founders, Jason and Emily Ko, as title sponsors. Gala revenues will support the hospitals’ The Future of Surgery campaign.

As for present-day surgery, guests saw a video of Willie Dalagan, “who could not be kept alive by conventional means,” said Dr. John Yee, the B.C. Lung Transplant Program’s surgical director. With no donated lungs available, Dalagan and his family OK’d pump perfusion that directly oxygenated his blood for three weeks until such organs were found.

Here seen doing voluntary surgery in Togo, John Yee appeared in a Time To Shine video sustaining a patient for three weeks without lungs.

Dr. John Yee.

Far from high-tech surroundings, Dr. Yee volunteers his thoracic skills every year in rural West Africa. As gala banqueters tucked into black cod, duck foie gras, Angus beef and Hokkaido scallop, few knew that Dr. Yee had returned from Togo three weeks earlier. On his final day, he concluded an operation in what resembles an ordinary room with cinder-block walls. Four hours by dirt road later, he flew to Paris, then to Vancouver where an awaiting phone message sped him to VGH to undertake a double-lung transplant.

“In the span of 24 hours, operations were done on opposite sides of the world and at opposite sides of the technology-economic-social development scale,” Yee said. “A remarkable day to experience as a tiny human on this blue planet of ours.”

Not so tiny, many might argue.

Gynaecologist Janice Kwon and brother Brian, a spinal-cord surgeon, entertained Time to Shine gala-goers by playing twin Fazioli pianos.

KEY CONTRIBUTORS: Like summer campers around a fire, the Time to Shine gala’s many physicians entertained each other. At least they did when spinal-cord surgeon Brian Kwon and gynaecologist-sister Janice played Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and Liszt’s Un Sospiro (The Sigh) on matching Fazioli pianos. Earlier, camper-aged Ray Zhang and Isabelle Wang romped through The Entertainer, a 1902 ragtime hit Scott Joplin composed a century before either player was born.

Seen launching Patron premium tequila here in 2006, Canadian actor-comedian Dan Aykroyd went on to develop Crystal Head vodkas.

BOOZE BROTHER: A decade ago, Dan Aykroyd launched his Patron Silver tequila at Kitsilano’s Las Margaritas restaurant. The Canadian actor-comedian later produced Crystal Head vodka in skull-shaped bottles. A like-packaged premium version named Aurora debuted, sans Aykroyd, in the Hotel Georgia’s Prohibition bar recently. Few other body parts seem adaptable to liquor bottles, although opportunities could arise for Stand Fast whisky.

ROOSTER BOOST: While the Lunar New Year dumped white stuff on the Hyatt Regency Hotel, some $880,000-worth of green stuff piled up inside. That was when Margaret Chiu and Heather Pei Huang co-chaired the Scotiabank Feast of Fortune gala to fund specialized equipment for Mount Saint Joseph Hospital’s 60-a-day surgeries. The tally reportedly raised the fundraiser’s 10-year total to $4.7-million.

Following painful first lessons in the kite surfing that impressed Barack Obama, Sir Richard Branson relaxed beside the now-late Jim Green.

EXTRA VIRGIN: The kitesurfing prowess that Sir Richard Branson showed Barack Obama this week began in Squamish. There, in 2005, two instructors subjected tyro Branson to long, punishing routines. Easing his pains with drinks at Lift restaurant, the Virgin mogul toasted the late Jim Green whose mayoral campaign would leave him bruised, too.

Stacey Dallyn commemorated fentanyl-felled son Jack Simpson with a painting at a SoMa Gallery benefit exhibition for Covenant House.

NEVER ENDING: Cathy Jenkins recruited fellow artists Niina Chebry, Cori Creed, Tiko Kerr, David Robinson, David Tycho and others to exhibit at a fundraiser she organized with SoMa gallery director Don Macmillan. Spurred by hundreds of deaths linked to the drug fentanyl, the event benefited the child-and-youth-care agency Covenant House. The theme particularly touched exhibitor Stacey Dallyn, whose son Jack Simpson would have recognized her painting’s Whistler scene. Jack died March 26 at age 18 after receiving addiction treatment in Utah. Dallyn’s artwork was tagged $2,000, but she would have paid 100 times that not to have created it.

Backed by a David Tycho painting, Rachael Biggs presented her drug-related memoir at an art exhibition addressing the fentanyl-death crisis.

BIGGS HEARTED: Also at SoMa gallery, Tahsis-born author Rachael Biggs presented Yearning for Nothings and Nobodies. The former ghost writer’s first bylined book includes hopes for her reunited addict-mother “to be something else until the day she died and I realized the perfection of exactly what she was.” The memoir is leavened with “plenty of promiscuity, some incarceration, lots of drugs, heartbreak, some boxed wine, self-loathing, intense loneliness [and] international stripping.” That’s without bringing in British great-uncle Ronnie Biggs, the 1963 Great Train Robbery gang member who accompanied the Sex Pistols punk band to record the song No One Is Innocent.

HOME AGAIN: After publishing some 30 books, globally feted artist Parviz Tanavoli launched his European Women in Persian Houses at the Roundhouse Community Centre recently. The event helped fund the Neekoo Philanthropic Society’s student grants. Tanavoli’s 1977 book, Locks from Iran, proved prophetic last July when officials temporarily denied the Canadian-Iranian citizen’s departure from native-city Tehran.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: La Stella winery’s description of its lightly effervescent Moscato d’Osoyoos as “culinary foreplay” may encourage some men to empty the bottle as quickly as possible and promptly fall asleep.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

WALTZ TIME: Fundraising galas come and go. But only one has the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra play Strauss’s Radetzky March and Lehar’s Gold and Silver Waltz for cocktail-fuelled guests entering the ballroom. After the recent Symphony Ball’s prawn-and-tuna salad, beef tenderloin and berry-and-chocolate-laden coconut-cream pavlova, the orchestra got attendees dancing to eight more Strauss and Lehar waltzes and popular foxtrots. The unique format had pleased attendees 25 times before AJ McLean and Karin Smith co-chaired the 2016 and 2017 balls. For all the romance of pirouetting to Blue Danube, Ballsirenen and Vienna Blood, organizers laboured to increase the $11 million previously raised for VSO performance, education and community programs. Happily, the night ended with dancers learning they’d helped generate $750,000.

WHAT A PAL: While gala chairs must look after guests’ and sponsors’ every need, it sometimes works in reverse. Sure did during a recent Paris buying trip when Boboli store owner Maggie Murphy spotted a Stella McCartney Venetian-blue gown. Deeming it perfect for Symphony Ball co-chair AJ McLean, “I ordered just one, in one size, so no one else in this city has it.”

Joti Thind and Brittany Newton relished Ketel vodka Boisson Gazéifié cocktails illuminated by a Science World plasma-display globe.

Hendricks gin and Tuxedo cocktail mixings arched over Nomad restaurant bar manager Matthew Benevoli at the Science of Cocktails event.

SCI-FINE: Science of Cocktails co-chairs Tristan Sawtell and Warren Tsoi were stirred, if not shaken, by their second annual $150-ticket event’s success. It filled Science World’s first and second floors with 31 bars, 13 food stations and 1,500 guests eager to get their money’s worth. The science entailed bar-top robotics, booze fountains, liquid-nitrogen tricks and the False Creek facility’s many hands-on displays. Science World president Scott Sampson welcomed the event’s $240,000 funding of a “field-trip bursary initiative for students from underserved schools.” As for the occasional over-served attendee, a splashed restroom washbasin confirmed arch-scientist Isaac Newton’s third law: To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Watching today’s orchestra perform, former VSO flute player Liesa Norman fronts The Leisure Principle group with an album due March 2.

I’M WITH THE BAND: Not any more, she isn’t. But former VSO flute player Liesa Norman did step back to greet current musicians at the Symphony Ball. “Back” refers to her physical presence, not her gown, which didn’t have any. Player-singer Norman’s front-line activity now is the album she and The Leisure Principle group will debut at a Media Club concert March 8. They’ll be accompanied again by former Swollen Members rapper Prevail and the Alpha Omega ensemble.

Peter Chrzanowski has broken many bones climbing, skiing and making dozens of movies in the world’s highest, most dangerous places.

FAST FRIEND: Opening the Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival he founded in 1998, Alan Formanek spoke affectionately of B.C.-based Peter Chrzanowski who has shot more movies — including If You Fall, You Die — than most tough guys have shot pool balls. He’s skied Canada’s “impossible” Mount Robson, tumbled 700 vertical metres from Peruvian Mount Ranrapalca’s summit, smashed both legs while hang-gliding, and likely regrown an entire skeleton damaged by extreme-sport mishaps. Regarding a name sounded Cher-noff-ski, “We call him Peter Should-not-ski,” Formanek said, laughing.

Bramwell and Lana Tovey’s daughter Jessica was born in 2000 (pictured in 2001) when he became the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s musical director.

GOOD CONDUCT: Music director Bramwell Tovey missed the Symphony Ball. No doubt he’ll be there next February before handing his baton to Otto Tausk on July 1. It’s been a long innings for Tovey, who left the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra in 2000 to succeed VSO conductor Sergiu Commissiona. Wife Lana delivered daughter Jessica just as Tovey began work here, but the VSO has remained his baby all along. Regarding his prizefighter features, Tovey amused one audience with: “I was cosmetically challenged, so I got a job where I can turn my back on people.” In fact, he welcomed the community face-to-face and soon earned its respect and affection. As a teenager, Tovey played the euphonium (tenor horn) with British Salvation Army bands. Perhaps he’ll bow out with the VSO accompanying his horn rendition of the Sally Ann favourite, Come And Rejoice With Me.

Forum For Women Entrepreneurs’ 15-year event Feb. 20 will be a feather in the cap or flower in the corsage for founder Christina Anthony.

BEST SHOT: Three finalists will compete for $25,000 at the Forum For Women Entrepreneurs’ Pitch for the Purse Feb. 20. Richmond-raised jazz singer Christina Anthony launched the organization in 2002 after returning from Wall Street bond trading to become an Odlum Brown director and pregnant for many early FWE events.

Martine Argent and daughter Morgan wore Michael Costello and Robert Cavalli gowns when the latter made her debut at the Symphony Ball.

MOMMY NEAREST: Martine Argent’s family name means “silver.” But it’s often her jewelry’s platinum settings and hefty diamonds that shine when she attends social events. For the Symphony Ball, though, Argent left the rockery at home and brought along daughter Morgan for the latter’s first formal public appearance. The two still provided glitter aplenty in gowns by Michael Costello and Roberto Cavalli respectively.

Nordstrom general manager Chris Wanlass said the Vancouver department store outsold the chain’s others in its first full year in business.

NO TRUMP: White House bluster aside, Ivanka Trump reportedly displayed only three slow-selling shoe styles at Vancouver’s Nordstrom department store. Meanwhile, it outsold the chain’s 117 other stores in first full year 2016, general manager Chris Wanlass said without divulging hard numbers. Such success would hardly cheer Eaton’s and Sears who rose and fell there before the building was remade for Nordstrom.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: GivenWest Georgia Street’s potential for drugs and crime, a certain new complex could block its front door with a wall and demand that city hall pay for it.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

Sophie Lui, Coleen Christie and Robin Gill gave moral support to fellow TV news type Chris Gailus who was the Bacchanalia gala’s MC.

Wine festival Bacchanalia gala chair, Jana Maclagan, and husband Bill readied for a night of many offerings, on the plate and in the glass.

WINE O’CLOCK: After rinsing with Summerhill Pyramid Winery’s Traditional Cuvée 1996, $450-a-ticket guests at the Vancouver International Wine Festival’s Bacchanalia gala knew exactly what they were getting into. Rather what would get into them. The glasses blanketing each banquet table would soon hold Italian and Napa Chardonnays, two American Pinot Noirs, an Italian Brunello, a Bordeaux-style Okanagan wine, a genuine 2001 French Bordeaux, an Australian Shiraz, and beddy-byes beakers of 20-year-old tawny port. Complementing the cascade, Hotel Vancouver executive chef Cameron Ballendine provided a “tidal pool,” of caviar, salmon, tuna, lobster and six shellfish, followed by roast pheasant, 40-day-aged Angus beef, a “field of cheese” and six dessert confections. Whereupon, and with $280,000 reportedly raised, third-time chair Jana Maclagan and husband Bill, the Blake Cassels & Graydon managing partner, relaxed at that law firm’s corporate table. Benefitting the Bard on The Beach theatre company, the gustatory gala might have delighted Shakespeare’s good-life devotee, Sir John Falstaff, who nevertheless figured: “The better part of valour is discretion.”

Bard On The Beach artistic director Christopher Gaze launched the Bacchanalia gala by performing Bernard Levin’s On Quoting Shakespeare.

BARDON ME: Falstaff’s “better part” line is still common today. So are others journalist-author Bernard Levin compiled in his On Quoting Shakespeare. Bard On The Beach chief Christopher Gaze got Bacchanalia started by reciting that 370-word work. In it, Shakespeare finds cold comfort and bids good riddance to bloody-minded and tongue-tied folk occupying a fool’s paradise where, without rhyme or reason, they deem it high time to play fast and loose. Google “levin quoting shakespeare” for many more.

Semiha Abdullah Inan designed her own gown when she and spouse Zanil Bora Inan, Turkey’s consul general, attended Bacchanalia.

DRESSING HERSELF: Three millennia ago, Greek poet Homer praised wines from part of present-day Turkey. Commercial winemaking resumed there in 1925, three years after starting in B.C. With some 1,000 varieties, Turkey is the world’s fourth-largest grape producer. So it was no surprise when the 12-month Turkish Consul General, Anil Bora Inan, and wife Semiha Abdullah Inan attended Bacchanalia with U.S. Consul General Lynne Platt and husband, Jud Hamblett. Semiha even made her own gown. Not a home-sewing project, either, as the former banker-economist is now a scholarship fashion-design student at our Blanche Macdonald Centre.

Lamborghini’s Aventador S coupe made a one-day appearance at the Vancouver dealership with look-at-me paint and a half-megabuck pricetag.

PLOWING ON: Enzo Ferrari scoffed in 1963 when tractor-maker Ferruccio Lamborghini vowed to build automobiles as speedy, elegant and expensive as his own. The 69-year-old Bolognese firm still makes more tractors than tourers. But there are plenty of the latter, all named for fighting bulls. Lamborghini’s latest model, the Aventador S, had a one-day showing at Asgar Virji’s dealership recently. Speedy? 350 km/h. Elegant? Che bella! Expensive? That $463,775 pre-tax tab would cut a deep furrow in anybody’s billfold.

ATTERTON AT IT: Odysseo circus’s horses will now perform until March 12, three weeks later than planned. The show’s wild-west riding style would amuse former city-based aviation-biz official Harry Atterton, who did it for more serious purposes. He and other recruits in the Household Cavalry, Britain’s royal bodyguard corps, had to pass inspecting officers unseen by lying concealed by their galloping horse’s bodies. Then, taking a series of low jumps while blindfolded and backwards in the saddle, they uninterruptedly recited their names, ranks and serial numbers. Finally, rigged out in control-impeding breastplates, plumed helmets and thigh-high kinky boots, they trained to protect the Queen by speedily surrounding her with a bomb-and-bulletproof wall of human and horseflesh. No circus act, that.

Bill Lui, who produces B.C.’s costly One Faith wine, vamped with Andre St. Jacques who seeks the best for his Bearfoot Bistro at Whistler.

SAVING FAITH: Time was when Andre St. Jacques all but popped a cork while bidding for the most, the best and the costliest Bacchanalia wine-auction lots. Whistler visitors paid much more for them later at St. Jacques’ Bearfoot Bistro. More composed now, he still noses for good stuff. Stepping out for a ciggy, he powwowed with former merchant banker Bill Lui who launched the Okanagan’s One Faith Vineyards firm, then asked — and got — $165 a bottle for its debut Grand Vin 2012. It’s a classic Bordeaux blend of Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc. St. Jacques may have been angling for the unreleased 2014 vintage that Lui figures could be even better — and pricier.

YEA, NORM: Cab drivers call their trade “pushing hack.” Maybe that’s where cabbie Norman Armour got the name for the multidisciplinary, international-themed PuSh Festival he founded in 2003 and that recently wrapped what many called its best-ever running. That’s worth a decent tip any day.

Backed here by a Michael Wesik painting, Vancouver Art Gallery chief curator Daina Augaitis will end her 21-year duties December 31.

YEA, DAINA: Sayonara to Daina Augaitis who handled artist-collective Western Front’s mid-1980s exhibitions, headed Banff Centre’s Walter Phillips contemporary-art gallery, became the Vancouver Art Gallery’s chief curator and associate director in 1996, worked alongside directors Brooks Joyner, Alf Bogusky and Kathleen Bartels, and will leave Dec. 31.

YEA, BILL: After 45 years of countless hits and a few turkeys, Arts Club Theatre artistic director Bill Millerd will hang ’em up Dec. 31, too. He embodies Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun lyrics that butchers, bakers, grocers and clerks would “gladly bid their dreary jobs goodbye for anything theatrical and why? There’s no business like show business.”

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

At the first kickoff party for what is now the Trump International Hotel, Holborn Group principal Simon Lim poured champagne all night long.

As partiers tossed it back, Diana Krall sat at the piano to play tunes such as Frim Fram Sauce. That was 2005, and the Arthur Erickson-designed building at Georgia and Bute Street was to house a 147-room Ritz-Carlton. But the economy tanked, Ritz-Carlton took a hike and, in 2009, Trump signed on.

Current Holborn head Joo Kim Tiah took over and the hotel opened for real Tuesday with a party in its ballroom, Drai’s nightclub and Hong-Kong-based Mott 32 restaurant. There was real champagne, too, but it came later on in the form of a 12-litre bottle of Moet Imperial that could have given sommelier Robert Stelmachuk a hernia as he tossed it around.

No Ms. Krall, this time, but rather an all-too-common deejay who made conversation a challenge for some in the ballroom. Nonetheless, some had plenty to say.

Finance-biz fellow Cary Pinkowski said he and wife Katya were at Mott 32 a week ago “for one of the best meals I ever had.” It included smoked cod that all but knocked him out. He’ll doubtless be mighty impressed in five months time when Katya delivers the couple’s first baby, a girl.

Thai House chain owner Desmond Chen, who attended with wife Peachy, endorsed Pinkowski’s rating. “It was expensive but very good,” he said of Mott 32, “and the juicy dumpling was something I’ve never had anywhere else.”

Faubourg restaurant owner Franck Point said the breakfast croissants served to hotel guests and residents are just right. No surprise there as he supplies them. Point arrived with Le Crocodile owner Michel Jacob, who hadn’t dined at Mott 32. Things are better for him, though, as Joo Kim Tiah comes to his place often for frog legs with foic gras.

The latter cruised around with friend Ken Hsieh, the global and Vancouver Metropolitan Orchestra conductor in whose Tokyo apartment he sometimes stays. He’s also a professional-level drummer, Hsieh said, but has yet to play a gig around town. That shouldn’t be hard to arrange now that his hotel is open.

Two chaps with a professional interest in the $360-million, 63-floor tower were LMS Steel Group co-principal Ivan Harmatny and Whitewater Concrete owner Kyle Smith who supplied the steelwork and formwork “three weeks ahead of schedule,” Harmatny said.

Still, despite the initial misstep and a longer development time that Holborn expected, the tower is up, occupied and fully running. Regarding architect Erickson, Lim said: “Arthur should be on our skyline.” And so he is.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca

BURSARY TIME: A recent gala banquet at North Vancouver’s Pinnacle Hotel at the Pier reportedly raised $178,000 for the nearby Kenneth Gordon Maplewood School’s bursary program. That private facility for children with learning disabilities had 100 K-to-Grade 7 students in 2010 when it leased and refurbished a former elementary school in six weeks flat. Today’s 191 students go to Grade 12, and there is space for further enrolment.

Tracey Miller and Eva Cipera co-chaired a bursary benefit for the Kenneth Gordon Maplewood School for children with learning disabilities.

Music teacher Rafe Haines’s band, Whiskey Jane, entertained at a gala where first-time co-chairs Tracey Miller and Eve Cipera almost doubled their fiscal target. Bursaries so funded will “enable us to share … the specialized learning environment,” Miller said.

According to head of school Jim Christopher, KGMS students gain “an understanding of their own learning style and a vision of their own success … to be successful self advocates in the real world.” Board chair Gregory Henriquez’s mother Carol did something similar by co-founding the Arts Umbrella organization in 1979.

SAMBA TIME: Caipirinha cocktails flowed when the Born Brazil organization staged a Backstage Lounge tribute to Rio de Janeiro’s pre-Lenten Carnaval festival. Sao Paulo-born event organizer Andrea Monteiro celebrated the samba’s 100th birthday by dancing with the Samba Fusion troupe she and Carine Carroll founded. Monteiro also beats the surdo bass drum in the Sambata percussion ensemble that, with Sambacouver, played while partiers competed for dance-move prizes. Ballet-trained Monteiro’s own moves included gyrating with a feather-duster-like costume component attached to what Brazilians would call her bunda. That technique might be handy in her day job as owner of the Maid In Heaven home-cleaning service.

Zahra Mamdani lifted a named-for-her Z75 cocktail while opening Hendricks resto bar in the Westin Grand hotel, one of six her family owns.

HERE ELSE: Weeks after her family sold its 24-home Retirement Concepts chain to China’s Anbang Insurance Group for a reported billion dollars, Zahra Mamdani opened Hendricks resto-lounge in the Westin Grand hotel. Her Jamal family members substantially own that Robson Street hotel along with five others. They assembled their substantial nest egg after leaving Tanzania in 1971 to launch a Chilliwack poultry farm. Mamdani, who closed her Wear Else? womenswear store last year, said rock’n’roll-themed Hendricks, formerly named Hidden, acknowledges the late Jimi Hendrix. In turn, the bar acknowledges her with its Z 75 cocktail of Grey Goose vodka, champagne, lemon juice and raspberry purée. It’s a variant of the French 75, named for a quick-firing artillery piece. Such drinks may salvo Aug. 19 when Mamdani marries a Washington state construction-firm owner “to become Mrs. Salisbury.” With a steak house to follow, perhaps.

Barbara-Jo McIntosh closed her Books to Cooks store after two decades of selling thousands of cookbooks and writing a few of her own.

CAN DONE: It’s almost 30 years since Barbara-Jo McIntosh opened the Cambie-off-Broadway restaurant that became Beetnix and now La Taqueria. Twenty years ago, she launched the Barbara-Jo’s Books to Cooks store and demonstration kitchen that closed for good Tuesday. While offering hundreds of cookbooks, many rare and expensive, McIntosh became an author, too. Her vastly useful Tin Fish Gourmet should have folk-in-a-hurry whip up creamy-garlic clam chowder, oyster pot pie, salmon coulibiac and other dishes for decades to come.

Global orchestral conductor Ken Hsieh feted friend and Holborn Group CEO Joo Kim Tiah whose firm developed the Trump project here.

CLOUDED VISION: The Trump International Hotel’s recent opening party saw some 700 guests throng its ballroom, Mott 32 restaurant and Drai’s nightclub where President Donald Trump’s sons Donald Jr. and Eric mingled briefly in a roped-off area. With no equity in the Holborn Group’s development, the family licensed its name long before Donald Trump Sr. entered politics.

Not good enough for Gregor Robertson who was into his second mayoral term and still part-owner of the Happy Planet Juice Co. when the licence agreement was signed. “Trump’s name and brand have no more place on Vancouver’s skyline than his ignorant ideas have in the modern world,” said Robertson, who wasn’t at the event.

West Vancouver realtor Saba Tavakoli vamped with oh-so-English Nicholas Ning at an opening party in the Trump hotel’s Drai’s nightclub.

More effervescent than their wine, Shirley Huang and Rachel Chan bracketed Ben Chou at the Trump International Hotel’s debut party.

Oddly, his and Vision councillors’ sensitivity to arms-length business relationships didn’t prevent them from cheerfully attending events in the Vancouver, Pacific Rim and Waterfront hotels. Until a year ago, their controlling owner — not license signatory — was Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal.

WhiteWater Concrete and LMS Steel Group principals Kyle Smith ands Ivan Harmatny furnished formwork and steel for the Trump Tower.

Faubourg and Le Crocodile restaurateurs Franck Point and Michel Jacob kept sharp eyes on food served at the Trump hotel’s costly Mott 32.

His own philanthropic efforts aside, Al-Waleed’s royal family rules an utterly undemocratic nation that flogs, beheads and amputates the hands of many, including gays, stones female adulterers even when they have been raped, bars women from driving, imports labour and sexual slaves, prohibits non-Muslim worship, and drastically censors media. No modern world there, your worship.

STAND ALONE: Other than the Trump, few B.C. hotels even hint at U.S. presidents. Of those that do, Hastings-off-Main’s Roosevelt Hotel is a social-housing facility, New Westminster’s Garfield Hotel accommodates at-risk homeless, and Maple Ridge’s Garfield Hotel & Spa boards cats. Alaska Highway’s Taylor Lodge Motel recalls area fur trader Herbie Taylor, not 1849-’50s president Zachary Taylor. And the classic Harrison Hot Springs Resort & Spa commemorates HBC official Benjamin Harrison rather than the same-named 1889-1893 president.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: While Mexican airport-hotel bus escorts usually suggest tipping, one in Puerto Vallarta got a somewhat wry laugh recently with: “It’s not for the driver, but to help pay for the wall.”

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

BORN FREER: Medical-related fundraisers often have research physicians and static displays to remind attendees what their money will buy. B.C. Women’s Hospital & Health Centre went further when Karim Kassam and Sonia Sayani co-chaired the Glow gala in the Pan Pacific hotel. President Jan Christilaw could have simply shown arriving guests a new-technology device from the hospital’s months-old research centre for ultrasound. Instead, diagnostic radiologist Dr. Denise Pugash sat at it to demonstrate real-time internal images of obstetrician Chelsea Elwood lying on a gurney beside her. A fellow in reproductive infectious diseases at B.C. Women’s, Dr. Elwood has twin girls due in mid-May. Gala-goers marvelled at high-resolution 3D images of the sisters’ hearts beating. By night’s end, they’d contributed $738,000 to fund three such machines for the hospital’s newborn ICU.

B.C. Women’s Hospital president Dr. Jan Christilaw thanked Annar Mangalji who donated Pan Pacific hotel facilities for a $780,000 fundraiser.

Aiding those contributions, Mangalji family members donated gala facilities in their newly renovated, 503-room hotel. They and other Ismailis were evicted from Uganda by president Idi Amin. It’s ironic that the 1971-1979 dictator’s lamentable birth should help benefit many Canadians who have still to do so.

WORLD VIEWS: The 12th annual Women in Film and Television Vancouver organization kicked off International Women’s Day by screening Iranian director Nargas Abyar’s Breath. With a Skype Q&A session and post-screening celebration at the Vancity VIFF theatre, it opened the five-day Vancouver International Women in Film Festival. Schedule’s global offerings featured several by B.C.-based filmmakers.

Filmmakers Elizabeth Sanchez and Brishkay Ahmed backed Laura Adkin, Shauna Johannesen and Maja Aro at the Vancouver International Women In Film Festival launch.

Those at the premiere event included Laura Adkin, Maja Aro, Shauna Johannesen, and Brishkay Ahmed and Elizabeth Sanchez. The latter two made Unveiled: The Kohistan Video Scandal, which details constitutional and tribal justice at odds in the deaths of four Pakistani girls. Ahmed, who also directed a prime-time courtroom series in Afghanistan, said: “It is critical that more and more people support women’s rights today.”

Tayybeh organization founder Nihal Elwan and Rawa Mahouk showed the cuisine that helps Syrian women settle down in Canada.

EAT AND GREET: Two-decade international-development professional Nihal Elwan had festival guests feast on mutabbal and hummus spreads, fattoush salad, sheesh tawook chicken-and-vegetable skewers, waraa enab stuffed vine leaves and other Syrian cuisine. More seriously, the Tayybeh organization that she founded helps Syrian immigrant women assimilate in Canada.

Claiming that “all Syrians are amazing cooks,” Egypt-born Elwan recruited some to prepare dishes for Tayybeh, the Arabic word for “kind” that means “delicious” in Syria. Its inaugural October pop-up dinner at Tamam Palestinian restaurant led to events that reportedly double every time and sell out in minutes. “It is getting overwhelming, fantastic,” said Elwan, who expects to launch a catering arm “soon.”

BMW dealer Brian Jessel and partner Jim Murray fronted the St. Tropez-themed Cabriolet gala to benefit pancreatic cancer organizations.

Joes Fortes executive chef Wayne Sych and assistant GM Albert Chee served smoked albacore with orange miso on taro chips at Cabriolet.

KICKING TIRES: The 12th annual Cabriolet charity gala ran in the Brian Jessel BMW dealership’s new-car showroom recently to benefit Pancreatic Cancer Canada and Pancreas Centre B.C. The Evening in Saint-Tropez theme gave Diane’s Lingerie store carte blanche for models to parade in mostly black underthings. Meanwhile, white-suited Jessel spends many evenings in Cabo San Lucas, where he’s built a hacienda and part-owns Sharky’s Mesquite Restaurant. With partner Jim Murray ever at the wheel, though, the dealership reportedly sold 4,800 cars last year, up 1,000 from 2015.

Mostafa Keshvari photographed himself with ballet dancer Leeza Udovenko whose animated form stars in his Cannes-bound film Music Box.

KICKING FOR CANNES: Although non-grata in Trump America, Iran-born Vancouver resident Mostafa Keshvari, 30, expects France’s welcome in May. His Music Box will screen at the Cannes Film Festival where his 22-minute I Ran did in 2015. The new film is “a strong surreal animation that deals with sexism and social media,” the former BMO financial-services manager said. Made by a fivesome from Bolivia, Canada, Mexico, Iran and Ukraine, it portrays ballet dancer Leeza Udovenko “trapped in a music box that is actually a cel phone, and she has to find her own voice to get out.”

Keshvari was encouraged when The Salesman’s Iranian director, Asghar Farhadi, boycotted his recent second Oscar win but sent a message that included: “Film-makers can capture shared human qualities and break stereotypes of various nationalities and religions … not just limited to the United States; in my country hardliners are the same.”

Keshvari is readying a feature film about fellow nationals who immigrated to the U.S. “It will be an intimate picture of an Iranian family. I know I can tell the story authentically,” he said. “You can’t do that in Iran.”

COMMUNITY CHEST: The Surrey Memorial Hospital & Outpatient Foundation took off to the reported tune of $1.3 million recently when Haisha Ashrafi and Fay Bond chaired its Sky’s The Limit thoracic surgery benefit in a Boundary Bay airport hangar.

A 10-years-younger Trevor Linden joined wife Cristina when she and Liselott Montesano opened their Basquiat fashion store in Yaletown.

TEN YEARS AGO: Rain had Yaletown’s warehouse bay surfaces glistening like ice when Vancouver Canucks captain Markus Naslund and centre/right winger Trevor Linden attended the Basquiat clothing store’s launch. Owned by Linden’s wife Cristina and jewelry designer Liselott Montesano, it became popular with then-gung-ho pucksters. They’d caught fire under new coach Alan Vigneault and would end the season as Northwest Division champs and the league’s top penalty killers. Basquiat’s premises now house Monti Samuel and Iva Pownall’s Blush Bridal store.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

Premier Christy Clark was welcomed by SUCCESS foundation chair Sing Lim Yee at the society¹s annual fundraising gala.

Cecilia Heung and Alive Health Centre president Alice Chung dressed to the glamorous nines for the Bridge to SUCCESS gala.

GIVING ROOM: The United Chinese Community Enrichment Services Society (a.k.a. SUCCESS) drew 750 people to the Westin Bayshore hotel ballroom for its recent gala. Chair Grace Wong and foundation chair Sing Lim Yeo joined event co-chairs Brandon Hui, Jason Lam and Walter Soo to announce $539,109 had been raised. Addressing attendees, Wong said the society has “for 44 years supported many hundreds of thousands to succeed and to give back to their adopted country.” Soo added: “We don’t give to get. We give to encourage others to give.” The event traditionally attracts politicians, especially with elections due. Those there recently included Premier Christy Clark, who promised $9 million for a 109-unit mixed housing project the society, Victoria and the city will fund.

International trade minister Teresa Wat attracted many with the higher-style version of the Beijing Cotton Shoe she discovered in Zhuhai.

HIP TO TOE: International trade minister Teresa Wat showed something appropriate for her portfolio at the Bridge to SUCCESS gala. It was a version of the Beijing cotton shoes usually worn by older women. Wat purchased them while recovering from a broken hip in Zhuhai on the so-called Chinese Riviera. Traditionally decorated but with raised heels and closer fit, “They are so comfortable,” Wat said. Appealing, too, according to many gala-goers who eyeballed them.

CANTON QUIET: The Vancouver Police Pipe Band’s Tim Fanning played Atholl Highlanders while leading Christy Clark and dignitaries into the Bridge to SUCCESS gala. The whole band will doubtless reprise it at a tattoo in Nanchang, China, Sept. 20-30. During a 1988 gig, Guangzhou coppers reported “eleven 911 calls in one day — for six million people,” Fanning whistled. That mega-city’s population is 13.5 million today.

Kim Galavan feted former Yorkton Securities colleagues Frank Giustra and John Skinner on producing world beating Domenica Fiore olive oil and highly rated Painted Vineyard wines respectively.

CHECK THE OIL: Imagine a brokerage house that offered clients the opportunity to own estates in Umbria, produce the world’s best olive oil, and make some of B.C.’s highest-regarded wines. All came to pass, albeit involving members of the Yorkton Securities firm. John Skinner moved to the Canaccord brokerage, then founded 24-acre Painted Rock Estate Winery and its spectacular tasting room above Skaha Lake. Kim Galavan left for a four-hectare property with 500 olive trees in Orvieto, Italy. Yorkton chief-turned-billionaire Frank Giustra then said they should make oil together. “And that was the business plan,” he said in Umberto Menghi’s Giardino restaurant recently while releasing another metal-bottled pressing of oil from the 121-hectare, 10,000 tree estate he bought. Giustra has since added tomato sauce, honey and vinegar — “No wine, everybody makes wine now” — to the Domenica Fiore line named for his mother, much to her reported delight.

Fets Whisky Kitchen owner Eric Fergie showed some coded-label single-cask products that Scotch Malt Whisky Society members can acquire.

DRAM RIGHT: As boys who had yet to taste it, we sat around camp fires singing: “Here’s to good old whisky that makes us feel so frisky.” Many grown-ups grew frisky at Performance Works recently when the annual Dram Come True event benefited the Vancouver Writers Fest. Now featuring dozens of whiskies from 16 suppliers, the tasting was founded in 2003 by Scotch Malt Whisky Society member Sandy Garossino. Representing that Edinburgh-based organization, which supplies $120-to-$400 single-cask whiskies to members, Commercial Drive’s Fets Whisky Kitchen owner Eric Fergie dispensed many samples. Disguised by coded labels, they included one from a batch of  282 bottles named Tarry Ropes on a Wooden Boat. Self-professedly “suffused with smoke, tar, seaweed and lemon-squeezed scallops” it had the colour of “mermaid hair.” That should make anyone frisky.

International chef students Saif Pradhan and Hannah Kim flanked president Peter Nunoda at Vancouver Community College¹s Flourish party.

SCHOOL TIES: Vancouver Community College Foundation chair Ken Cretney and executive director Nancy Nesbitt knew who to call on for Flourish, the college’s inaugural fundraiser. Alumni chefs from Sung-Hee Ahn to Hamid Salimian, and including restaurateur David Hawksworth, provided the chow. VCC music grads Arnt and Tom Arntzen and Alan Matheson played Dixieland alongside Lloyd Arntzen and Jen Hodge, while models paraded fashion design students’ creations. “At VCC, we know how to party,” said president and CEO Peter Nunoda, a historian whose period of study includes his parents internment during the Second World War. “We don’t go looking for million dollar donations,” he said while watching the jollity. But would he? “Of course we would,” Nunoda replied.

Sculptor Ken Clarke showed a tree stump modelled from willow wands at an exhibition launching the Vancouver International Dance Festival.

BIG IS BETTER: “Only God can make a tree,” poet Joyce Kilmer wrote. Still, city-based sculptor Ken Clarke comes close, albeit aided by willow fronds sourced at local roadsides. Another of his towering works, this one reminiscent of Stanley Park’s hollow tree, showed up in the Roundhouse Community Centre. It was part of the Big Print Chinatown Exhibit Peter Braune and Richard Tetrault coordinated as part of the Vancouver International Dance Festival. Almost as tall as Clarke’s tree, 11 other artists’ two-dimensional pieces supported the view that artworks — if not city hall — gain appeal when blown up.

Louis Wolfin died recently after decades seeking to add to the Pioneer and Bralorne mines’ output of 4,178,363 ounces of gold.

IN THEM THAR HILLS: Another classic Howe Streeter, Lou Wolfin, died March 3. His later life saw Wolfin seeking more from the Pioneer and Bralorne operations that closed in 1971 after producing 4,178,363 ounces of gold That included an astonishing 2,000 ounces from one deep-mined ton of ore. Now it’s up to others.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca

604-929-8456

Valeria Costa, who designed model Isa Souza’s ensemble for Rio de Janeiro’s Carnaval parade, reprised it when Jamal Abdourahman, right, launched the 17th annual Vancouver Fashion Week.

FROM IPAMENA: The first of 30,000 attendees packed the Chinese Cultural Centre hall when Djibouti-born Jamal Abdourahman opened his 17th annual Vancouver Fashion Week. Its 25 international designers include Brazilian Valeria Costa, whose show was the evening’s highlight. Her angel-winged ensemble would certainly enliven Vancouver streets. And why not? Model Isa Souza previously paraded the glistening silver creation on Rio de Janeiro’s Rua Marques de Sapucai during Carnaval celebrations there.

SHOE HOP: Centre A, the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, held a fundraiser in Gastown’s Fluevog Shoes store recently. It acknowledged Japan’s White Day, when men give marshmallows to exceed the goodies received from women on Valentine’s Day. No footwear, though, as giving shoes in Asia implies ending relationships. Take a hike, in other words. The centre may do that soon to double the size of its East Georgia Street facility.

Kyle Archibald’s homemade Archimallows s’mores are roasted, dipped in Bailey’s liqueur and drizzled with chocolate syrup before serving.

ROASTMASTER: Respecting White Day, Archimallows owner Kyle Archibald served s’mores composed of his home-made marshmallows — salted caramel is the top seller — torch-roasted, dipped in Bailey’s liqueur, drizzled with chocolate sauce and sandwiched between Graham crackers.

UNLACED: Look for a million-dollars’ worth of Fluevog and other brand-name shoes March 29 when fleet-footed Army & Navy store owner Jacqui Cohen and Maynards Liquidation Group offer inventory from Roger Hardy’s shoeme and shoes.com online outfits that went soles up Jan. 27.

Gary Segal will aid Dr. Rick Hodes’s Ethiopian spinal surgery and care program when he and wife Nanci chair the Bring Back Hope gala on June 8.

GIVING BACK: Gary and Nanci Segal founded Bring Back Hope in 2012. The $1 million raised furthered the quarter-century of spinal surgery and care provided by Dr. Rick Hodes, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee director for Ethiopia. Also aided was Christian Baptist Dr. Ohbena Boachie-Adjei’s similar work for all religions and ethnicities in Ghana. The UBC Branch for International Surgical Care then partnered them. Thirty-seven spine surgeries and treatment for 14,000 children followed, including dramatically reconstructing a TB-deformed Ethiopian youth named Tesfaye. A Segal family member during six months of treatment here, he’ll return June 8 for Bring Back Hope’s second running. So will Dr. Hodes, whom Gary Segal called “a saint, a mensch, a hero” to supporters at a reception recently.

Ballet B.C. board chair Dr. Kevin Leslie feted artistic director Emily Molnar for “kicking it out of the park” with recent record ticket sales.

STEPPING UP: Six years of posting modest cash surpluses was a triumph for once-bankrupted Ballet B.C. So was having executive director Branislav Henselmann head-hunted to be Vancouver’s managing director of cultural services. Florida-raised successor John Clark arrived for artistic director Emily Molnar’s recent three performances that set ticket sales records. “Kicking it out of the park,” said board president-chair Kevin Leslie who, though no dancer, understands solid footings. Respecting mega-philanthropist Michael Audain’s maxim that board members “give, get or get off,” Dr. Leslie is listed as a $15,000-to-$24,999 donor to Ballet B.C.’s Founders’ Council.

Vancouver artist Marie Khouri is readying her four fountains for the Place de la Concorde façade of Paris’s soon to reopen Hotel Crillon.

STEPPING OUT: City-based artist Marie Khouri will furnish a Ballet B.C. backdrop showing such global cities as Paris. She’s there now, readying four self-designed fountains for the Hotel Crillon’s Place de la Concorde façade. The 1758-built Crillon will reopen soon following a three-year renovation.

APPLES TO APPLES: Regarding 35 million Canadians welcoming 35,000 Syrian refugees last year, Khouri said 1.1 million live among her native Lebanon’s six million. If that ratio pertained here, Syrians, who now match Port Moody’s population, would equal everyone living in the three Prairie provinces.

Hindi-turned-global movie star Kabir Bedi appeared in Kamal Sharma’s Jagjit Singh tribute concert and at a Fraserview Hall banquet later.

ONE MORE TIME: Impresario Kamal Sharma’s debut production in 1994 brought since-deceased singer Jagjit Singh to the Vogue theatre. Sharma came almost full circle recently with Tauseef Akhtar’s song-tribute to Jagjit Singh at the Hard Rock Casino. Akhtar and narrator Kabir Bedi also attended a Fraserview Hall banquet. Bedi vaulted from Hindi film roles to international movie, TV, stage and radio fame with 60 pictures to his credit. In one, Octopussy, his Gobinda character opposed James Bond (Roger Moore) throughout but perished by falling from an aircraft while Bond leaped to safety. Addressing banqueters, B.C. justice minister and frequent Fraserview attendee Suzanne Anton likely banked on similar salvation in the May 9 election. Nine days earlier, Sharma will have singers Kumar Sanu and Alka Yagnik and a 60-piece orchestra play the PNE’s Agrodome.

Rebecca Rilling served a beer at the St. Regis pub which was rather more austere during columnist Parry’s first-night-in Vancouver visit.

HAPPY DAY: Marking the anniversary of a journalist-to-be’s first full day in Canada, he revisited the St. Regis hotel pub. Back then, taciturn men served one brand of draft lager in a plain room with little food and less entertainment. Not that a young man toasting his adopted country needed any. Today, St. Regis patrons choose from many dishes and cocktails, watch sports (for now) on large monitors, see passersby through once-verboten windows, and have Nelson-raised Rebecca Rilling serve best-selling Red Truck beer from one of many taps. Far more rewarding than pub evolution, though, is how Canada welcomed that first-day immigrant and more than fulfilled his every expectation and dream. Happy 150th, Canada. Here’s mud in your eye.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: With New Zealand’s Whanganui River now legally a human, perhaps a urologist will advise on any flow difficulties.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

President Ron Burnett toured Emily Carr University’s near-ready facility that includes a 400-seat semicircular theatre he “fought to have.”

FINISHING TOUCHES: Rain lashed Great Northern Way beside Emily Carr University of Art + Design’s near-ready, four-building campus this week. But all was sunshine inside as 21-year president Ron Burnett and chief project officer Carey Prokop toured Diamond Schmitt Architects’ 285,000-square-foot, $122.5-million complex that occupies its own land. ECU will accept it on Aug. 4. Five weeks later, students will relish its large lecture rooms, labs, workshops and especially the artist-desired northern light pouring through floor-to-ceiling windows. Burnett’s favourite space is the 400-seat, semi-circular Reliance Theatre that “I fought to have.” It may remind him of ancient auditoriums near a house he inherited in Metropolitan Rome’s Anticoli Corrado community. With his crowning project accomplished, perhaps Burnett, who will be 70 on May 24, will spend more time with wife Martha in that traditional artists’ habitat.

POWER HOUSE: Founder Sonia Andhi filled Surrey’s Bollywood Banquet Hall recently for the 15th annual Shakti Awards. Categories from academic achievement to Volunteering honoured Rabina Anjum, Gurpreet Kaur Bains, Christina Basi, Hema Bhatt, Ana Brand Castellanos, Gurdip Kaur Dhaliwal, Kerry Gibson, Karina Hayat, Jyotika Jasuja, Ramanjot Kingra, Shawna Narayan, Sandhya Prasad, Rimpy Sahota, Saroj Sood and the women of Moving Forward Society. Surrey-Green Timbers MLA Sue Hammell received a lifetime achievement award. Iran-born Triunity Martial Arts Studio owner-instructor Mitra Castano MCed the women-empowering event. Arriving in Surrey with the family name Haddad, she endured fellow junior-high students mocking her as “Mitra Had A Dad.” If taunting males repeated that today, she might cheerfully toss them out the window.

Owner Manuel Bernaschek welcomed Florence-based designer-manufacturer Stefano Ricci to the Georgia Street store that bears his name.

MORE GOODIES: Stefano Ricci previously visited B.C., Alberta, Yukon and N.W.T. to stalk game. Recently, though, he came loaded for the Latin-named advenae dives species: rich newcomers. Stocking the highest of high-end menswear, Florence-based Ricci’s new self-named store is at ground level in the taller of late architect Arthur Erickson’s Georgia Street towers. Store owner Manuel Bernaschek specializes in representing Italian entrepreneurs such as Ricci who design and manufacture top-quality products. The fluent Mandarin speaker’s Showcase Pianos firm has found several local homes for Paolo Fazioli’s $100,000-and-up pianos. He’ll test the formula again with Pierre Paul Caffarel, who died in 1871 after devising the hazelnut-infused chocolates that Bernaschek will market at Aberdeen Centre “late this year.”

Visiting piano-maker Paolo Fazioli inspected one of the instruments that have made audiences and other makers sit up and listen.

At his Fazioli piano, Peter Wall relished the Westin Wall Centre Vancouver Airport Hotel being named Canada’s best franchised Westin.

FLIGHT TIME: While inspecting one of his pianos in a Shaughnessy home, Paolo Fazioli alluded to having influenced long-established makers. The latter had previously acted like birds pecking at the ground, he said. “Then you throw something in and — zi, zi, zi — they fly. That was how it was with pianos. We threw something in.”

TOP-RATED: Property developer Peter Wall installed the ritziest of Paolo Fazioli’s pianos in the mansion centrepiece of Shannon, a 12-block Granville Street estate he bought in 1967. With its wood body and metal frame coated in 24K gold, the concert grand arrived here priced at $535,000. Seated at its keyboard, Wall could play the 1936 Rodgers and Hart foxtrot, There’s a Small Hotel. That would be in respect to the Westin Wall Centre Vancouver Airport Hotel which the Marriott Hotels organization recently named Canada’s best-franchised Westin. Not that 188 rooms make it small, except beside the the Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre hotel’s 746. To rhapsodize that earlier twin-skyscraper project, its builder-owner could stay in the key of G and play Alan Jackson’s 1993 Tonight I Climbed The Wall.

St. Paul Hospital’s $75-million benefactor Jim Pattison displayed his huge empire’s founding financial statement, a $40,000 bank loan.

BY THE NUMBERS: While writing a $75-million cheque for St. Paul’s Hospital, Jim Pattison likely recalled being busted flat after doing the same at Christmastime, 1969. Without warning, the CIBC had called in $73 million worth of personal and corporate loans. “Ten years in business, and my net worth is now minus $2 million,” he told then-and-now executive assistant Maureen Chant. Happily, a TD loan equalling Pattison’s personal deficit “saved our company and helped us build it again.” No kidding. Forty years later, with 29,000 employees handling $6.3 billion annual sales, “we’re just getting started,” Pattison said.

Then-Royal Winnipeg Ballet principal Evelyn Hart feted biographer Max Wyman who is now named on an arts-commentary award.

POINTMAN: Former Vancouver Sun cultural reporter Max Wyman’s name will adorn a biennial prize for arts commentary to debut April 18. Funded by Yosef Wosk and produced by the Dance Centre and BC Alliance for Arts + Culture, the first presentation, to Wyman, will not include cash. One of his several books, Evelyn Hart: An Intimate Portrait, is a biography of that former Royal Winnipeg Ballet principal. Asked what got a then-young British reporter keen on ballet, Wyman smilingly replied: “Legs.”

Lori Joyce, who co-founded the 10-store Cupcakes chain in 2002, has launched Betterwith ice cream with a reported 18.8 per cent cream content.

GOOD LICKING: To follow the 10 varieties offered at her and Heather White’s Cupcakes stores, Lori Joyce decided on ice cream. Heavy on the second word, her Betterwith products feature 18.8 per cent cream, half again the usual content. Joyce expects D.R. and Angela Vaandrager’s exclusively contracted Lavender Farm in Abbotsford will meet her super-milk specs until long after its cows come home.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Cliché repetitions of “going forward” don’t deter certain politicians from engaging neutral or reverse.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

CORRECTION: Max Wyman will receive the first art-commentary award made in his name but not its $5,000 prize, as reported in an earlier version of this article.

Piping for those who fell at Vimy in 1917, Seaforth Highlander Mitchell Bain recalled that his injured grandfather met his wife-to-be there.

OLD SOLDIERS: Pipe Major Mitchell Bain of the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada played a four-century-old lament, Flowers of The Forest, at the regiment’s 100th annual Vimy memorial service and reunion dinner. None survive from that nation-building battle, but Bain has a link.

Convalescing from injuries sustained at Vimy Ridge, his grandfather, Cpl. George Bain, met and married a woman named Martha. The family they raised later in Merritt, B.C., would include piper Bain.

At the memorial, Seaforths commanding officer Lt.-Col. Paul Ursich greeted one of his predecessors, Col. David Fairweather, 97. Fairweather fought in 1943’s bloody struggle for Ortona, Italy, beside another subsequent Seaforth’s commander, Brig. Bert Hoffmeister, whose daughter-in-law Pat Hoffmeister attended the ceremony.

Founder Linda Poole launched the Cherry Blossom Festival with wine, Japanese food from many restaurants and few trees yet in full flower.

IN THE PINK: Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival founder Linda Poole filled the Stanley Park Pavilion with folk celebrating the 11th annual kickoff. Only the trees were tardy about decking themselves in pink blossoms. Marking the event’s Japanese inspiration, several restaurants provided tuna tataki, tori-shio ramen, trout aburi and suchlike. Ecumenically, Scherene Auchterlonie played Cape Breton fiddle airs as models paraded Norwegian Oleana garments from Julia Manitius’s Urbanity store. Poole’s necklace incorporated a festival-commemorating $15 silver coin designed by friend Jan Poynter. But no one had briefed Poole, who recruited another friend to snag the last remaining one from an Ottawa-region post office.

Architects Michael Green and Jim Taggart had 100 folk fill the Inform Interiors store for the debut of their Tall Wood Buildings book.

INSIDE THE BOX: Architect-authors Michael Green and Jim Taggart launched their 196-page book, Tall Wood Building, in Inform Interiors’ short concrete building recently. The two envisage 40-floor (say 150-metre) towers that would benefit from pre-fabrication, just-in-time component deliveries and minimal construction incursion. Although somewhat resembling giant violins, such structures could match the sound-attenuation characteristics of concrete buildings, Taggart said. Of course, wooden structures stretching to 140 metres were built over a century ago, albeit without windows. Still, these ships withstood being stressed by tempestuous winds while crashing into and partly cantilevering themselves from towering and ever-moving waves.

Super-yacht designer Ron Holland, whose M5’s mast is too tall for the Lions Gate Bridge, has written the All The Oceans memoir.

To sail “extremely powerful” yachts like Ron Holland’s 58-metre Ethereal, “You’ve got to know what you’re doing,” Rupert Murdoch said. 

MAST MASTER: Super-yacht pioneer Ron Holland still designs large, fast (but not wooden) sailing vessels such as the 77.6-metre M5 with a single 88.5-metre too tall to clear Lions Gate Bridge. Holland’s recently written 240-page memoir, All The Oceans, spans six decades from dinghy-sailing in his native Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf to cruising locally aboard 7.6-metre sloop Kia Aura. A foreword by media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, who owned a Holland-designed 56-metre ketch for 10 years, includes: “Many people think of sailing as a leisurely activity with endless sunbathing and cocktails on deck, but big yachts are extremely powerful and you’ve got to know what you’re doing.” Peter Willcox, who skippered Greenpeace’s 40-metre protest vessel, Rainbow Warrior, will talk about pal Holland at the False Creek Yacht Club April 13.

UH-OH: Late Sun reporter-columnist Bob Hunter was Greenpeace’s founding president. Less ecologically, he owned and temporarily lived in a smoky VW van, then drove a tired Plymouth sedan. Mislaying that unloved beater while celebrating with a friend, Hunter delightedly reported it stolen. The wait for insurance compensation was ending when wife Bobby drove him to revisit the convivial pal. Spotting a grimy jalopy angled partly across a nearby West End sidewalk, she said: “Hey, Bob, isn’t that your car?”

SETTING IT STRAIGHT: Max Wyman will be honoured with the debut arts-commentary award in his name, but won’t receive its $5,000 prize.

Kim Spencer-Nairn launched the Capture Photography Festival beside an image by Kelly Jazvac in the Contemporary Art Gallery window.

BEST SHOTS: Founder and executive director Kim Spencer-Nairn launched the month-long fourth Capture Photography Festival with a squeeze-in at the Contemporary Art Gallery. Following that event, 167 participants exhibited in 50 galleries and other locales. All 8,000 copies of a deluxe, 160-page catalogue were snapped up, too. This festival has definitely clicked.

Former recipient Jaimey Hamilton sang at a Children’s Wish gala and admired High Gear Motorcycle Training’s BMW 700GS model displayed. 

COME TRUE TONIGHT: With the Autoform dealership’s dream cars removed, Jessica Hollander chaired a gala that reportedly raised $375,000 for the Children’s Wish Foundation to fund seriously ill youngsters’ dreams. Recovered leukemia patient Jaimey Hamilton, 17, who’d had CWF professionally record another self-written song, performed her Forget The Peace. It included: “My scars are starting to age and all that’s left is a scrape of where it used to hurt … Take me by the hand. I’ll show you a surprise, I’ll show you what you never realized.”

Idris Hudson and Geekender chief Fairlith Harvey staged a benefit for sex-trade workers in Health Initiatives for Men’s Transitions program.

SO THERE: Idris Hudson and Fairlith Harvey staged Circo Disco at Odyssey nightclub to benefit the Health Initiatives For Men organization’s Transitions program. It prepares men for work and social relationships outside of sex work, said Hudson, who is a Transitions coordinator. Harvey is artistic director of the Geekenders burlesque and revue troupe. As for such career-switching, Prostitute Empowerment Education Resource Society (PEERS) staffer Amanda Bonella said of enrolled women in 2002: “They’re easily employable because they have been working, they have excellent communication, selling and telephone skills, they can work shifts and long hours, they’re good at conflict resolution.”

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: As new members of the 100 Resilient Cities network, our citizens’ resilience to city hall’s wacky ways must be an inspiration to the other 99.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

Even before the Royal B.C. Museum’s Terry Fox exhibition opened, the first floral tributes appeared beneath a life-size poster of him outside.

HERO HOME: The late Betty Fox’s final public words about son Terry’s 1980 Marathon of Hope run included regretting her generation no longer speaking of “Terry’s humility, his never-give-up attitude, his courage and his reasons for wanting to show us all that the impossible is indeed possible.” When cancer stopped his daily 26-mile runs near Thunder Bay, Terry’s marathons ended, but not his hope of raising $1 for every Canadian for cancer research. The Terry Fox Foundation has now done it 20 times over to top $700 million. And, despite his mother’s misgivings, Terry’s accomplishments remain well known. The Canadian Museum of History’s exhibition, Terry Fox: Running to the Heart of Canada, opened at Victoria’s Royal B.C. Museum this week. Dignitaries and others at an Empress hotel reception included four who had accompanied Terry’s run: brother Darrell Fox, friend Doug Alwood, Bill Vigars and then nine-year-old daughter Kerry-Anne.

Brother Darrel Fox, Kerry-Anne Vigars, Bill Vigars and (front) Doug Alward all accompanied Terry Fox on his 1980 Marathon of Hope.

Aware that the cancer that had taken his right leg might spread to his lungs and other organs, Terry had said: “Even if I don’t finish, we need others to continue. It’s got to keep going.” Boy, did it ever. Although his ailing mother worried about “not being able to share Terry’s values of inclusiveness and unconditional giving, and how they have helped define us as Canadians,” Canadians themselves have done it for her.  

SOMETHING THEY CAN FEEL: Singer-producer Kendra Sprinkling packed the Commodore Ballroom when the 14th annual Motown Meltdown concert featured a 12-piece band and 25 singers from headliner Karen Lee Batten to Garfield Wilson. The event benefited Seva Canada, whose executive director, Penny Lyons, said every $50 raised adds to the four million folk whose sight Seva has restored since 1982. Concertgoers will doubtless look out for Batten’s June-releasing Under The Covers in Muscle Shoals album. The former Canadian Idol finalist recorded it in Alabama with members of Aretha Franklin’s band. Another eye-opener occurred last summer during a 12-woman stagette at Batten and chain-restaurateur husband Michael Gardner’s Kelowna getaway condo. Forgetting the complex’s security cameras, the celebrants staged a late-night group skinny dip. The resulting video might be called on if Batten ever covers Franklin’s 1968 hit, (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.

Dressed as a walking cocktail bar, Sabine Gervais joined Variety president Shirley Stocker to welcome Night in Monte Carlo gala guests.

MOVING ON: Variety — The Children’s Charity has long held set-piece fundraisers. But it shifted gears one rainier evening recently with One Night in Monte Carlo, a masquerade with casino-style gambling, a six-act variety concert and back-to-basics Beef Wellington dinner. The $200,000 reportedly raised for Variety’s Mobility Program will literally put challenged children on the move, president Shirley Stocker said.

Some of Isola Bella junior-fashion store owner Julia Molnar’s models likely were up after their bedtimes at a BabyGoRound fundraiser.

GROWING UP: In 2012, founder Jennifer Randall’s Kingsway-off-Rupert BabyGoRound boutique began offering “gently used” clothing and products to limited-means families. Like the babies served, though, the charitable organization grew. Its recent fundraiser on Telus Garden’s rooftop entailed a TV-familiar MC, raucous auction, fashion show and other gala-style elements. Unchanged, though, is that donated cribs, strollers, high chairs, blankets and suchlike are still needed (babygoround.ca or 604-558-4840) for 800 families who receive them annually.

LET IT RING: The future may be friendly at Telus, but 47 minutes for a human to respond — at the phone company — leaves the present in doubt.

Tyler Schramm’s organic gin is incorporated in the Two Rivers firm’s Gin Bites that Tammy Koert handed out at the B.C. Distilled event.

STILL KICKING: B.C.-made liquor once came only from corporations or law-breaking moonshiners. Not so now. Thirty-four craft producers showed at the recent B.C. Distilled event in the Croatian Cultural Centre whose members would call participant True North’s plum brandy slivovitz. Otherwise, vodka, gin and whiskey ruled, among them the organic varieties Pemberton Distillery CEO Tyler Schramm produces from that region’s famous spuds. You can even eat some in North Vancouver-based Two Rivers’ Gin Bites made from pork, beef, natural flavourings and Schramm’s white lightnin’.

Former BC Lions David Sidoo and Geroy Simon, nine others and the UBC Thunderettes were the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame’s 2017 inductees.

GAME ON: “Honouring the past, inspiring the future” is how the B.C. Sport Hall of Fame describes its Banquet of Champions. The annual event filled the Vancouver Convention Centre West recently to induct taekwondo master Chang Keun Choi, wheelchair basket baller Tim Frick, cyclist Roland Green, hockey winger Mark Recchi, CFL player-turned-philanthropist David Sidoo, former B.C. Lions slotback Geroy Simon, longtime UBC football coach Frank Smith, wheelchair athlete Michelle Stilwell, rugby fullback-fly half Mark Wyatt, the UBC Thunderettes basketball team and late equestrian luminaries George and Dianne Tidball.

Stephanie Yuen and Pink Pearl manager Alvin Zheng began a classic-dining benefit for the Food Bank and Vancouver Sowers Society.

YUM YUM: If it’s years since you enjoyed Cantonese-style deboned chicken wings or water-chestnut and egg-swirl sweet soup, East Hastings Street’s Pink Pearl restaurant will dish them up for groups of 10 on two days’ notice. Stephanie Yuen had the notion to recreate four decades’ worth of classic fare. Pink Pearl manager Alvin Zheng agreed, and 10-dish banquets will be served May 1 to Aug. 31 to benefit the Greater Vancouver Food Bank and the Vancouver Sowers Society of Education’s child-learning programs. Steamed eight-treasured Fraser Valley duck will be the signature dish.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Comparing electioneering politicians’ “promises” to substances found in cattle pastures discredits the cattle who do actually deliver.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

REVEALING REVEAL: The Canucks Autism Network’s eponymous team endured a baleful season. But the organization itself anticipates quite the opposite when its Reveal gala occupies Rogers Arena on May 6. Team-owning family member Clara Aquilini and Christi Yassin will co-chair what is billed as “an Evening in Venice.” That won’t involve melting the rink and having 544 attendees float between 68 tables in gondolas. There will be ice, though, in raffle prizes of $38,800 diamond-chandelier earrings and an $11,500, 72-diamond bracelet donated by Britton Diamonds. The bijoux appeared during a reception at Nader and Mana Mobargha’s Moissonnier store where gala committee member Saeedeh Salem and husband Sean characteristically donated plenty of wine from their La Stella/Le Vieux Pin operation.

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• More Town Talk with Malcolm Parry

In Canadian Film Week’s Menorca, Tammy Gillis is a soccer mom “who won’t settle for domestic banality when casual sex is much more fun.”

JUST DO IT: Twice this week city actress Tammy Gillis got to see herself starring in the feature film Menorca. Screening at Vancity Theatre as part of Canadian Film Week, it pictures Gillis as “a rebellious soccer mom … who won’t settle for domestic banality when casual sex is much more fun.” Viewers may or may not choose to emulate that role. Given our months of dreary wetness, though, several likely contacted their travel agents regarding the film’s title island off Spain’s Mediterranean coast.

Chris Gallagher’s 1978 Vancouver magazine photos showed friend Allan Harvey depicting Santa Claus enjoying a vacation at Waikiki Beach.

ON HIS WAY: In 1978, Chris Gallagher photographed red-suited, white-bearded pal Allan Harvey as Santa Claus on holiday. Published in Vancouver magazine, the pictures showed Santa shooting pool, brawling in a hockey rink, and tanning, flirting and surfing at that North-Pole getaway paradise, Waikiki. Gallagher’s subsequent decades as a UBC professor saw him produce endless films, photographic exhibitions, books and journals.

US$225,000 1989 Porsche Speedster backed Chis Gallagher and wife Theresa Pan when his art exhibition opened in the Autoform showroom.

But his inventive whimsicality is still clear in a Capture Photography Festival exhibition at Clark Drive’s Autoform dealership. Its title: I Will Not Shoot Any More Polaroid Pictures. Delighted to see Gallagher’s works on Autoform’s showroom walls to April 27, co-principal Mike Wood might be even happier to snag the artist’s 1957 Austin Healey 100-6 roadster for its sales floor.

Son Destry Straight was seen as a kid in photographer Rob’s Horizons Gallery exhibition and as a real-life grown-up at its opening.

STRAIGHT SHOOTER: Photographer Rob Straight’s five-decade exhibition will run at Horizons Gallery to April 30 as part of the citywide Capture festival. It’s likely the only one containing photos of two Nobel laureates, 1979’s Mother Teresa and 2016’s Bob Dylan. Straight is a second-generation Vancouver Sun alumnus whose late father, Hal, was sports and managing editor. Straight’s wide-ranging oeuvre includes a charming photograph of daughter Kelsey and son Destry on a mid-1990s Hernando Island beach. All grown up now, novelist Kelsey recently wrote the semi-autobiographical All This While F***ing. Destry, who played centre-left wing for Boston College, coaches midget hockey here.

Although not in our Capture Photography Festival, Dina Goldstein will exhibit in Toronto’s “world’s biggest” Contact Photography Festival.

NEVER AFTER: One city artist you won’t find in Vancouver’s 167-exhibitor Capture Photography Festival is Dina Goldstein. But as our show winds down, she’ll participate in the world’s purportedly largest such event that will open April 28. That’s Toronto’s 1,500-artist Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival. Goldstein’s Fallen Princesses series will show there at Gallery House May 11 to June 10. Her photo tableaus portray Cinderella, Rapunzel, Snow White and other characters after having missed their fairy tales’ usual happy endings.

Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence 2017 recipient Douglas Coupland was pictured soon after his career began in 1987.

GENERATION XXX: Douglas Coupland will receive the Lieutenant-Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence at the B.C. Book Prizes Gala on April 29. That will be exactly 30 years since he launched his writing career by filing an article titled Ace in the Hole to Vancouver magazine. It addressed the legal tribulations of former city art gallerist Doug Chrismas who had moved to Los Angeles. Three months later, another feature article titled Generation X started Coupland climbing fame’s ladder.

Robert (Frenchy) Gagne’s wife Jeannie may have to tousle his hair anew now that he has left Joe Fortes to be maitre d’ at Coast restaurant.

FRENCHY LEAVES: Better known than many now-vaunted chefs, maitre d’ Robert (Frenchy) Gagne doesn’t change jobs often. Nor does he move far. This week, he trotted one block to the Glowbal Group’s Coast restaurant from Joe Fortes, where he’s logged 26 years. Gagne did break that term by defecting to Granville Island’s SandBar for a year, but then-owner Bud Kanke’s irresistible offer brought him back. No word on his recent sweetener from Emad Yacoub, the executive chef who left Joe Fortes in 2009 to found Glowbal.

Clavinova Nights Jazz Band’s Anthony Maljevac, Steven Pringle and Kalen Dofher backed Jamie de Guia at a B.C. Sports Hall of Fame banquet.

AS WE WERE: Reporters’ fondest memories can be stimulated by matters experienced in the course of duty. So it was when the Clavinova Nights Jazz Band played at the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame’s recent Banquet of Champions. Looking as though they’d just met at Port Coquitlam’s Archbishop Carney Regional Secondary, singer-keyboardist Jamie de Guia, sax player Kalen Dofher, bassist Anthony Maljavac and drummer Steven Pringle performed Fly Me to the Moon and other standards. Their Filipino-Estonian-Croatian-Canadian backgrounds differed from this reporter’s past combos. But the enthusiasm was the same, and the sight of a dress-suited young man playing tenor sax backed by a tight rhythm section was pure nostalgia and pure delight.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Onlookers may get shocks if protesting Mounties carelessly rip that insulating tape from their trousers.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

Anna Wallner and Frank Giustra prepared Italian meatballs to benefit the B.C. Cancer Foundation’s Eleni Skalbania Fund for Brain Cancer.

Elpie Marinakis organized a commemoration for mother Eleni Skalbania attended by aunt Joanna Tsaparas and sister Marousa Dumaresq.

REMEMBERING ELENI: Global business and olive-oil biggie Frank Giustra may not serve Italian meatballs when welcoming former U.S. president Bill Clinton aboard his airliner-size MD-87 business jet. But he and Shopping Bags TV-series star Anna Wallner cooked plenty in the Wedgewood hotel’s kitchen recently. Accompanied by cocktails and champagne, the meatballs opened a banquet that reportedly contributed $247,500 to the B.C. Cancer Foundation’s Eleni Skalbania Fund for Brain Cancer. It commemorates the Wedgewood owner who died in 2013. Chef Montgomery Lau prepared much of the halibut ceviche, lobster agnolotti, eggplant parmesan, beef tenderloin and chocolate tart that followed, and Sarah McLachlan sang to 72 diners. They included Peter and Joanne Brown, Bob and Lily Lee and Darlene Poole who, with late husband Jack, holidayed with Eleni and husband Nelson. The event was sparkplugged by daughter Elpie Marinakis who, with sister Marousa Dumaresq, owns the hotel. Regarding the 77,000 British Columbians with cancer, foundation president Sara Roth said, as many did to Eleni Skalbania: “Our job is to give them hope.”

Carly Monahan and Jennifer Traub chaired the Daffodil Ball for the third time and saw it reportedly raised $1.5 million for the B.C. Cancer Agency’s metastatic-cancer research programs.

FULL BLOOM: Another cancer-felled mother was remembered when Carly Monahan and Jennifer Traub co-chaired the Daffodil Ball to benefit the Canadian Cancer Society. Traub’s heart-shaped diamond necklace was one of the duplicates she and sisters Amanda and Kathryn commissioned of one favoured by mother Wendy, who died Sept. 16. Presented by Silver Wheaton (soon to rename itself Wheaton Precious Metals Corp.), the 21st-annual ball itself was very much alive. To the $14 million raised over the years, third-time chairs Monahan and Traub reportedly added $1.5 million to fund CCS metastatic-cancer research. That delighted CEO Faye Wightman, now completing her first year after eight heading the Vancouver Foundation.

HUSH UP: Certain event MCs haven’t learned that century-old electronic PA systems make shouting unnecessary.

John and Lane Middleton-D’Eathe celebrated the Daffodil Ball’s occurrence on the 12th-anniversary of his marriage proposal at Cafe de Paris.

POPPED OFF: The Daffodil Ball brought romantic memories to property developer John D’Eathe and wife and longtime ball board member Lane. He proposed on the same date in 2009 at the Cafe de Paris, where then-owner Jon-Michael Preece henceforth greeted them by opening a bottle of Moet et Chandon champagne. Subsequent business difficulties saw Preece uncork himself and vanish completely.

IN A NAME: D’Eathe was a mite surprised, let’s say, when son Bob Deith became Maple Ridge-Mission’s NDP candidate. Thinking his birth name morbid, entertainment lawyer Deith modified it before co-founding the Mythos ensemble and heading the Music B.C. industry organization. Pity he’s not running in Burnaby-Lougheed against the Green Party’s Joe Keithley. That D.O.A. band founder and music-biz entrepreneur changed his name, too, to Shithead and back again as his career evolved.

In mutually happier times Mayor Gregor Robertson joined Peter Wall whose Shannon project has won a Vancouver Heritage Award of Honour.

The Shannon development entails a four-hectare Granville Street estate for which Peter Wall and Peter Redekop paid $750,000 in 1967.

SO THERE: Elsewhere along the developer-politician divide, Wall Financial Corp. founder Peter Wall sidestepped the City of Vancouver Heritage Awards presentations. That’s where Wall’s Shannon estate headed Awards of Honour recipients. Wall and Peter Redekop paid $750,000 in 1967 for that four-hectare Granville Street property. Avoiding Mayor Gregor Robertson, with whom his relationship appears to have cooled, Wall sent a short acceptance statement. It noted that, after much early opposition at city hall, then-mayor Art Phillips and council had “negated the re-zoning and threatened to cancel the building permit which we had already obtained.” Today’s Heritage Award jurors “recognize the fine grained and detailed conservation of the Shannon Mansion and its interiors, along with the Coach House, Gate House, Italian garden and the property’s perimeter wall.”

At a premiere for the film Colossal, Brightlight Pictures producer-chair Shawn Williamson had son Aidan call him “the person I’d want to be.”

DAD’S THE ONE: Had Brightlight Pictures chairman Shawn Williamson followed recently deceased father Joseph’s career, he’d be a naval officer. Instead, he’s produced many movies, including Colossal, starring Anne Hathaway and Jason Sudeikis. At its premiere after-party, in former director Uwe Boll’s Bauhaus restaurant, Williamson’s son Aidan, 20, vowed to follow papa. “He honestly has been an inspiration to me. He’s the person I’d want to be,” said Aidan who rowed in the Shawnigan Lake School eight and is enrolled in Capilano University’s School of Motion Picture Arts. “I can’t praise him enough,” he said of Shawn. Then, pausing: “I hope he never sees this.”

Centre A president Karen Zalamea welcomed Howie Tsui’s auction donation of a work depicting the razed Kowloon/Wudang Walled City.

A1: Artist Howie Tsui’s top-rated work in the recent Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Centre A) gala-auction was titled Kowloon/Wudang Walled City. Although that complex was demolished in 1994, many features and human activities are depicted by Tsui in a Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition titled Retainer of Anarchy. Fortunately, order is retained at Centre A where president Karen Zalamea and guests saw 1999 founding director Hank Bull conduct an auction to help the organization “celebrate and bring attention to Asian art … and speak out in favour of diversity.”

Tammy Gillis, who stars in the movie Menorca, had a photo of another city actress incorrectly portray her in this column April 22.

SETTING IT STRAIGHT: A photo of Sydney Doberstein April 22 was incorrectly captioned as Menorca star Tammy Gillis. Coast restaurant maitre d’ Robert “Frenchy” Gagne’s present wife is named Sara. Predecessor Jeannie’s photo appeared.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Title aside, expect plenty of meat and fish at the Fairmont Pacific Rim hotel’s new Botanist restaurant.

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• More Town Talk columns from Malcolm Parry

malcolmparry@shaw.ca, 604-929-8456

MULTO BENTLEY: Wine flowed in Vancouver Bentley’s auto showroom when the 10th-annual Grape Juice gala reportedly raised $100,000. It will see Big Sisters of B.C. Lower Mainland add 50 girls to the 775 served in 2016 while still leaving 107 wait-listed. McNeill Nakamoto Recruitment group founders Cheryl Nakamoto and Sarah McNeill and husband Cam McNeill chaired the event. Now her firm’s sole principal, Nakamoto sampled another driver’s seat in a Bentley Bentayga SUV that can cost well over $400,000. Regarding daughters not sisters, she once recalled her firm’s name prompting potential Japanese clients to say: “Ah, you must work for your father.”

“No,” she replied regarding part-time comptroller Kaz Nakamoto. “He works for me.”

HEADY STUFF: Grape Juice patrons also sampled Steamworks beers. Hardly surprising as that brew-pub’s founder, Eli Gershkovitz, is married to Big Sisters executive director Brenda Gershkovitz. Bucking a craft-brewing craze, the former lawyer avoids giving his beer more hops than a Bugs Bunny episode. He also owns a car that reflects his enterprise and is rarer than most Bentleys. It’s a 1913 Stanley Steamer, with a boiler that could brew limited batches of a truly exotic beer — Stanley Steamworks, say.

The boiler of Eli Gershkovitch’s 1913 Stanley Steamer car might be adaptable for making extra-special beer at his Steamworks brew pub.

TO THE METAL: Bentley calls its Bentayga “the world’s fastest SUV.” No kidding. With 600-horsepower, the 3,250-kg bruiser reportedly hits 301 km/h. The slogan also echoes race-car maker Ettore Bugatti calling the big, heavy Bentleys that won 1927-1930 Le Mans 24-hour races “the world’s fastest lorries.” Maybe the Bentayga name will inspire Lamborghini, Ferrari and Pagani to launch Lambago, Ferrago and Paganaga SUVs — even a compact Paganini complete with replica Stradivarius violin.

Retiring his partnership but not involvement in the DIALOG firm, architect Norm Hotson received a blue-heron mask carved by Simon Dick.

DRAWN AWAY: After 41 years, Norman Hotson retired his partnership from, but not his involvement in, the architectural firm that he and Joost Baker founded and is now a 150-member part of 650-staff DIALOG. Having honoured Hotson at that firm’s recent San Francisco debut, Bakker did so again as staff, colleagues and clients filled Bridges restaurant, That’s literally old home for the two who undertook Granville Island’s master plan and located their office there for six years. Reflecting his extensive work for aboriginal clients, colleagues presented Hotson with a blue-heron mask by Kwakwaka’wakw carver and hereditary chief Simon Dick.

Cause We Care Foundation’s Andrea Thomas Hill and Vandana Varshney Lecky fundraised for the YWCA’s single-mothers-and-kids house.

TAKING CARE: Cause We Care founder Andrea Thomas Hill, event chair Vandana Varshney Lecky and 200 women raised a reported $87,000 one recent rainy lunchtime in the Sutton Place hotel’s Boulevard restaurant. It will benefit single mothers and children at, or reliant on, the YWCA’s 21-unit Cause We Care House that opened April 21. The foundation (causewecare.org) earlier raised $1.5 million to join the city and Vancouver Public Library on that project. Lunch over, Thomas Hill and others left to work on a Mother’s Day care-package drive for 500 recipients.

Chef Ned Bell and Vancouver Aquarium CEO John Nightingale at a Naramata Bench wine benefit for Ocean Wise’s sustainable-fishing efforts.

WORD FROM THE WISE: Twenty-seven Naramata Bench Wineries Association members served new releases at the Four Seasons hotel when the Wine for Waves gala benefited Vancouver Aquarium Marine Science Centre’s Ocean Wise program. That sustainable-fishing initiative is supported by 5,000 Canadian restaurants, said aquarium executive chef and Ocean Wise ambassador Ned Bell. Fans from his days at the hotel’s Yew restaurant await Bell’s fall-releasing first book, Lure, with 100 recipes for 40 species from California to Alaska. More imminently, Aquarium CEO John Nightingale awaits May 15, when a bylaw amendment-enactment is due regarding Vancouver park board banning the importation and display of live cetaceans in parks. “The question is: When is a deal a deal?” Nightingale said regarding the aquarium’s lease with the city until 2029 and its possession of a development permit for an expansion on which the Park Board signed off.

Former tugboat-SeaBus captain, J.G. (Greg) Freedman began producing paintings now honoured by the American Society of Marine Artists.

WATER COLOURED: Like the commuters he carried, tugboat-turned-SeaBus Captains J.G. (Greg) Freedman got time to think. Retiring in 2001, he began painting things seen during a career afloat. His oil-on-canvas Twilight, English Bay is the only Canadian work in an American Society of Marine Artists’ juried exhibition to open May 11 in Oxnard, California.

General managers Bradley Goian and Antonella Puglisi erected a Clayoquot Wilderness Resort luxury tent in the Hotel Georgia ballroom.

NO ROUGHING: Occupy Vancouver protesters were removed from the Vancouver Art Gallery forecourt in 2012. This week, another tent went up and down briefly across the street in the Hotel Georgia ballroom. It was from the up-Island Clayoquot Wilderness Resort, and ritzy enough to cost two occupants $5,400 each (including return air) for a three-night stay, general managers Bradley Goian and Antonella Puglisi said.

Nadia Iadisernia, here with partner Craig Stowe, will dispatch 150 teams on the Whistler-bound Hublot Diamond Rally to support 30 charities.

ON THE ROAD: Look for supercars on the Sea to Sky Highway Saturday. At 10 a.m., Hublot Diamond Rally director Nadia Iadisernia will start dispatching 150 teams from Brian Jessel’s dealership to Whistler. They’ll pause at Squamish’s Chances Casino where some cars may change drivers or even hands. The event will benefit 30 charities from Alzheimer Society of B.C. to Wounded Warriors of Canada.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un could strengthen a putative relationship by trading haircuts.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca, 604-929-8456

AUTISTIC LIVES MATTER: The nine-year-old Canucks Autism Network had home-ice advantage when its Reveal gala reportedly raised $1,025,000 in Rogers Arena. The network was founded by Paolo and Clara Aquilini of the Canucks-owning family. Clara co-chaired the gala with Christi Yassin and the vice-chair was Olympian Charmaine Crooks. A reception in the team dressing room drew several tailor-suited players. Network CEO Katy Harandi and guests then entered an arena surrounded not by tiers — and sometimes tears — of fans but by huge audio-visuals that event manager Martin van Keken commissioned. Celebrants listened to the Canadian Tenors who sang as a foursome in 2009 for Paolo’s father Luigi’s 77th birthday. Missing now, Remigio Pereira was expelled following a 2016 baseball game for improvising O Canada words that implicitly supported the Black Lives Matter movement.

Wearing a 1968 Pucci ensemble, Catherine Konantz welcomed Lions Gate Hospital cardiology head John Vyselaar at a gala she chaired.

Lions Gate Hospital’s $100-million campaign chair Ryan Beedie and Cindy celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary on B.C. election day.

GREENS PARTY: The sporting location favoured for Lions Gate Hospital Foundation galas is Capilano Golf & Country Club. That’s where two-time chair Catherine Konantz reported $1,132,668 was netted at the Goldcorp-sponsored 17th annual running. Her pencil-slim 1968 Emilio Pucci ensemble contrasted with the white gown British Properties-raised Konantz wore on the same day in 1990 for her and Don’s wedding reception there. Wedding bells also echoed for Beedie Development Group president Ryan Beedie and wife Cindy. They met at an event for the Social Credit party that, having morphed into the B.C. Liberals, took an electoral setback on the Beedies’ 25th anniversary, May 9. Ryan chairs a $100-million LGH campaign to add operating rooms, single-patient rooms and related facilities, and help draw physicians and staff to the North Shore. In a word to the unwise, cardiology head John Vyselaar recounted a 39-year-old being embarrassed to mention symptoms among older folk “until he came to emergency full of fluid and with aortic stenosis (congestive failure). Now he was embarrassed for not coming in.”

Rosemary Siemens was performing a concert when Eli Bennett burst in, pulled a ring from the sax he played, proposed and was accepted.

RINGTONE: As a certain large-handed U.S. president showed, tenor-sax players can become and do pretty much what they wish. Take Port McNeill-born Eli Bennett who burst into a recent Rosemary Siemens concert, played Can’t Help Falling In Love and produced a diamond ring from his instrument’s bell. They’ll wed Aug 20 in the Manitoba town that gave violinist-singer Siemens her latest album title: Plum Coulee My Home.

SWEET SOUND: Other than spittle and squawks, the only thing my tenor sax disgorged was the orange a New Year’s Eve reveller slam-dunked so hard it needed mashing with a drumstick to retrieve.

Models Joshua Cawthorpe, Isaiah Stevens and Matt Gutteres backed Eden Sassoon at her event to fund safe drinking water projects.

HAIR APPARENT: The Sassoon name resonates among fans of First World War poetry, hairstyling celebrities and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Eden Sassoon, who recently nixed appearing on the TV series’ eighth season, hit the Vancouver Club this week with Beauty Gives Back. Featuring big-time hair stylists, it’s a touring tribute to father Vidal that benefits the Thirst Project’s international safe-drinking-water efforts. Avant Garde saloniste Jon Paul Holt and event manager Viktoria Langton staged the show in a room where quaffing, if not always of water, enjoys a 128-year tradition.

Gordon Campbell and Arnold Schwarzenegger likely hoped May 2007’s hot sun would light their way to environmental and political triumph.

TEN YEARS AGO: It was a hot May afternoon when then-California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and then-B. C. premier Gordon Campbell signed to reduce their economies’ greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by 2020. Had Campbell maintained his environmental initiative and not launched the HST, there might have been no Green party to upend his, not Christy Clark’s, electoral apple cart on Tuesday.

Dan Dunn (background) painted the Beatles on the catwalk when Franci Stratton and Paul Palmer chaired an Ovarian Cancer Canada fashion-show benefit.

SPATTER MATTERED: The long road to screening for and treating ovarian cancer has frustrated many researchers. Symbolizing the rapid resolution many pray for, “America’s favourite speed painter” Dan Dunn made pigments fly while producing large works for auction at the recent Love Her gala. Franci Stratton and Paul Palmer co-chaired the event, which included a fashion show, to reportedly generate $220,000 and change for Ovarian Cancer Canada’s $10-million #ladyballs campaign.

Vancouver Art Gallery director Kathleen Bartels and Rob Rennie fell out years ago, whereupon his support for the local institution crumbled.

Bob Rennie’s wording suggested that his $12-million National Gallery of Canada donation had no link to a Vancouver Art Gallery feud.

SO NEAR: Regarding $12-million-worth of artworks donated to the National Gallery of Canada, Bob Rennie said: “It is really a gift to the nation. There is nothing else behind it.” There may have been something in front, though. That’s the 10-year spat with Vancouver Art Gallery director Kathleen Bartels that otherwise might have seen Rennie’s collection move up the street not across the country.

Vernard Goud and Georgia Primar appeared suitably surreal while staging an event during the Chali Rosso gallery’s Salvador Dali exhibition.

SURREALLY NOW: Impresario Vernard Goud and realtor Georgia Primar tag-teamed again to present photographer Liz Rosa’s works at Chali-Rosso gallery. Owner Susanna Strem, meanwhile, exhibited etchings, sculptures and suchlike by Salvador Dali. Good company for Primar who once sold the thoroughly surreal townsite of Bradian. Its rows of identical if mouldering cottages neighbour near-ghost town Bralorne where late prime minister Pierre Trudeau considered but finally vetoed establishing a back-to-the-mountains community of youthful craftworkers. Maybe jolly Green giant-hobbler Andrew Weaver will resubmit that plan.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: B.C.’s next cabinet may reflect founding Canadian prime minister Sir. John A. Macdonald’s jest to appoint “highly respectable parties whom I could send to the penitentiary if I wished.”

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

Jack Cohen joined daughter Jacqui in the early days of the Face The World charity now merged with her daughter Kasondra’s Face of Today.

NEW FACES: Primed with bottomless Taittinger champagne, the 300 or so $2,000-a-ticket folk in a tented University District tennis court began their Hawksworth-catered dinner with the Happy Birthday song. CTV News co-anchor Mike Killeen led them through it to acknowledge convener Jacqui Cohen’s day-earlier 64th. Reportedly raising $925,000, the event formally merged the Face The World charity gala Cohen founded in 1991 with daughter Kasondra’s eight-year-old Face of Today. The latter’s influence showed in many younger and professionally ascendant men and women attending for the first time. Their presence echoed Cohen’s words at FTW’s 1991 debut when, still mourning fast-living siblings Jeffrey and Casey’s early deaths, she said: “So many people our age are looking for something to do.” Regarding the charity she urged on her own hardly reclusive set, Cohen added “We are the United Way of the yuppie generation.”

Unlike yuppiedom, Face The World kept going. Its intimate locales — Cohen’s Point Grey Road waterfront home and the NW Marine Drive estate — were unique. Movie, music and other stars added allure. Cohen’s forceful character then saw $17 million raised for organizations that often served disadvantaged women and children. Meanwhile, a record of sorts was set when noise complaints came from West Vancouver, six kilometres distant.

At one brouhaha, with movement difficult, a chap toting two martinis said: “Do what we do in business: Penetrate, assimilate, dominate.” That emerged as Cohen’s own style in 1995 when taking control of the Army & Navy Stores and other properties that grandfather Sam had founded and non-family professionals managed during his son Jack’s indisposition with multiple sclerosis. In retrospect, Face The World was an opener to that main act, and now has one itself.

Lt.-Gov. Judith Guichon saw Lorne Segal chair the Courage to Come Back Awards to aid the Coast Mental Health Foundation.

ALL THE WAY: It took exceptional fortitude for Deborah Carter, Rachel Fehr, Esther Matsubuchi, Richard Quan, Stephen Scott and John Westhaver to be finalists at the 19th-annual Courage to Come Back Awards. Their respective categories were: addiction, mental health, social adversity, youth, medical and physical rehabilitation. Twelve-time chair Lorne Segal and 1,500 attendees reportedly raised $1.57 million for the Coast Mental Health Foundation. Among numerous Liberal MLAs and ministers attending, Sam Sullivan was an awardee himself for special achievement, in 2006.

Jane and George Hungerford, the Olympics rowing gold medalist, recalled him chairing the first Pacific Salmon Foundation gala in 1992.

Simone Carriere, Lyndsey Harkonen and Mariana Terreri wore crab, sea horse and jellyfish attire at the Pacific Salmon Foundation banquet.

SOCKEYE SAVIOURS: The Pacific Salmon Foundation’s 25th gala attendees snacked on oysters, blackened and smoked sockeye, ling cod, prawns, scallops and halibut cheeks before sitting for albacore-tuna tataki and dry-land beef tenderloin. Paintertainment models floated by in crab, sea horse and jellyfish costumes, and a West Vancouver-built Aquatica Stingray 500 submersible promised three passengers eight-hour endurance to 500 feet. The $16.7 million PSF has directed to 2,083 freshwater salmon projects since 1989 reportedly generated $99.1 million more in community funds and in-kind gifts. A new saltwater program will help restore wild coho, steelhead and chinook stocks. Gala attendee George Hungerford, who chaired the founding 1992 banquet, is speedy through the water himself having won gold in the 1964 Olympics’ coxless-pairs event.

Paula Cranmer-Underhill and Brianna Underhill showed Spapium Farm woven-cedar works at the Bill Reid Gallery’s Aboriginal Tourism show.

GO SEE: Many spawning salmon leave the Fraser River for the Thompson River at Lytton, where the top-rated Two Rivers Farmers’ Market runs Fridays from June to October. Its offerings include heritage vegetables, preserves, teas and cedar craftworks from Spapium Farm. Founded by the Oates family in 1882, the 15-hectare spread is owned by descendant Paula Cranmer-Underhill. Promoting her business at an Aboriginal Tourism Association show in the Bill Reid Gallery, she said: “In my parents’ age, they were told to go and get training, so there was a break in (farming) knowledge.” She has repaired that breach.

Jessica Bushey engraved German men’s saucy WhatsApp messages reconfigured, with their emojis, by the Google Translate App.

APPY SNAPS: Emojis can amusingly challenge the Google Translate app. Artist Jessica Bushey learned that after entering German men’s emoji-laden What’sApp messages regarding saucy images of her and female friends. She engraved the unexpectedly humorous results on gold-plated charms that fetch $200 at Hastings-at-Princess’s Back Gallery Project. Many are rather salacious for relaying here, but “i have given you everything of my male (devil-horns and heart-eyes emojis),” “my divorce runs (winking emoji),” and “i am at home heat me up in front of the hair dryer (kiss-lips emoji)” need little further translation, digitally or otherwise.

Washboard Union’s Chris Duncombe, David Roberts and Aaron Grain performed at the MPS Foundation’s Mucopolysaccharidosis fundraiser.

Accepting an MPS Society award for the Vancouver Canucks Alumni Association, goalie Kirk McLean accompanied Genevieve Duford.

RARE GIFTING: The MPS Society chose the right band when its Ignite Hope event raised research funds for Mucopolysaccharidosis, a genetic disorder that affects bone, skeletal structure, connective tissues, etc. From their In My Bones EP, Vancouver-based Washboard Union’s Chris Duncombe, Aaron Grain and David Roberts performed songs that contributed to their five Country Music Awards. Society executive and former figure skater Kirsten Harkins handed MPS’s Rare Heroes award to the Vancouver Canucks Alumni Association, represented by retired goaltender Kirk McLean. He and former top squash player Genevieve Duford, who has twice survived leukemia, appeared to appreciate Washboard Union’s rendition of Head Over Heels.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: B.C. Liberal and NDP strategists may ruefully recall the Weavers’ songs If I Had A Hammer and Go Where I Send Thee.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

RANCH HANDS: The narrow 9 km road beside Stave Lake once led to a prison. Today, 600 youngsters with life-threatening or debilitating ailments follow it yearly to what is now the Zajac Ranch for Children. This week, former senator Gerry St. Germain, Mission Mayor Randy Hawes and 120 others attended the official opening of the ever-expanding facility’s aboriginal arts and education centre.

Zajac Ranch benefactor Don Rutledge welcomed White Spot president Warren Erhart whose annual Pirate Pack event contributes $100,000.

Wendy and Mel Zajac opened he Zajac Ranch’s Aboriginal Arts & Education Centre with a welcome song by Kwantlen Michael Kelly Gabriel. 

They were greeted by the Kwantlen First Nation’s Michael Kelly Gabriel, 19, who performed a welcome song and led Mel and Wendy Zajac into the building. More structures may follow, said Don Rutledge, who raised $1 million for the ranch by completing the 2008 New York marathon. He and Zajac foresee a $2.5-million lodge-conference centre aiding the ranch’s $2.2-million budget. Victoria contributes $650,000, and attending White Spot president Warren Erhart’s Pirate Pack promotion adds $100,000. An annuity should launch at $6 million and grow to provide all funding, Rutledge said.

Former Deeley’s motorcycle dealer Don James found its easier to reach remote Zajac Ranch in his helicopter than by a dusty two-wheeled ride.

Ceremonies over, Don James, who sold his Deeley motorcycle dealership to Harley Davidson, left not on two wheels but in his Eurocopter EC130 helicopter, and was home before some reached the Lougheed Highway.

NO LOOKING BACK: Among her creations, city fashion designer-manufacturer Chloë Angus chose daringly backless ones for herself and close clients. It was cruelly ironic on June 29, 2015, when an otherwise-benign cavernoma tumour trickled blood into her spinal cord and paralyzed her. With 3,000-square-foot premises recently occupied and six months of treatment and therapy ahead, Angus figured “I would tone down and stop working eight days a week.” Some hopes. A commission to design for a royal visit arrived. Plans for menswear and home-decor lines matured, and Angus’s business doubled. Today, with “just enough feeling returning to keep me working hard, I can walk while swimming, just not on land.” Meanwhile, aware that she carries the gene for Huntington’s disease, Angus is encouraged by UBC researcher Dr. Blair Leavitt completing the human clinical trial of a promising drug treatment. Typically, she has honoured her mother and Huntington patient Dana by launching a wrap, sales of which will benefit the Huntington Society. Designed by Clarence Mills, its Dragonfly motif symbolizes transformation. As for her own ever-transforming business activity, “I should try to tone it down,” Angus said. Not that that worked before.

Jonty Parker bought his prize-winning Jaguar E type from Calgary folk who had garaged it for 41 years because it stalled in traffic one hot day.

PURTY PURR: Jonathan T. (Jonty) Parker has a truffle-hound’s nose for British cars with promise. Spotting a scruffy 1960 AC Ace on Kingsway in 1972, he waved the driver over and paid $1,400 for it. Restored, the roadster won many awards, including first in class at world-top-ranked Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. In 2015, Parker heard of a six-cylinder Jaguar E-type coupe garaged in Calgary since 1974 when an exasperated woman had the “honeymoon” car stall one hot day. Parker corralled what Enzo Ferrari called “the most beautiful car in the world.” Ian Davey and Mike Taylor’s RX Autoworks did their magic, and the Jag, with 35,000 miles on the clock, took the recent All British Field Meet’s Best Debuting Restoration and E-type class trophies.

IN A NAME: Isn’t what Donald Trump calls a witch hunt really a wizard hunt like that pursued by Dorothy’s pup Toto

ARThritis Soiree founder and chair Naz Panahi raised Arthritis Research Canada’s befit to a reported $390,000 at the fifth annual running.

NAZ CLUB: After entertaining previous guests with displays of tango dancing and sword fighting, City Square VP-director Naz Panahi presented South Korean violinist Jenny Bae at the fifth annual running of the ARThritis Soirée that she founded. Held in the Hotel Vancouver’s fabled Roof, and without the benefit of auto-modulating PA, the event raised a reported $390,000 for Arthritis Research Canada.

B.C. Hospitality Foundation executive director Rowena Veylan and Richard Carras toasted the Dish’n’Dazzle benefit with Chilean Cono Sur wine.

Notch8 chef de cuisine Will Lew pleased Dish’n’Dazzle guests with platters of wine-poached seafood on a bed of tastily gritty “nori sand.”

FRIENDS INDEED: Colleagues rallied around wine agent Michael Willingham in 2007 when an accident-induced stroke needed $50,000 in surgery. The B.C. Hospitality Foundation launched then has since supported 150 others and funded 140 scholarships. Featuring 14 Chilean wineries, 14 city restaurants and six bartenders, the foundation’s recent Dish ’n’ Dazzle tasting reportedly added $60,000 to the $840,000 raised previously. Notable on the chow line: wine-poached crab, mussels, clams, shrimp, coastal fish, roe, kelp and bottarga aioli on “nori sand” by the Hotel Vancouver’s Notch8 chef de cuisine Will Lew.

Rocketship International founder-chief Marv Newland screened and discussed many of his famed animated movies at the Cinematheque.

CEL MATES: Classical cel-animation moviemaking is akin to monks hand-illuminating books in the pre-printing era. About as anonymous, too. Still, the man who called himself Marv Newland Since 1947 has made several pictures — frame by painstakingly hand-coloured frame — at his city-based Rocketship International studio. At the Cinematheque recently, film historian Michael van den Bos introduced former boss Newland and screened 12 globally respected productions, including his student opus, Bambi Meets Godzilla. What a cultural monument he’s been — since 1947.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Cued by self-serving politicians, multiplex theatre chains may introduce the single transferable movie ballot. Patrons would enter their first, second and subsequent choices of films offered, whereupon a computer would eliminate the least popular, re-assign nominators’ alternative choices and repeat the calculation until ticket holders contentedly watched the same flick on every screen.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

Supreme Court of Canada Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin and B.C. Lt.-Gov. Judith Guichon attended a Canadian Club luncheon.

VISIONS WE HAVE FOUND: Beverley McLachlin’s judicial career has led her from the Vancouver County Court to chief justice of the B.C. Supreme Court to, in 2000, the Supreme Court of Canada. At the Terminal City Club this week, soon-to-be-published novelist McLachlan attended the 20th annual luncheon of the Canadian Club of Vancouver whose president Raymond Greenwood’s nickname is Mister Fireworks. Lt.-Gov. Judith Guichon, who attended, likely anticipated pyrotechnics herself when dealing with that day’s unveiling of the NDP-Green party pact. Meanwhile MC Peter Legge paid tribute to the late Order of Canada and Order of B.C. member Grace McCarthy. Vancouver Symphony Orchestra music director then played Amazing Grace variations on the club’s piano. Historic coincidence played, too, when McCarthy, who resurrected B.C.’s Social Credit Party after its 1972 electoral defeat by the NDP, was memorialized on the same day that the Socred-succeeding Liberals looked about to be toppled. Honorees then saw soprano Catherine Campolin lead the Henry Hudson Elementary intermediate choir through English and French renditions of O Canada and This Is My Home. Perhaps that home will eventually witness one of the youngsters installed on its top bench or even as prime minister.

Mission Hill Family Estate Winery owner Anthony von Mandl, escorted mother Bedriska, 101, to an event for other OC and OBC members.

BELL RINGING 101: Mission Hill Family Estate Winery owner Anthony von Mandl brought an extra-special vintage to the Canadian Club event. That was his 101-year-old mother, Bedriska Mandl-Schlesinger, who weighs less than one sixth the 277 kg of the bell named for her at the West Bank winery. Its cast-in dedication: “Purpose Courage Preservation Discernment Dignity Progession.”

Martin Creed’s neon sculpture backed artist Ian Wallace when his multi-decade exhibition opened at the Wing San Building’s Rennie Museum.

NO-J3RK5: Order of Canada member Ian Wallace’s exhibition of photographic-conceptual works filled the Rennie Museum recently. Some hadn’t been seen publicly since 1988. An eight-panel series titled Poverty1982 greeted opening-day arrivees who, with drinks plentiful, might have welcomed a reprise performance by Wallace and famous fellow artists Jeff Wall and Rodney Graham’s 1979 band, UJ3RK5. No such luck, although the three and 19 others are participating in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Pictures From Here exhibition to Sept. 4. As for Wallace’s personal archives, they, like a recent $12-million donation from Rennie’s collection, will go the National Gallery of Canada. “That will make it absolutely the place of reference for Ian’s career,” Rennie said.

Rescue dog Cooper accompanied furniture designer-maker Kate Duncan when she launched her Address show for Pacific Northwest designers.

ADDRESS KNOWN: Many were surprised while jam-packing the Main-off-National Ellis Building for the opening of furniture designer-manufacturer Kate Duncan’s Address show. It wasn’t just that the event doubled last year’s B.C.-only exhibitors to 39 with newcomers from Alberta, Washington and Oregon. Rather it was part-time detention-centre teacher Duncan saying “the man of my dreams” was snoozing upstairs. Turns out it was golden retriever Cooper, a six-year-old rescue dog whose laid-back mien and slowly sweeping tail complemented the ever-exuberant Duncan. Her annual display of talented and often younger designers is bound to grow.

Architect David Yustin and Fabulous Furnishings owner Celina Dalrymple launched the Liveable Luxury furniture line at the Address show.

SEATMATES: David Yustin, the Zacharko Yustin Architects partner who first graduated in interior design, often has clients add his self-created furniture to high-end homes they commission. Fabulous Furnishings principal Celina Dalrymple once dedicated an armchair to Lady Gaga. Their firms now conspire on the Liveable Luxury line that the two debuted at the Address show with a $19,000 velvet sectional. Sofas run from $7,000 to $11,000, Dalrymple said.

EYE-OPENER: When city ophthalmologist John Richards, 82, conducted the first of 5,000 eye operations, “patients would be in hospital for at least six days.” Undergoing cataract surgery himself recently, “I went in at 7 a.m. and was out at 8:20,” he whistled.

Top Drop co-organizer Kurtis Kolt welcomed Antoine Clasen who brought his wines from Luxembourg to the annual terroir-focused tasting.

MULTO BENELUX: Kurtis Kolt and Jeff Curry enjoy offering something different when their Top Drop tasting features 200 terroir-focused wines and fewer beers and ciders from generally smaller domestic and global operations. They sure did this year when the Caves Bernard Massard concern’s Antoine Clasen poured five wines from rarely heard-from Luxembourg. After neighbouring Belgium, Quebec is the firm’s top client, he said.

Rogers Communications’ Philip Lind greeted artist Paul Wong at a reception for the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Pictures From Here exhibition.

BEAR WITH US: Rogers Communications vice chairman Philip Lind and president/CEO Joe Natale had guests meet Ian Wallace and other contributing artists for drinks before viewing the VAG’s Pictures From Here exhibition their firm sponsored. TV-series producers wishing to have Rogers view their pictures included city-based Omnifilm Entertainment’s Michael Chechik and Gabriela Schonbach. Their Smithers-shooting Wild Bear Rescue sees former German zookeeper Angelika Langen and family operate the world’s reportedly sole legal rehab centre for orphaned grizzly-bear cubs.

A Jason Matlo gown and Tiffany pendant hardly hid Annabelle Hawksworth’s 2007 pregnancy from husband and restaurateur-to-be David.

TEN YEARS AGO: David Hawksworth’s self-named restaurant was four years in the future and his Nightingale nine when another project preoccupied him. That was the unhurried appearance of wife Annabelle’s first baby. Referring to Vij’s restaurant, Hawksworth said: “We’re going to Vikram’s tomorrow for a curry. That should fix it.” It didn’t. Still, Heston John Hawksworth arrived a week later, possibly drawn by the prospect of papa’s slow-cooked squab with caramelized onion and bacon tarte fine.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: To perceive his accommodation with the NDP more clearly, Andrew Weaver could put on Green Fade eyewear.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

Wayne Gretzky wines were served when CTV anchor Mike Killeen attended and Global rival Sophie Lui was MC at the Rick Hansen event.

MOTION MAINTAINED: Thirty years after his Man in Motion wheelchair journey around the world, Rick Hansen took the elevator to a Rick Hansen Foundation fundraiser in the Hotel Georgia ballroom. Other than still using a chair, the decades appear to have been good for Hansen. Ditto for wife Amanda, who was called in when Rick needed a physiotherapist for 1984-Olympics-trials hurts. “Make her a pretty one,” he cracked prophetically. Called again three days into his world tour, Amanda stayed on. Today, she recalls a two-week break in New Zealand “when Rick’s system began to break down and he had to start moving again.”

Along his multi-nation way, Rick was heartened when many folk likened him to Terry Fox and to “what he did for the country and disabled persons. He epitomized the spirit of most Canadians.” Another Canadian exemplar was represented at the Hansen reception in the form of Wayne Gretzky Estate Winery products, although none from the ’99 vintage.

Kenneth’s father Henry Lee played a $50,000 Fender guitar at the old Tom Lee Music locale in 2006 before leaving for Hong Kong head office.

During a reception at Tom Lee Music’s Granville Street store, busker-like Kenneth Lee strummed a $10,000 National Reso-Phonic Dobro.

PRESTISSIMO: That was the cue last December when the Tom Lee Music company began demolishing premises for its relocation two blocks north on Granville Street. When VP-director Graham Blank hosted an opening reception there recently, Kenneth Lee, 28, re-enacted father and then-company president Henry’s 2006 photograph as a Granville Street busker. But instead of papa’s $50,000 Fender “Harley Davidson” guitar, he chose an acoustic $9,999.99 National Reso-Phonic dobro. Career-wise, they’re on the same page, though. In July, Kenneth will join the global Tom Lee Group in Hong Kong where Henry is chief financial officer.

At relocated Tom Lee Music, Jane Coop saw a $600,000 Steinway she may play to launch her cross-Canada, New York and London recital tour.

STEINWAY OR THE HIGHWAY: It will be both for city pianist Jane Coop this fall when she begins a Victoria-to-Halifax tour of 13 cities, with New York and London to follow. She’ll rehearse the Beethoven-Rachmaninoff repertoire at home, relishing her personal Steinway 7B instrument’s “warm and expansive sound.” For the tour’s Vancouver recital, though, she may play the $600,000, nine-foot Steinway Model D named Kuniisii for the supernatural figure that Haida artist Jay Simeon applied with its ground-argillite acrylic finish.

NEVER LOST IT: When a 1961 Vancouver park board byelection prompted her political debut, Canadian Florist of The Year Grace McCarthy reflected: “I guess I felt a little obligated to give something back. It sounds a bit mundane, I know, to say I thought I owed it to the community, but I still have that strong sense of responsibility.”

Consul General Massimiliano Iacchini congratulated Luigi Aquilini and Lucio Sacchetti on Italy conferring different knightly honours on them.

THAT’S AMORE: Attending National Day celebrations at the Italian Cultural Centre, Consul General Massimiliano Iacchini conferred his government’s Commendatore status on CMC Engineering Group president-CEO Lucio Sacchetti. In Rome, meanwhile, President Sergio Mattarella had honoured Aquilini Group founder Luigi Aquilini and 24 other industrialists as Cavalieri del Lavoro, meaning Workers Knights. Formalities over, celebrants looked forward to Sunday, June 11, when they’ll join artists, merchants, restaurateurs and others packing 14 blocks of traffic-closed Commercial Drive for the Amore-themed Italian Day on The Drive festival.

At the Leo Awards, Michael Eklund, here with Eadweard co-star Sara Canning, won no prize but raised the bar on topknot-and-beard styling.

ON TOP: Leo Awards Founder Walter Daroshin was thrilled when the 19th annual running named winners from 1,295 entries by B.C. films, TV productions and performers during three Hotel Vancouver events.  Hello Destroyer was named best motion picture, and its Jared Abrahamson was named best male actor. The Hollow Child’s Jessica McLeod was best female actor. Oddly, veteran actor Ben Ratner was overlooked when his remarkable depiction of a punch-drunk boxer in Ganjy was, like the short film itself, not nominated. Any transformative-appearance award would likely have gone to 2015 Eadweard star Michael Eklund whose bleached-blond mohawk, shaved dark sides and two-tone beard may make auditions challenging. Then again, wacky dos haven’t harmed certain living or dead dictators or today’s US president.

Director Alex Law and producer Mabel Cheung screened Echoes of the Rainbow to launch the Cinematheque’s post-1997 Hong Kong series.

DIFFERING VISIONS: It was 1992 when the then-colony of Hong Kong’s final governor, Chris Patten, cheered Vancouver listeners by mentioning a “bridge fabricated across the ocean from this great and civilized land to a rock in the South China Sea.” That rock became China’s Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in 1997, and the bridge still stands. Contemporary filmmakers crossed it recently with the eight-production Creative Visions program screening at the Cinematheque to June 23. It opened with writer-director Alex Law and producer Mabel Cheung’s Echoes of the Rainbow, wherein a boy dies of leukemia amid 1960s Hong Kong’s inequalities and corruption.

Former U.S. consul general Lewis Lukens, here with wife Lucy, countered Donald Trump’s post-terror rudeness to London Mayor Sadiq Khan.

WITH HONOUR: Former city-based U.S. consul general Lewis Lukens was minding the fan in London recently when President Donald Trump flung something that way. Following a multi-death terrorist attack in the British capital, Trump, a.k.a. Tweeter the Great, called Muslim mayor Sadiq Khan’s appeal for calm “a pathetic excuse.” With Washington’s London embassy having no ambassador since Jan. 18, chargé d’affaires Lukens took the dignified and daring step of praising Khan’s leadership while expressing U.S. sympathy and solidarity. Current Vancouver consul general Lynne Platt likely will be equally gracious at her approaching Fourth of July reception.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Anyone recall a third-party review for Glen Clark’s fast ferries fiasco?

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456