Christian Chan donated $600,000 and Dr. Kim Chi spoke about inherited cancer at a B.C. Cancer Foundation Inspiration gala reception.

SECOND-HAND CANCER: After raising $3.05 million at its 2016 Inspiration gala, the B.C. Cancer Foundation has received a $600,000 pledge for this year’s Nov. 4 event. Christian Chan of the philanthropic family announced that donation to guests at a VanDusen Botanical Garden reception. With millions raised later, it will help fund the B.C. Cancer Agency’s hereditary-cancer program to benefit at-risk families. According to prostate specialist Dr. Kim Chi, who addressed guests, inherited cancers now account for 10 per cent of diagnoses. “We have to completely revamp our system to diagnose and opportunistically manage these patients,” he said. Of particular clinical interest, the BCRA2 gene normally repairs DNA. But when mutated and passed through generations, it can increase the likelihood of cancer inheritance. Facing that risk, screen star Angelina Jolie had a double mastectomy and removal of her ovaries and Fallopian tubes. Some 20 other genes need to be screened for and studied, Dr. Chi said.

Honoured for his orthopaedic work in Ethiopia, Dr. Rick Hodes had adopted son Semgnew accompany him at the Bring Back Hope gala.

AT THEIR BACKS: Joe and Rosalie Segal passed the philanthropic gene to their sons. Among other ventures, Lorne fronts the Courage To Come Back Awards that benefit the Coast Mental Health Foundation. Gary and wife Nanci recently co-chaired the sixth annual Bring Back Hope gala that honoured Dr. Rick Hodes and Dr. Oheneba Boachie-Adjei for orthopedic treatment of all-faith patients in Ethiopia and Ghana. Their partner is the UBC Branch for International Surgical Care. An orthodox Jew who favours Don Cherry-style jackets, Hodes is equally characteristic when facing bureaucratic red tape. Learning that orphaned street kids without health insurance couldn’t receive the treatment their serious afflictions needed, Hodes simply adopted them. One such son, Semgnew, now 27, accompanied him at the gala. As Gary Segal said of Hodes earlier: “He’s a saint, a mensch, a hero.”

THE MORE YOU WANT: Before politely answering a young attendee’s inquiry about his Order of Canada and Order of B.C. lapel pins, Joe Segal cracked: “I got them in a pack of Cracker Jack.”

B.C. Attorney General Andrew Wilkinson joined wife and UBC and VGH Hospital Foundation CEO Barbara Grantham at Bring Back Hope.

MONEY TALKING: Regarding a possible successor for B.C. Liberal leader Christy Clark, party bagman David McLean saw lawyer-physician, and now attorney general, Andrew Wilkinson at the Bring Back Hope gala and said: “I’d be his campaign manager.”

Maiko Behr and Yasuko Goto conducted tea ceremonies when Sherri Kajiwara staged the Nikkei Centre’s kimono-themed Bloom event.

SWEET AND BITTER: Traditional Japanese attire brightened Burnaby’s Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre recently when executive director Roger Lemire and director-curator Sherri Kajiwara staged a fundraiser billed as Bloom: Kimono Nikkei High Tea. The event’s garment component reflected Hitomi Harama’s Kimono Culture exhibition in an adjacent gallery. The Silk Road Tea firm provided artisan beverages while kimono-clad Maiko Behr and Yasuko Goto conducted traditional tea ceremonies. Lemire announced programs celebrating Canada’s 150th birthday. Less joyfully, 2017 is the 75th anniversary of 22,000 Japanese Canadians having their homes and property confiscated and being forcibly removed to eastward detention centres.

CHEEKY: A Canada 150 series profile of this newspaper’s late publisher, Stu Keate, recounted his slogan: “The Sun has the writers.” Our sister publication informally responded: “The Province has the reporters.”

Amid mortuary chambers and post-mortem tables, Eve Lazarus launched Blood Sweat and Fear about forensic investigator John Vance.

DARK DAYS: Vancouver’s historic seamier side continues to attract authors. Former reporters Ian Macdonald and Betty O’Keefe began the trend with their 1997 The Mulligan Affair: Top Cop on the Take. Aaron Chapman hit pay dirt with his 2012 Penthouse nightclub bio, Liquor, Lust, and The Law. Former Sun reporter Eve Lazarus weighed in with Sensational Vancouver, which won a 2015 Heritage Award of recognition. Her subsequent Cold Case Vancouver studied 50 unsold murders. Now she’s covered police inspector John Vance’s four-decade forensic evidence career in Blood Sweat and Fear. Fittingly named to write about bringing back the dead, Lazarus launched her latest book in the Vancouver Police Museum with chilled wine and beer served beside now-disused mortuary chambers and post-mortem slabs.

SILLY SYNONYMS: “Send not to know for whom the bell mobility prices, it mobility prices for thee.”

Pitched in the key of G and fingered differently than others, Luke Moore’s clarinet literally brought the right tone to the Turkish Film Festival.

Consul general Anil Bora Inan joined Turkish Film Festival founder Elem Sonmez for the opening of the 4th annual running.

SCREENING TURKEY: Following 6,000 years of grape fermentation, Turkey still produces far more wine than movies. Both were featured when the fourth annual Vancouver Turkish Film Festival presented eight movies and served seven Suvla wines from the Gallipoli peninsula. Consul general Anil Bora Inan opened the festival that former movie production coordinator Eylem Sonmez founded and now co-presents with Simon Fraser University. Luke Moore added cultural context by playing a Turkish-made clarinet that, pitched in the deeper-than-usual key of G, gave his repertoire authentic tone.

Deighton Cup co-founder Jordan Kallman and Dawn Melody pray for sunny weather to return for the dress-up event’s ninth running July 22.

STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOR NEVER? With spring washed out and summer due on Wednesday, fingers are crossed for the Deighton Cup on July 22. That traditionally sunny Hastings Park party usually features cigars longer and dresses shorter than the tote board’s odds. Complementing the event’s Japan-Louisiana chow, city bartenders will employ strawberries and much else in the Cocktail Jockey competition to be held ahead of time this year.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Cambridge University examiners who claim the word “genius” has only male connotations may now turn their attentions to “idiot.”

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

RUNNING UNWILD: East Side Junior Alternative School students know about running. From other schools, family or problematic pasts, that is, or to catch up with those to whom life dealt a better hand. Saskatoon-born teacher Trevor Stokes, 47, had a better idea. If students began running full marathons, he figured, they might lead their contemporaries in more ways than one. It worked. His program has reportedly developed the world’s largest cohort of student marathon runners. Thirty completed the full Vancouver marathon this year, and 18 the half marathon. Many participated in Patagonia’s gruelling Street to Peak event or climbed Tanzania’s 5,895-metre Mount Kilimanjaro … or both. Colombia-born Grade 9 student Ibin Ardila has completed five marathons. More tellingly, three-quarters of Stokes’s students graduate from high school. Recently, he welcomed them to a barbecue on the school’s Britannia Secondary campus, saying: “You’ve worked hard, and made me and the community proud.” Trimpac Meats’ Jonathan Burke and Flying Pig-Wildtale restaurateur Erik Heck handled the chow. Asked if Stokes is a tough guy, one student replied: “No. He just wants the best from all of us.” For him, that best entails the camaraderie, goal-setting, self-worth and confidence of students succeeding after intense training. Asked what he needed most, Stokes simply said: “Acceptance that these kids are worth investing in.”

East Side Junior Alternative School teacher Trevor Stokes backed Ibin Ardila, Margaret Dixon and Christa Waterworth from 48 marathon and half-marathon runners, possibly the world’s largest such group. 

After redeveloping the Hotel Georgia, Delta Group chair Tony Hii and Delta Land Development head Bruce Langereis announced its sale.

GEORGIA OFF HIS MIND: Britannia grad Bruce Langereis, the Delta Land Development president, will check out of the Rosewood Hotel Georgia after a dozen-or-so-year stay. Effective July 15, it’s been bought by PR Acquisitions (Canada) Limited Partnership, an affiliate of Dr. Azim Jamal and Joe Moosa’s Pacific Reach Properties here. A former freestyle ski champ who often scaled the Squamish Chief’s vertical rock face, Langereis could exit the hotel by scrambling down its Georgia Street wall.

Sea otters scrutinized Vancouver Aquarium CEO John Nightingale and board chair Randy Pratt during the Night at the Aquarium fundraiser.

PARK PARTY: The Vancouver Aquarium’s Ocean Wise Conservation Association recently filed for a judicial review of the park board’s cetacean-banning bylaw. One day later, president-CEO John Nightingale and board chair Randy Pratt fronted the Night in the Aquarium gala. Nightingale reported 1.2 million human and 60 million digital visits annually. Of the Ocean Wise nomenclature: “We figure the only thing that can save the oceans’ problems is the people. We’re in the people business, not the fish business.” With certain fishy incursions, he might have added.

The Juice Truck founder-owners Zach Berman and Ryan Slater show the 232-page book that appears to leave no fruit or vegetable unsqueezed.

JUICED IN TIME: Undergrad degrees in hand, 10-year friends Zach Berman and Ryan Slater might have gone to business school. Instead, their higher education was a year in the Himalayas, India and Sri Lanka. After sampling juiced versions of everything from high-altitude sea-buckthorn berries to sea-level bananas, they returned stricken with entrepreneuritis. By 2011, that resulted in The Juice Truck and its myriad cold-pressed fruits and vegetables. Smoothies and a fixed-location café followed, also a 232-page book of recipes, photos, cleansing and home-juicing info. Following their regimens, as one headline informs: “You’ll be like an invigorating spring day with a sky full of puffy clouds, some of them shaped like cabbages.”

PILGRIM PROGRESSING: Diplomat Joseph Caron’s 17 years in Japan included the final five as our ambassador. In Tokyo recently, he received the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Stars from Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and was congratulated by Emperor Akihito. Feting the down-to-earth Caron in Vancouver, consul general Asako Okai said he’d trekked to 76 of 88 temples on the 1,200-km Shikoku pilgrimage, and should add the remainder next year.

Le Vieux Pin and La Stella co-owner Saeedeh Salem brought wine to a $100,000 benefit for the Neekoo Philanthropic Society she founded.

The Neekoo Soirée’s platinum sponsoring Peggy Riahi, Maryam Chafouri, Afsaneh Shirazi and Fatmi Riahi enjoyed Telus Garden’s views.

NEEKOO NIGHT: Sean and Saeedeh Salem do sell wines that their Oliver-based Le Vieux Pin and La Stella operation wineries produce. They also appear to give away plenty at charitable functions they support. The Salems did it again recently at Telus Garden’s rooftop patio where a Neekoo Philanthropic Society soirée reportedly raised $100,000. Saeedeh sparkplugged Neekoo (ancient Persian for providing goodness and guidance) in 2012 to fund educational grants for needy students. Increasingly popular for events (Forum for Women Entrepreneurs partiers were there this week), the al fresco locale lets some puff ciggies without a 25-floor elevator ride down to West Georgia Street.

Recently deceased David Roels photographed such eminent locals as 120 Order of Canada recipients, including late architect Arthur Erickson.

PICTURES PAST: Cameras have portrayed people since 1839. Such works carry faces and names into perpetuity while the photographers are seldom known. Such a one, Dave Roels, has portrayed many eminent folk here, including some 120 of B.C.’s Order of Canada recipients. The son of tennis-and-soccer champ Oscar Roels, Dave had coach Harry Jerome help him secure a U.S. track scholarship. That kept him running until he died recently at age 68, leaving a portfolio of photographs that should still inform viewers in 2195 and beyond.

PARRYDIDDLES: Whalley’s 53-year-old Stardust Roller Rink will entertain its last-ever skaters July 8 … Neuroscientist-politician-athlete Pat McGeer will be 90 on June 29 … Moviemaker-boxer Uwe Boll’s Bauhaus restaurant has completed round — uh, year two.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: The vow to end union-certification secret balloting suggests that politicians’ cliché about “moving forward” can mean just the reverse.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

Virtually “fresh off the boat,” as folk once said, columnist-to-be Malcolm Parry admired the Bridge River gorge to begin his first July 1 in Canada.

MANY HAPPY RETURNS: Waking on his first July 1 in Canada, the young man marvelled at B.C.’s Bridge River gorge rising to twice the height of mountains he’d known in Wales. Spiralling in its sun-warming vortex, hawks scanned the valley floor for breakfast. Fifteen weeks earlier, the young immigrant had done much the same by flying to Vancouver hungry for opportunity. Canada promptly delivered. By 10 the next morning, he had the kind of job that, like many then, could provide a single-paycheque family with its own house and car. Then he vaulted to a hydroelectric project that would — and still does — generate 492 megawatts of clean power for B.C. There, with over-40-degree daytime temperatures imminent, a co-worker announced it was “Dominion Day,” to be celebrated in the bunkhouse later with rye whiskey and ginger ale — no ice. As his life here lengthened, Canada’s innate encouragement of opportunity opened the young man’s career vista from his still-beloved Bridge River to all of B.C., then across the entire land to its three oceans. Millions of others have, and continue to have, their lives equally enriched. So, here’s a thankful 150th-birthday birthday toast to Canada, that infinitely welcoming of homelands — with ice this time.

Before his Hollywood film roles, present exhibition subject Chief Dan George joined Frances Hyland in the 1967 play The Ecstasy of Rita Joe.

THEN AGAIN: For Canada’s 100th birthday in 1967, Burrard Indian Band (now Tsleil-Waututh Nation) chief Dan George composed Lament for Confederation. A printed version circulated when granddaughter Charlene Aleck and the Squamish Nation’s Carla George welcomed guests to a North Vancouver Museum exhibition. Running to April, 2018, it tracks the late chief’s 82-year life, his showbiz triumphs and his decades of First-Nations activism. The 1967 lament included: “When I fought to protect my land and my home, I was called a savage. When I neither understood nor welcomed (the white man’s) way of life, I was called lazy. … I shall grab the instruments of the white man’s success — his education, his skills— and with these new tools I shall build my race into the proudest segment of your society.” Geswanouth “Dan” Slahoot (a residential school changed his surname to George) grabbed the instruments of stagecraft well enough to receive an Academy Award nomination for his role in Little Big Man and to feature in several other Hollywood movies. “It wasn’t hard for me to play the part of an Indian chief,” he said later. “I am an Indian chief.”

Artist Lisa Penz feted Amyn Nasser on his Voyeur Nocturne show of large, high-resolution photographs of city apartment towers at nighttime.

GLOW NATUREL: It was a frigid December night when Tanzania-born global fashion photographer Amyn Nasser ended his exertions with a personal trainer-friend. Arising, he glanced at an adjacent, glowing-windowed condo tower and said: “I have to photograph this.”

“It’s cold out there,” his companion protested as the stark-naked Nasser carried his Gitzo tripod and Nikon D2X camera to his 25th-floor balcony. Ten minutes later, he’d recorded the first of several large, fine-detailed images that are in the Voyeur Nocturne exhibition that is worth a fully clad visit to Gastown’s Lumas gallery.

Olympian Nikola Girke envisaged the long, winding roads that await Ride to Conquer Cancer participants and the researchers they help fund.

TAKE A BIKE: The Audi Downtown auto dealership hosted a gala recently for a two-wheel event: the ninth annual Ride to Conquer Cancer. Participants will pedal to Seattle Aug. 26-27 and add to the $77 million reportedly raised for B.C. Cancer Agency-funded research projects. There’ll be an all-B.C. route for 2018, the agency’s Lindsay Carswell said. Although riders don’t officially race, they were encouraged by three-time Olympics sailor Nikola Girke whose skipper-punishing 17-foot catamaran hit 46 km/h at the 2016 Rio games. She’ll return to oomphier vessels in her job as Fraser Yacht Sales’ office manager.

Adele Noronha and Alexandra Lainfiesta won lead-female-performer Jessies for their roles in Angels in America and Brothel #9.

FREDDIE’S FRIENDS: Randi Edmundson and Jess Amy Shead could have danced like marionettes when their Little Onion Puppet Company’s first-ever production won twice at the 35th annual Jessies theatre-awards ceremony.  They and their Freddie in the Neighbourhood show were cited for outstanding performance and outstanding production in the young audience category. “It’s mind-boggling,” said Edmundson who had controlled one puppet to friend-from-Grade 10 Shead’s nine.

Omar Mawjee, Karen Christiansen and auto dealer Greg Keith staged the 12 North Fantasy Football Draft party in the Yale Saloon.

Seattle Seahawks George Fant and Tanner McEvoy supported teammate Luke Willson’s efforts “to inspire Canadian kids to play football.”

TOUCHDOWN: The Seattle Seahawks Blue and Green anthem could have replaced the Yale Saloon’s traditional blues when the 12 North Fantasy Football Draft party occupied it recently. Fronting the event, Canadian tight end Luke Willson had Seahawks teammates George Fant and Tanner McEvoy join in to benefit Special Olympics B.C., the Skidegate Haida Immersion Program and Willson’s own grants “to inspire Canadian kids to play football.”

Christie Darbyshire and Canadian Seattle Seahawk Luke Willson greeted guests at one of the 12 North multi-charity events he heads here.

With a related golf tourney, youth football camp and celebrity game, the event was staged by Eventcorp’s Omar Mawjee and Karen Christiansen and Greg Keith of the Dueck auto-dealership clan.

PLACE AND SHOW: Shamed by political-election wonks, horse-racing tracks may end their own first-past-the-post system. They’ll now declare winners by aggregating horse-and-jockeys’ positions at each furlong (402 metres). No more elitism with performance-based odds, either. Bettors will simply receive a fixed-ratio fraction of each race’s “handle.” Such fun.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Denied evolution schooling by religious fiat, Turks still have the devolution of their once-mighty Ottoman Empire to ponder.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

EMPRESS REDUX: Two Victoria institutions rang in the changes recently. Belleville Street’s 120-year-old B.C. legislature saw NDP and Green party leaders John Horgan and Andrew Weaver oust a 16-year B.C. Liberal government. Kitty-corner across Government Street, Natale “Nat” and Flora Bosa celebrated the refurbishment of the 119-year old Empress Hotel they bought in 2014. “On our first visit, the staff wore tennis shoes, so they knew they’d have to run fast,” developer Nat recalled. Costly running, too, as a $30-million renovation estimate doubled. Worth it, though, Nat said, “for the great honour … and opportunity to do something for B.C. and Canada.” He also called the 477-room hotel “my mistress, who gave me a lot of headaches and cost me a pisspotful more than I expected, and now she’s beginning to give me pleasure.”

Wife and Palladio jewelry firm owner Flora — family call her Flo —  reportedly heard Nat’s original purchase-and-refurbishment proposal and proclaimed, “We’re doing it.” She likely remembered a marital uncle who’d established himself in Vancouver before various relatives immigrated here from rural Italy. “He would take nephews and nieces to Victoria and stay at the Empress,” Flo said. “Before the trip, he gave them a lecture on how to dress and behave so as not to embarrass him.”

Born Dec. 25, 1944, Nat likely wouldn’t have survived had a village drunk not dripped grappa into his mouth so that violent coughing cleared his congested lungs. What a pity the late boozer and uncle weren’t there to see the strong, well-mannered Nat and Flo unveil their reborn “national treasure.”

Accustomed to hotel towers, architect James Cheng was delighted to master plan the Empress renovation and especially to liberate its gardens.

AS YOU WERE: Architect James Cheng’s hotel commissions include Vancouver and Toronto’s Shangri-La and our town’s Fairmont Pacific Rim and Terminal City Club. Those new towers were only partly hotel. But the Empress renovation, which he master-planned, was all hotel and far from new. Nat Bosa also opened a design window for him by ruling: “We’ve got to clean up the gardens.” That entailed removing fences and evergreens and making new plantings so that the hotel might seem to float in its surrounding as it had in 1900. “The space between buildings is as important as a building’s structure, or even more,” said Cheng. “Maybe I should become a landscape architect, not just as architect.”

Now named to Cadillac’s roll of 150 inventive Canadians, Tojo Hidekazu earlier had fellow chef Daniel Boulud applaud his name-brand sake.

ROLL MODEL: Cadillac’s classic Eldorado convertibles have long rolled on Californian boulevards. Now, the automaker has honoured the sushi chef who invented the California Roll. At his West Broadway restaurant recently, Tojo Hidekazu was inducted to Cadillac’s Daring Moments roll of 150 inventive Canadians. Launching his own-brand sake a decade ago, Tojo was feted by Daniel Boulud, the then co-owner of Vancouver’s now-defunct Lumiere and db Bistro Moderne whose present-day Cadillac connection is the Michelin company. Its tires support the cars while its two stars support Boulud’s self-named New York restaurant.

With his book of reminiscences, Tony Swain inspected a Harvard similar to one late wife Mary bought to remind him of jet-fighter training days.

After recording this photo, the shooter found gasoline drizzling into his open cockpit in a far-from-home-field aircraft piloted by Tony Swain. 

WING AND TAIL TALES: Before his short-lived second marriage, one city entrepreneur’s bride bought a multimillion-dollar business jet for him to pilot. Mary Cheslock, the widowed owner of West Vancouver’s still-mourned Royal Seafoods store, did much the same. However, she paid $4,000 for a Canadian-made military Harvard training plane that would be worth 50 times that today. She thought it would remind her boyfriend, former RAF jet-fighter pilot Tony Swain, of training days. It did, and they flew “Bessy” far and wide during a 42-year marriage that ended with her 2013 death. Swain recounts their aviation activities in the 252-page Old Swainey Stories he released at Delta Heritage Air Park recently. There’s also an account of his Lockheed T-33 jet’s aileron controls locking at 40,000 feet above a Manitoba blizzard, and his commander radioing: “My advice to you is to eject now.” Instead, Swain landed successfully. His hair-raising descent reminded one reader of accompanying him in a twin-open-cockpit aircraft to photograph a First World War replica fighter over downtown Vancouver. A sudden aroma alerted the photographer to gasoline dribbling into his cockpit from a tank above his knees. The potential fireball’s 75-knot crawl back to Delta Air Park seemed infinite. Happily, the photo was a winner, too.

Rick and father Pat McGeer coupled their 60th and 90th birthdays at an Alice In Wonderland party complementing Canada’s 150th.

CANDLE POWER: Olympian basketballer and B.C. legislature veteran Pat McGeer complemented Canada’s 150th birthday with one of his own. That entailed coupling son Rick’s 60th to his own 90th.  Their Alice In Wonderland-themed celebration — the book’s Mad Hatter would say “unbirthday party” — took place beside the McGeers’ Point Grey family home’s tennis lawn. As a famed Alzheimer’s disease researcher and B.C. Liberal party leader who quit for cabinet posts in a Social Credit government, McGeer would be professionally cognizant of Alice’s “Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.”

After conducting Vancouver Chamber Choir and guest singers such Allyson McHardy, Jon Washburn will retire at 2018-19 season’s end.

SO LONG, JON: Illinois’ gifts to music include Washburn guitars and Vancouver Chamber Choir’s founding artistic director, Jon Washburn. Some of today’s choristers weren’t born when Washburn began conducting in 1971. He’ll pass the baton to a yet-to-be-named successor at the 2018-19 season’s end but, as guest conductor emeritus, will keep a spare close by.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Let’s hope this G20 meeting will be as useful and warmly remembered as the same-named Infiniti automobile.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

Mozaico Flamenco founder Kasandra (La China) Lea exhibited the passionate Spanish dance form’s international verve and appeal.

LATIN PRIMER: The Roundhouse community centre hosted international events on two consecutive evenings recently. During the first, Latincouver business-and-culture organization founder-director Paola Murillo premiered a flamenco-and-tango soirée. It was part of Latin American Week that preceded the ninth annual Carnaval del Sol celebration. Mexican-born Rosario Ancer, who presented three members of her 28-year-old Flamenco Rosario troupe, had trained and performed professionally in Spain. But her non-Hispanic dancers, schoolteacher Sula Boxall, student social worker Yurie Kaneko and biotech firm executive Michelle Zaharik, who has a PhD in molecular biology, are of English, German, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Polish and Ukrainian background. Soirée attendees also applauded Spain-trained Mozaico Flamenco’s co-founder Kasandra Lea, whose stage name, La China, reflects her birth. And that’s multiculturalism.

As for our Latin community’s own makeup, “There’s been a huge wave of Brazilians,” Colombia-born Murillo said. “More than ever before — and young.”

Laura Byspalko and spouse Sirish Rao launched their seventh Indian Summer Festival with a Roundhouse Community Centre gala.

After organizing the Indian Summer Festival’s food station, chef-restaurateur Vikram Vij welcomed festival performing artist Ernie Watts. 

GIVING INDIAN: Evening sunshine gilded the Roundhouse concourse when Laura Byspalko and husband Sirish Rao launched their seventh- annual Indian Summer Festival. At the rain-swept 2016 gala, Byspalko was full-term pregnant with daughter Teodora, who considerately arrived six days later. Her and Sirish’s baby this time was the festival’s diverse performance schedule ranging from Bengal-born author Arundhati Roy to Virginia-native jazz sax player Ernie Watts.

Traditionally dressed immigrant members of the Tayybeh Syrian-home-cooking group surrounded T-shirted founder Nihal Elwan.

Two days before his and violinist L Subramaniam’s festival concert, Watts played a short set for gala-goers feasting at international food stations organized by chef-restaurateur Vikram Vij. Among them, five traditionally dressed Syrian women from the Tayybeh organization served rice-beef-eggplant-and-almond makloubeh they’d prepared along with tableh, a dish of bulgur wheat, peppers, onion and pomegranate molasses. Boat-shaped cheese-and-parsley-stuffed pies represented Syrian refugees’ sometimes-fatal means of escape while reflecting the festival’s war-and-peace theme. Native Egyptian international-development professional Nihal Elwan founded Tayybeh (@tayybeh) last year to help Syria’s “amazing women cooks” assimilate in Canada.  It’s working — deliciously, too.

Sarah Macaulay exhibited globally feted Wayne Ngan’s ceramic works alongside paintings by fellow Hornby Island artist Gordon Payne. 

MORE POWER: Although as spare as many of his kiln-fired creations, Guangzhou-born potter Wayne Ngan is a giant in his field. Not so his budget in 1958 when he enrolled in the lowest-priced course, ceramics, at Vancouver School of Art, now Emily Carr University of Art + Design. His current $5,000-to-$9,000 creations, along with fellow Hornby Islander Gordon Payne’s paintings, debuted recently at Sarah Macaulay’s gallery. Now sole owner, Macaulay co-founded the facility in 2005 after years as a Europe-based fashion model appearing in most of the big magazines. Located in the east-of-Main arts district, with a satellite in San Francisco, her gallery will participate in Sat., July 15 afternoon’s Flats Block Party with Brad Chernoff’s, Monte Clark’s and Jennifer Winsor’s operations and Gallery Jones and Gallery 295. At his exhibition opening, Ngan said: “Some potters go to sleep after two or three phases.” Wide awake at age 80, he is busily undertaking the painting and bronze sculpting he couldn’t afford to study 60 years ago, “All my work is moving very quickly into the world,” Ngan said.

Former Moscow fashion model Anyuta Gusakova displayed individual and production-series works at the Gallery of B.C. Ceramics. 

FEATS OF CLAY: Another former fashion model is exhibiting ceramic works at a Vancouver gallery. In Anyuta Gusakova’s case, though, she actually makes them  — 120 or so individual pieces annually, and up to 300 each of the 15 designs in her Anyuta Porcelain Collection. Recent works are displayed at Granville Island’s Gallery of B.C. Ceramics. Depicting amusingly fanciful animals, they contrast sharply with a Gusakova work at the Sculptors’ Society of B.C.’s 2015 exhibition. That impossibly slender female nude with coif resembling a dandelion seed pod likely echoed Vladivostok-born Gusakova’s career on Moscow’s fashion-show catwalks and in photo studios. Meanwhile, a contemporary piece titled Wings of Inspiration won her a commission for the Canadian College of Performing Arts’ inaugural Legend Award. The college presented it to Victoria-raised David Foster June 30 to recognize his musical accomplishments and his support and fostering of young Canadian artists.

Riji-certified Interior Flori designer Stephen Kuo conducted a class in Ikebana-style flower arranging at Gastown’s Inform Interiors.

THE BLOOM ROOM: Instructional sessions at Niels and Nancy Bendtsen’s Inform Interiors store can involve architects and other grand-design specialists. But when Stephen Kuo presented recently, the design components he brought from West Broadway’s Interior Flori store were far more ephemeral than steel, concrete, wood and suchlike. They were sprays of aspidistra, eryngium, lisianthus and alchemilla with which Kuo introduced attendees to Ikebana flower arranging. He’s a whiz, too, and holds the highest Riji level of Sogetsu Ikebana certification. Having artistically filled their vases, sunny-afternoon students had the option of bartenders doing much the same for them at the steps-away Lamplighter pub.

Seen at a 1997 book-award event, Vicki Gabereau was escorted by spouse-movie producer Tom Rowe, whose recent death saddened many.

GONE TOO SOON: Tom Rowe’s recent death meant the film-and-television industry lost a top-drawer producer and broadcaster Vicki Gabereau lost a devoted husband. A quick-witted and gently self-deprecating one, too. When Vancouver Mycological Society member Rowe was asked if his interest in mushrooms included farmed as well as wild ones, he smilingly replied: “I have nothing to do with culture. I’m in the movie business.”

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: B.C. Culture Days will launch at Whistler’s Audain Art Museum Sept. 28.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

SO LONG: Had the U.S. Consulate’s usual Fourth of July reception occurred one day later, it would have shared France’s July 14 Bastille Day. “Make America late again,” one attendee joked. With the consular residence in Shaughnessy under renovation and an expected U.S. warship deployed elsewhere, the event took place at the Vancouver Aquarium. In what was her swan song, consul general Lynne Platt congratulated then-incoming B.C. premier John Horgan and aquarium president John Nightingale. She credited the latter for “leadership in  ocean science worldwide (and) keeping our oceans healthy and sustainable for generations to come.” As for sustainable U.S.-Canada relations: “We have much to learn from each other. I remain deeply optimistic about our bilateral relationships.” That optimism envisages “tech corridors and centres of excellence” she likened to “Florence in the Renaissance era.” Without a present-day Machiavelli, one assumes. Platt’s warmest words to guests: “It has been my great privilege to be shaped for three years by you and this place.”

MORE RIGHT STUFF: Succeeding Platt and predecessor Anne Callaghan, U.S. consul general Katherine Dhanani will arrive Aug. 7. Her two decades of African postings included the declined offer to be ambassador to Somalia following that embassy’s 24-year closure. In September, subject to congressional confirmation, ­Republican party fundraiser and billionaire coal-clan member Kelly Knight Craft should become the Trump-nominated ambassador to Canada.

Former B.C. Liberal finance minister Carole Taylor and Mike Farnworth, who would become solictor general a few days later, traded political talk at Vancouver Aquarium.

A HOUSE APART: Politicos celebrating July 4 included NDP solicitor general-to-be Mike Farnworth and former B.C. finance minister Carole Taylor. As premier Christy Clark’s dollar-a-year special adviser, Taylor earned $95,999 less than Horgan appointee Bob Dewar. “And they never paid me,” she quipped. Learning of that, Horgan hinted that she may be invited to continue in her role. Farnworth recently inherited a house in his near-Liverpool birthplace, Wirral West, that has the smallest electorate in Britain’s House of Commons. No word on him retiring there.

Princess Giada and Prince Marcantonio del Drago had friends remember their 2015 Prague wedding during a reception at the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club.

Prince Andrew looked to be running a little behind schedule during one of his ribbon-cutting visits to the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club in 2003.

CASTLE COUPLE: B.C.-raised Giada Dobrzensky de Dobrzenicz got an easier-to-render name and a title upgrade from countess to princess with her 2015 marriage to Prince Marcantonio del Drago in Prague’s St. Thomas church. This week, parents Enrico and Aline Dobrzensky staged a reception for the couple, daughter Aurelia and 150 guests. They occupied the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club’s main dining room, not the less formal Star & Dragon restaurant that Britain’s Prince Andrew opened in 2003 while delivering a Thames Yacht Club burgee. The del Dragos live alternately in France, Switzerland and Brighton, England, a town made fashionable in 1815 when yet another prince, later King George IV, moved there. Meanwhile, they are renovating and plan to live in a 1,000-year-old castle the del Dragos have owned since the 1500s in the near-Rome village of Riofreddo. It means Cold Water which, as pelting Vancouver rain, was the motif for director Giada’s 2001 short film Mon Amour Mon Parapluie that producer Paul Armstrong revived for this week’s Celluloid Social Club screenings. In other water matters, the del Dragos should awake refreshed in all their homes. That’s because investment specialist and computer whiz Marcantonio designed a mattress with mutually compensating hydraulic chambers that, according to its U.S. patent, “form a structure enabling a body to rest.”

Elektra Women’s Choir members backed president Allison Tremblay and conductor Morna Edmundson before leaving for France and the World Symposium of Choral Music in Barcelona, Spain.

AIX AND SPAIN: They’re part of an 11-day itinerary for Vancouver’ Elektra Women’s Choir members who flew to Marseilles on Thursday. After singing in Aix-en-Provence and Sète, they’ll leave France for the World Symposium of Choral Music at Barcelona’s Palau de la Música Catalana. Their previous such participation was at Sydney, Australia, in 1996, when present-day conductor Morna Edmundson was an ingenue singer. This time they’ll perform Songbird and the three-movement Primary Colours by B.C. composers Sarah Quartel and Kathleen Allen. They sang the first enchanting work during a 31st-season launch at chorister Elisabeth Finch and spouse David’s Kerrisdale home.

A 1928 Triumph TT 500 motorcycle accompanies the vastly more costly British classic sports cars that Oliver Young restores in his home garage.

GASOLINE ALLEY: A roaring exhaust was music sublime for men visiting a Kerrisdale back-lane garage recently. You’d expect its owners, Homeworx house-building-and-renovating firm principal Oliver Young and wife Lisa, to house modern Euro sedans or a flossy pickup truck there. But the noisemaker was Young’s ultrarare 1929 British Invicta S sports car that Sun auto scribe Alyn Edwards reported on recently. When fully renovated — and it’s close — it should be worth well into seven figures. A 1937 Alvis Speed 25 roadster beside it undertakes long road trips and “is still good for 100 mph,” meaning 161 km/h, Young said. Also there, his 1928 Triumph TT 500 motorcycle could once “do the ton,” Britspeak for 100 m.p.h., although Young rides it more sedately. Any of those mature British beauties would enhance the classic homes Young builds to fund such automotive indulgences.

Late provincial court judge George Angelomatis thanked Paul Sahota in 2000 for the Astoria Boxing Club operating rent-free at the Sahotas’ Astoria hotel.

ASTORIANS: Reports of the Sahota family’s problematic hotels brought to mind the Astoria Boxing Club that once occupied their so-named East Hastings Street hotel. The club’s annual fight nights featured male and female bouts. Attendees uniquely included judges, senior lawyers, a soon-to-be mayor and senator, corporate and entertainment-biz biggies, and colours-wearing Hells Angels Motorcycle Club members. Unlike fellow-female boxers, round announcers had no tops to their minimal costumes. When Astoria hotel owners Paul and Gudy Singh Sahota offered to sponsor one such fundraiser, late provincial court judge and boxing club principal, George Angelomatis, called their rent-free arrangement contribution enough.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

CUP ALMOST RUNNETH OVER: For nine years, Deighton Cup organizers Dax Droski, Jordan Kallman and Tyson Villeneuve have gambled on the weather rather than the thoroughbreds at Hastings Racecourse. With many lightly dressed, highly heeled, sketchily hatted women and their escorts attending, rain could result in what regular railsiders call a mudder. This year, showers turned to drizzle, then evaporated before the second race (Fetisov paid $3.20 for the win). The conditions were a warning to Social Concierge principals Kallman and Villeneuve, whose sixth annual outdoors Diner en Blanc on Aug. 24 should draw 6,000 white-clad participants. Back at Hastings, clement weather has always gifted Parade Agency owner and former punk-rock guitarist Droski, who co-founded the Deighton Cup partly as a 27th-birthday present to himself. This year, it favoured flamboyantly attired sponsor David Bentil, who again corralled high-value horseless carriages from his Mile’s End Motors showroom. While admiring them, Sunan Spriggs noted more than 30 women wearing ultra-snug dresses and toting vividly coloured bags from her CityLux boutique. Taking a different couture tack, actress-dancer Keilani Elizabeth Rose draped gauze over an abbreviated bodysuit and relied on a broad-brimmed chapeau to fend off the early drizzle and chill. Many followed suit by ditching their once-ubiquitous Kate Middleton-style fascinators for larger, florally adorned headgear. Maybe next year will bring the “fruit basket” hats worn by singer-movie-star Carmen Miranda. Then again, those beside the paddock might have them bitten off by race-readying nags. Better than rain, though.

Backed by Dawn Melody and Lena Villeneuve, Deighton Cup’s Jordan Kallman and Tyson Villeneuve got damp bottoms from an early-in-the-day bench.

Deighton Cup co-founder Dax Droski raised a glass of Piper-Heidsieck champagne to toast Kylie Pasutto and Deanna Leystra’s floral millinery.

CityLux Boutique owner Sunan Spriggs and actress Karen Holness admired Mile’s End Motors dealer David Bentil’s luxury-and-sporting car display.

BOTTOMS UP: You’d expect Deighton Cup patrons to favour brandy-based horse’s neck cocktails. In fact, champagne from sponsor Piper-Heidsieck is the tipple of choice, and champagne-cocktail-mixing is important enough to warrant its own day-earlier competition. The Vancouver Club’s Michelle Medwin won this year’s tourney with Romaji, a concoction named for the system of spelling Japanese words with Latin-alphabet characters. Medwin’s Romaji, though, is comprising plum liqueur, shiso leaf, ginger, bitters and, of course, plenty of Piper-Heidsieck. As for the Deighton Cup paying true bibulous homage to its namesake, “Gassy” Jack Deighton, it could do what that pioneering hotelier did on Sept, 28. 1867. Landing at what is now Gastown, he hauled a barrel of whiskey from his canoe and began selling straight-up shots — no fancy cocktails — to the parched connoisseurs working at Captain Stamp’s nearby sawmill.

STONE UNROLLED: If ever-biting Frank magazine still existed, its front-page headline might be: “Donald Trump: Why can’t he be our prime minister?”

Late architect Bing Thom was a recently inducted Order of Canada member in 2002 when congratulated by then-Governor General Adrienne Clarkson.

Bing Thom Architects principal Venelin Kokalov showed a model of the firm’s design for Hong Kong’s a’building University of Chicago Center.

BREAKING OUT: Vancouver-based architect Bing Thom died Oct. 4, 2016 while visiting Hong Kong, a city he’d left at the age of nine in 1950. “He was a true visionary who demonstrated how architecture impacts and enriches our communities,” Architectural Institute of B.C. CEO Mark Vernon said while opening a free exhibition of the Bing Thom Architects firm’s works. “It is a celebration of … the journey we have shared with him,” BTA principal Venelin Kokalov said of the Building Beyond Buildings exhibition at 440 Cambie Street to Aug. 21. Fittingly, given Thom’s birth and death there, it includes a model of the University of Chicago Center under construction in Hong Kong. Barely touching its steep, treed slope, the curving structure will emblemise higher learning’s freedom by incorporating two former military and political prisons.

Tojo Hidekazu’s restaurant may relocate atop a mid-rise tower BTA technical director Shinobu Homma will oversee on Tojo’s West Broadway site.

ROLL ON: Diners at 29-year-old Tojo’s restaurant may soon see something new accompany the world-famous California Rolls that proprietor Tojo Hidekazu invented. It would be a view of downtown and the North Shore mountains from a restaurant now topping a mixed-use, mid-rise tower on its West Broadway site. BTA technical director Shinobu Homma will handle the development. “He said Tojo-san’s location very good for a legacy project,” Tojo said. Then, superfluously given his devoted following, “I like the city to be happy.”

Jason Dussault and Cathy High showed their artworks with others at Love Me, a 15th-anniversary celebration for Yaletown’s Opus boutique hotel.

Daniel Burke and Liza Labercane modelled T-shirts from Miriam Alden’s Brunette line which includes ones marked Blonde but not yet Auburn.

OPUS 15: Yaletown’s Opus Hotel, home of the glass-walled washrooms, marked its 15th anniversary with an art-installation party titled Love Me. It wasn’t as radical as a three-month project in 2010 when graffiti artist Vincent Dumoulin stripped the hotel’s bar-restaurant and resprayed it daily as a pop-up spot named 100 Days. This time, former fashion designer-manufacturer and TV-series personality Jason Dussault showed the aluminum-shard mosaic portrait of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau he debuted but didn’t sell at New York’s Hoerle-Guggenheim gallery. Cathy High produced the event’s Love Me theme painting installed outside and, inside, a mixed-media work from her west-coast totemic series titled Oh! Miriam Alden, the scion of  a newspaper-publishing clan who sensibly launched a garment-biz agency and later the Brunette fashion designing-manufacturing firm, had young men and women model T-shirts emblazoned Brunette or Blonde. Nothing for redheads yet, it seems.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Although those aged under 35 will get more Bach with less bite by paying half-price when the Vancouver Bach Festival launches at Christ Church Cathedral Aug. 1, they’ll receive no such discount for Lady Gaga’s Rogers Arena concert that night.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca

604-929-8456

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NEST EGG: Leaving Tanzania in 1971, Abdul and Shamim Jamal launched a Chilliwack poultry farm. Their birds sure laid golden eggs. The enterprise evolved into the Pacific Reach Properties firm that son Azim founded with his uncle, Joe Moosa. China-based Anbang’s Cedar Tree Investment Canada Inc. subsidiary recently paid more than $1 billion for PRP’s 24-home B.C. Retirement Concepts chain. The firm retained over a dozen L.A. and Phoenix properties and 12 in B.C., including the Westin Grand, Radisson Vancouver Airport and Sheraton Vancouver Guildford hotels. Recently, PRP paid $145 million for the 90-year-old Rosewood Hotel Georgia that Malaysia-owned Delta Land Development Ltd. had renovated to the tune of $120 million. The acquisition was celebrated in the Georgia’s Prohibition lounge that was a less salubrious basement pub when the fortune-bound Jamals quit East Africa.

U.S. construction firm owner Nick Salisbury and Jamal family member Zahra Mamdani will wed in Vancouver on Aug. 12 and Santa Barbara on Aug. 19.

THEY DO: Other Jamal celebrations are imminent. Daughter Zahra Mamdani will marry Spokane-based construction magnate Nick Salisbury in an Indian-style ceremony Aug 12. A Fairmont Pacific Rim hotel reception was booked before the Hotel Georgia purchase. They’ll tie the knot western-style in Santa Barbara, Calif. on Aug. 19. Mamdani’s gown will be by Israeli designer Mira Zwillinger, not residual stock from her now-defunct Wear Else? chain. For a pre-honeymoon, the couple visited Desolation Sound in a 50-foot yacht that Salisbury helpfully docks here.

HANGING OUT: More skippers of hitherto-respectable yachts now cruise all day with up to five bumpers blithely dangling overside.

Seen earlier with Bruce Langereis, Kevin Falcon joined him at the Hotel Georgia event and, with B.C. Liberal party leadership open, may be seen more often.

FLY RIGHT: At the Hotel Georgia celebration, former B.C. Liberal finance minister Kevin Falcon shot the breeze with friend and Delta Land Development president Bruce Langereis. Falcon, who left government after losing a B.C. Liberal leadership bid in 2011, could be a contender again following Christy Clark’s departure. But he likely won’t fly with Langereis, who says he crashed his Jet Ranger helicopter on a glacier recently. Also at the celebration was Langereis’ chopper partner, “cranberry king” Peter Dhillon, who survived a potentially risky adventure in 2015.

As Pacific Polo Cup temperatures rose, Craig Stowe relieved co-organizer Nadia Iadisernia by running for another $10,000-worth of champagne.

DOWN THE HATCH: Annabel (Paper Queen) St. John’s witty, elegantly self-drawn greeting cards include one captioned: “You know it was a good party when you have to clean the ceiling.” Ditto for having to rush out for another $10,000-worth of Veuve Clicquot champagne. Pacific Polo Cup co-organizer Craig Stowe did that when hot, sunny weather depleted the event’s already generous supply served in marquees beside the Southlands Riding Club’s field. Like someone with a popped cork approaching his eye, Stowe reacted just in time.

Seen at Southlands Riding Club with wife Suzanne, Pacific Polo Cup player Gery Warner handed over a Vancouver Polo Cup he won in 1989.

FAIR WARNING: Had Pacific Polo Cup drinking vessels run out, veteran polo player Gery Warner could have helped. Accompanying wife Suzanne, a former Miss Canada, and shaded by marquees that their International Tentnology firm provided, Warner returned the Vancouver Polo Cup he’d won in 1989. As for the real-silver 1938 Wallace Cup he owns, “As soon as I find a worthy cause, I’ll give it to them,” he said.

Former Southlands Riding Club vice president Kimberley St. Pierre welcomed George Dill and 15 of his ponies to Pacific Polo Cup games.

BOOK A CHUKKER: As the Hertz and Avis of polo-pony rentals, George Dill came to the Pacific Polo Cup from La Conner, Wash., bringing 15 of his 75 mounts for other visiting mallet swingers to ride. The U.S. Polo Association international committee chair, Dill stables 10 more ponies in Calgary, 35 in Santa Barbara and, at age 68, still plays a hard-charging game.

TURNING TURTLE: Although B.C. architects and builders learned long ago how to locate houses on contoured sites, Hamber Island, off Turtlehead at the entrance to Indian Arm, is being partly blasted flat for one.

This column’s photos of Christy Clark and others during her 21 years in politics include a 2013 one with prejudice-breaking hockey player Larry Kwong.

BENCHED: Former premier, B.C. Liberal party leader and Kelowna West MLA Christy Clark has appeared in this column several times since 1996. Of those portrayed beside her, then-90-year-old Larry Kwong, prompted her to say: “I am honoured to meet you.” The Vernon-born hockey centre-winger had experienced years of discrimination before becoming the NHL’s first player of Asian descent. “I didn’t get a chance to show what I could do,” Kwong said of his single, 60-second shift with the New York Rangers. But other ice titans knew. Jean Beliveau, who faced Kwong in Quebec Major Hockey League games, said: “Larry made his wing men look good because he was a great passer. He was doing what a centre man is supposed to do.” Political leaders could ask for no better endorsement.

Easter Armas, who founded the Loving Spoonful HIV/AIDS feeding agency, was feted by Telus executive VP Tony Geheran at a pre-Pride reception.

EASTER’S BREAK: Telus’s past, present and future are friendly to LGBTQA+ members. “I still haven’t mastered that acronym,” executive VP Tony Geheran said while fronting a pre-Pride reception on Telus’s rooftop terrace. The company supports 18 Pride celebrations, he said, and has donated $3.5 million to LGBTQA+ efforts across Canada.  Geheran also lauded Easter Armas, who founded the Loving Spoonful HIV/AIDS feeding agency in 1989 and remains a director while coaching preteens in the Young Rembrandts network’s drawing and arts-education programs.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Late-night TV efforts aside, it’s a pity that Gilbert and Sullivan aren’t still around to create a rapier-sharp comic opera based on Tweeter the Great’s White House shenanigans.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

Between modelling and authoring careers, Cea Sunrise Person designed and made bikinis favoured by actresses Jessica Alba, Lindsay Lohan and others.

BUSH TO BOOKS: A counter-culture, backwoods upbringing with glamorous, high-fashion career to follow sounds like any autobiographer’s best assets. Adding a husband-and-three-kids suburban lifestyle would be icing on the best-seller cake. In fact, Cea Sunrise Person signs herself that way: best-selling author. That’s based on the HarperCollins titles North of Normal and Nearly Normal that recount her first 10 years in a remote Alberta tipi, an international fashion-modelling career at age 13, and present-day domesticity high on the North Shore. Along the way, she designed and made bikini swimwear worn by Jessica Alba, Lindsay Lohan and other actresses. Tyro writers will understand that it took six years and 20 rewrites to get her first book published. For the second, “Five agents applied in a week, and it sold in 24 hours.” Next comes a roman-a-clef-hinting novel “about a young woman (named Winter) on a journey of awakening and learning to overcome her shameful past.” Person, who can write 5,000 words a day, has already tossed the 70,000-word draft of a manuscript due at year end. Like any autobiographer taking up fiction, “It is overwhelming all the different directions a story could go.” That may apply in spades to a planned “psychological thriller about two models moving to Paris.” Meanwhile, the mother who spent a summer-and-winter decade under canvas, living partly on sustenance derived from surrounding lakes and bush, believes it’s vital “for kids to learn the importance of nature.” So they all go camping, right? “No! Never!”

Wearing a replica Wedding Corset, Lace Embrace’s Melanie Talkington welcomed Lily Heise whose books detail 17 years of seeking romance in Paris.

CHERCHEZ L’HOMME: Ontario-raised Lily Heise has also written two books — Je T’Aime … Maybe?  and Je T’Aime, Me Neither — about her 17 years of seeking romance in Paris. Heise also conducts walking tours there. Her soon-to-release Je T’Aime … Oui will disclose further dallyings with dozens of men, including an aristocrat and a rock star, along with useful related data on bars, hotels and the like. Heise read recently at Vancouver’s literally straitlaced Lace Embrace atelier where corsetiere Melanie Talkington sells her own-design creations and related garments. Her unequalled collection of historic corsets was exhibited at Paris’s Louvre museum in 2014 and featured in a much-sought-after book, though not by Heise.

Blanca Blandon, Rebecca Traub, Sabrina Jensen and Serena Gerber Matter settled down to cocktails and hamper fare on a Grey Goose picnic blanket.

The University Singers honoured Sir Cecil Green in 1993 when the 1921 UBC grad donated $7 million to fund the varsity’s Green College.

Psychology student Katrina Kennedy and Grey Goose vodka firm executive Michael Corvese greeted guests at a Cecil Green Park House picnic.

BOOZE BLANKET BINGO: Paris’s Parc des Buttes-Chaumont’s picnic ambience was recreated recently on the UBC’s campus. French vodka maker Grey Goose celebrated its 20th anniversary there with blankets on the lawn of Cecil Green Park House, named for the 1921 grad who donated $7 million to fund Green College. Guests saw the Gallic theme sustained with a Citroen car in the driveway, a roped-off pétanque bowling court on the lawn and, on the blankets, picnic hampers containing Paris chef Justin Kent’s goat-cheese-and-champagne-dressed salad, poulet au moutard and riz au lait. Abundant, too: straight-up martinis, le grand fizz coolers, cocktails du vin rouge, and Grey Goose espresso martinis as digestifs.

Pender Street’s newly recreated Sai Woo Chop Suey sign represents a second at-bat for 18-year DeNiros/Section 3 Yaletown restaurateur Salli Pateman.

SAI AGAIN: Sometimes screen actress Salli Pateman helped kickstart Yaletown’s restaurant scene in 1994 with her DeNiro’s Bistro. When fellow thespian Robert De Niro threatened to make legal mincemeat of her under Section 3 of the Privacy Act, she saucily changed the ever-growing eatery’s name to Section (3).  It closed in 2012, more likely because of stellar rents rather than movie-star huffing. By 2015, having focused on once-restaurant-rich Chinatown, Pateman redeveloped a defunct eatery and recently recreated its Sai Woo Chop Suey neon sign (Sun, Aug. 9). Were she to crib De Niro again for his “Are you lookin’ at me?” line, Pender Street diners would likely reply: “You bet.”

Keri Algar and consul Kevin Lamb showed the Queen’s Baton en route to open the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games in Queensland, Australia on April 4.

GOING FOR GOLD: The XXI Commonwealth Games will open at Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, on April 4, 2018. Thirteen months earlier, the Queen sent the games’ official relay baton on its 230,000 km journey from Buckingham Palace. That was by air to Sierra Leone, a near-neighbour of Ghana that was called the Gold Coast in colonial days. The baton recently passed through Vancouver after visiting Hamilton, Edmonton and Victoria. At a reception, Australian consul and trade commissioner Kevin Lamb and Gold Coast dignitaries noted it “embodies the boundless energy, spirit and vibrancy of the Gold Coast, Queensland and (the games).” The reception also featured one of Maryann Talia Pau and the Museum of Brisbane’s ’s One Mission Stars to End Violence installations that will accompany the games.

Hoping that Lady Gaga might drop by, models ringed Abbotsford-based Trash Lingerie designer-manufacturer Rebecca Zubel at a post-concert show.

LADY, LOOK: It’s a pity Lady Gaga skipped the tribute party Vernard Goud and Georgia Primar staged following her recent concert. She might have acquired some nifty stage costumes from the ones University of the Fraser Valley fashion-design grad Rebecca Zubel and mother Brenda create for the former’s Abbotsford-based, all-sizes Trash Lingerie firm.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Recently deceased Howe Streeter Jimmy Gray’s son Joey, son-in-law Chris Nielsen and various pals hoisted memorial frosties Friday during the seventh-inning stretch of a Vancouver Canadians – Salem-Keizer Volcanoes game that  “Golden Rat” Gray (he loved the nickname) would doubtless have preferred to attend.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

RERUNS OF AUGUST: On this day 2003 years ago, 40-year Roman emperor Augustus kissed his wife and said: “Live mindful of our wedlock, Livia, and farewell.” Then, abiding by a favourite utterance, he died “quicker than you can cook asparagus.” Known previously as Mensilis Sextilis, the month was renamed to honour Augustus who “found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.”

The images here are of folk who provided both bricks and mortar for this column by appearing in it over several past Augusts. Each participated in Vancouver’s continuing emergence as a city of modern-day marble, which was late architect Arthur Erickson’s term for an infinitely useful Roman invention: concrete. Also valuable today, especially by the occupant of a Washington, DC, mansion that resembles marble but is white-painted sandstone, is this comment from Augustus: “Better a safe commander than a bold.”

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

1995: At the Molson Indy auto race, mayor-turned-Liberal MLA and premier-to-be Gordon Campbell started his stopwatch on B.C. finance minister and premier-to-be Glen Clark.

2007: Salsa choreographer Raymondo Chan, who got macaw Picasso squawking with wingtip tickles, saved him from a seagull-attacked escape to a condo balcony.

2002: Playboy model-actress Kimberley Stanfield’s fake cigarette promoted the film Under The Bridge of Fear, but director Mackenzie Gray’s eye-pops were real.

2005: Mayor and senator-to-be Larry Campbell joined teacher-training drummer Jennifer Kydd at a Fringe Festival parade to Granville Island Brewing’s taproom.

2004: Carmen Ruiz y Laza wrangled a planeload of David Ho’s colleagues and friends when his short-lived Harmony Airlines inaugurated service to Hawaii.

2003: With his Lumiere Light cookbook on the presses, since-closed Lumiere restaurant’s chef Rob Feenie hosted a barbecue that included Feenie’s Wienies.

2002: After Order of Canada ceremonies, Rogers Communications vice-chair Philip Lind and daughter Sarah vamped with Queen Elizabeth Park bronze sculptures.

2010: Television reporter-host Meena Mann wore the right number but may not have had the right phone number for a concert after-party that Lady Gaga skipped.

2009: Arts Umbrella dancers Nelle Lee and Anya Saugstad backed InTransitBC president-CEO Jean-Mar Arbaud at party for the Canada Line his firm had just built.

2011: Garment firm principal Mark Taubenfligel showed a British Triumph-based “bobber” he’d built, possibly discomfiting father and Mercedes-Benz dealer George.

2014: Six-foot singers Tracy Weddell and Leeta Liepins’ height suited the huge Carol Bruce steam-punk necklaces they wore at late-night Main and Hastings Street.

2008: Chef Robert Belcham seemed ready to cut Fuel restaurant partner Tom Doughty’s throat rather than open Main Street’s Campagnolo with him.

2010: Pacific Western Brewery president-CEO and near teetotaller Kazuko Komatsu added Hefeweizen beer to her equally organic Amber Ale and Lager.

2014: Three-decade wife Sylvia seemed inured to animated-cartoon firm principal Danny Antonucci’s attentions at a birthday party for painter Laurie Papou.

2000: Hair stylist Remington Schultz ensured that big-screen and TV children’s show actress Karen Campbell’s coif stayed in place at a Pride Week kickoff party.

2015: Vancouver Metropolitan Orchestra chair Kevin Chen amused conductor Ken Hsieh with his relief over rain ceasing at a VanDusen Botanical Garden fundraiser.

CHANCE’S ENCOUNTERS: Showbiz has been very good to Adam Hurstfield, a.k.a. Adam H. After an early R&B-hip-hop singing career in Mexico and Central America, he returned to Vancouver, set up as a music producer-director and recorded the likes of Elise Estrada who will headline the Albatross Music Festival here Sept. 14-15. Now he literally has another chance. That’s his and Aby Cervantes’ son Chance, who began screen-acting in 2011 at age four and, after pictures like Mark & Russell’s Wild Ride, Darc and Project MC2, is on a roll today. Now on three TV series, including multiple episodes of Ghost Wars, he’s on hold for a Disney starring role. On one day recently, he booked for Nickelodeon’s animated Paw Patrol and the feature film Eggplant Emoji. Making a somewhat out-of-character pitch to director Jake Szymanski (Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates), Chance reportedly said: “You need an obnoxious kid, and I’m the obnoxious kid. Shall we sign?”
“Chance is really good at knowing his audience,” Adam said, beaming.

After corporate and individual donations helped repair his Steveston Lifeboat, marine artist Kohn Horton saw it recommissioned as Delta Lifeboat.

SHIPSHAPE AGAIN: Lifeboats save those in peril on the sea. But who saves imperilled lifeboats? That worried feted marine artist John Horton when his 52-foot Steveston Lifeboat was badly damaged during a 2015 crew-training exercise, and repairs drained his billfold. Built in Pearl Harbour in 1944, the vessel became former Royal Navy coxswain Horton’s property in 1988. Its Canadian Lifeboat Institution volunteer crew has reportedly undertaken some 600 maritime rescues since. Aided by corporate and individual donations, the vessel was refurbished and renamed Delta Lifeboat. With a Canadian Coast Guard hovercraft moored alongside, Delta Mayor Lois Jackson and other dignitaries fronted a dedication ceremony at Ladner’s government wharf, whereupon Horton and crew resumed their interrupted duties.

GO FOR IT: The Canadian Coast Guard will host The This IS You event Oct. 5 with professional aircraft pilot Kirsten Brazier’s Achieve Anything Foundation (achieveanything.ca) reminding young women that all aviation, aerospace, marine and defence jobs are within their reach.

The man sculling on Vancouver’s 1910 waterfront in John Horton’s The End of Sail painting displays a technique adaptable to stand-up paddle boards.

STAND FAST: Recreational watercraft makers might benefit from John Horton’s 1987 The End of Sail painting. It shows a man propelling a dinghy with a transom-mounted oar. Such easy-to-master “sculling” is speedy and, for someone who accessed his Eagle Island home that way, ideal for rainy days. It could be the next big thing for standup paddle boarders.

Dirty Apron chef David Robertson and Science World’s Clare Charnley saw gymnast Malia Bulat serve at the Alfresco benefit for inner-city school students.

VAULTING AMBITION: Science World and Dirty Apron cooking school’s youth programs benefited from a recent banquet for 130. The Alfresco title fitted the locale: Science World’s rooftop patio. Dirty Apron chef David Robertson’s students did virtual handsprings helping prepare a tuna, sablefish and beef short rib meal. One youngster, vault specialist Malia Bulat, 11, did so literally at Hawaii’s Aloha Gymfest and numerous B.C. gymnastic tournaments, with more ahead. The Alfresco event reportedly raised $20,000 for Science World’s after-school programs for inner-city Grade 1-to-7 students.

Standing models Lilian Leopold, Liv Hanna and Amina Miller wore designs by Paulina Camizao seated between Julia Wong and Jeevitha Kandasamy.

POOL PARTY: Founded in Brisbane, Australia, the League of Extraordinary Women “inspires the next generation of female entrepreneurs.” Around the Westin Bayshore hotel pool recently, its local chapter staged a show of Zao Swimwear that city-based designer-principal Paulina Camizao debuted to U.S. retailers at the Curva Las Vegas industry exposition. Modelling the classic-hinting suits were members of the agency that ever-entrepreneurial global fashion model Liz Bell founded in 1992. The event will repeat in January, organizer Julia Wong said, although likely not outside.

Seen here at Planet Hollywood in 2001, deejay Red Robinson will end his 650 CISL radio show Sunday and go off-air — again and likely not for long.

SITUATION RED: Radio station 650 CISL hasn’t exactly handed Red Robinson his head on a platter. But the AM broadcaster’s switch to a sports format means the veteran DJ’s weekly four-hour show will die at 4 p.m. Sunday. Joining him on-air will be music-biz heavy Bruce Allen, of whom Robinson said: “He’s a gentleman who survived in a field full of crooks and rotters by brains and being tough.” Robinson himself survived by generating huge 1950s listenership for emergent rock ’n’ roll. Perhaps he’ll close Sunday with the Four Tunes’ doo-wop version of Marie, the tune that launched his career on CJOR at 4:05 p.m. on Nov. 12, 1954. As noted here 50 years later, Robinson “put the bop in the bop sh’bop sh’bop, and the ram in the rama-rama ding dong.”

WORD KEPT: Saloon-jazz vocalist Kenny Colman survived a 1985 brain tumour, vowed to “keep singing till I lose my hair,” and died, still coiffed, still singing, at age 85 this week.

Exotics will rule Luxury & Supercar Weekend, but Dr. Robert Follows’ 1933 Talbot, if it returns, would bring a prestige that moderns can’t always match.

CLASS ACT: Organizers, exhibitors and attendees are revving up for Luxury & Supercar Weekend Sept. 9-10. Some $250-million-worth of vehicles costing to $4.5 million each will occupy VanDusen Botanical Garden lawns. For classic elegance, let’s hope Dr. Robert Follows returns with his 1933 Talbot that can still hit 130 km/h, albeit not on bridges where modern exotics sometimes disgrace themselves.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Imperial Oil charged 4.4 cents a litre in 1907 when Canada’s first filling station opened at Cambie and Smythe, but gasoline won’t be available at any price downtown when the same company’s Burrard-at-Davie Esso station goes pumps up.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

GONE FISHING: Vancouver Canucks players, team officials and affluent fans left Sunday for the four-day Fishing For Kids tournament at Brian Legge and Rick Grange’s West Coast Fishing Club on Langara Island. The two expected the 2006 debut event would raise $250,000 for B.C. Children’s Hospital. It brought in $475,000. Since 2009, and by traditionally returning their big-money prizes, anglers have benefited the Canucks Autism Network by some $8 million. This year’s $12,500-a-ticket participants reportedly added $800,000. They were entertained on the Rosewood Hotel Georgia’s Reflections terrace by the 54-40 band whose I Could Give You More song suited the occasion. Accompanying Canucks defenceman and first-time fishing contestant Erik Gudbranson at the reception, dentist Sarah Sweetnam doubtless promised good bites.

Vancouver Canucks defenceman Erik Gudbranson had Dr. Sarah Sweetnam wish him good luck at the $800,000 Fishing For Kids fundraiser.

Canucks Autism Network co-founder Paolo Aquilini thanked West Coast Fishing Club’s Brian Legge for hosting an annual benefit tournament.

COME AGAIN: Those with mere $49 budgets also enjoyed fresh salmon in an al fresco oceanfront setting. Cooked or cured by chefs like Rob Clark, Lee Cooper, Jesse McMillan and Lucais Symes, the fish were accompanied by wines from four B.C. producers. Don Hardy’s quartet also played and sang along. Staged at False Creek Fishermen’s Wharf by the Chefs’ Table Society with B.C. Salmon Marketing Council support, the inaugural Wild Salmon Celebration will doubtless become a fixture. A pioneer of the sustainable-seafood movement,  Fish Counter chef Clark served soy-cured salmon, pickled quail egg, roe, oyster emulsion, sea beans and toasted nori. Campagnolo Roma’s McMillan ended the serving stations with smoked-salmon johnny cake, savoury whipped cream, maple syrup and chives.

Sonia Lombardo and Stacey MacBride toted chef-prepared dishes and Tinhorn Creek wine at the Wild Salmon Celebration debut at Fishermen’s Wharf.

THE BIG PICTURE: As Teddy Roosevelt might have said had he favoured art over soldiering and politics: “Walk softly and carry a big pencil.” Hong Kong-born Fiona Tang, 30, did that to create the 7.3-by-5.4-metre King of Panthera and other animal-featured pieces in the Works on Paper group exhibition at Richmond’s Lipont Art Centre. On display outside the gallery’s windows, Capstan Marine agency motor yachts and workboats might look swell with Tang’s Saltwater Crocodile work replicated on their plain hulls.

Michael Bublé’s career was still developing at his 24th birthday party in 1999 when he tugged photographer Jonathan Cruz’s coif to see him rise, too.

SEPTEMBER SONGSTER: Still a rising vocalist in September of 1999, Michael Bublé celebrated his 24th birthday in Vancouver’s now-defunct La Scala restaurant. The locale was ironic as three stars of Milan’s same-name opera house had earlier quashed Bublé’s  first big break by ordering him to pipe down. That was on New Year’s Eve, 1996, when tenors Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras played a financially disastrous gig at B.C. Place. Disappointing their audience, they quit before midnight to tuck into a private meal offstage. Bublé went on, whereupon the tenors said his energetic set was upsetting their din-dins and he should cessare subito. Bublé could probably sell out La Scala three times over today.

Seen perched high at Big Rock Brewery, producers Christine Haebler and Trish Dolman received the Whistler Film Festival’s B.C. Women on Top award.

ROCK ON: Big Rock Brewery was a fitting place for Whistler Film Festival executive director Shauna Hardy Mishaw to hold a fundraiser for the 17th running Nov. 29 to Dec. 3. That’s because she has big plans for an event that now screens 90 films. “We’re looking to establish Whistler to launch an avant-season fair for Oscar winners,” she said. “Everybody goes to Toronto, everybody goes to Cannes. We want to lure that group. We want the product and the talent.” Whistler’s location should help spur what Hardy Mishaw near-inevitably calls “Sundance of the North we’re all about the talent, developing and promoting it. That’s our little niche.”

Whistler Film Festival executive director Shauna Hardy Misha feted actor Aleks Paunovic for so inspiring others as to win the ‘Ignitor’ award.

AS FOR TALENT: The Whistler Film Festival event honoured Aleks Paunovic as an “Ignitor” who inspires other actors and moviebiz pros. Cynde and Allan Harmon were cited for their lengthy producer-director record, and Michelle Ouellet for rapid growth in that field. Recently deceased producer Tom Rowe was warmly acknowledged. The B.C. Women on Top award went to Screen Sirens Pictures principals Trish Dolman and Christine Haebler for “over 20 years … of creating their own niche in the independent film and TV landscape.” Dolman, who produced Eco Pirate, a feature-length documentary about Sea Shepherd Society founder-leader Paul Watson, put her and Haebler’s labours in succinct perspective with: “What we do is not without difficulty. We are really two f***ing strong women.”

National director Lisa Distefano accompanied now-outfoxed Sea Shepherd Society founder Paul Watson during his 1996 Vancouver mayoral bid.

ACTION  STATIONS: Paul Watson finished fourth in Vancouver’s 1996 mayoral election, ahead of “Prince of Pot” Marc Emery and 47,852 votes behind winner Philip Owen. The pantomime slate included Zippy The Circus Chimp, Frank The Moose and Yummy Girl. Mayoral ambitions thwarted, Watson went on to bedevil Japan’s Antarctic whalers with the close-quarters tactics of Greece-vs.-Persia battling 2,500 years earlier. His ships are tied up today because satellite surveillance technology lets the Japanese avoid them. With time to spare and all that ramming know-how, maybe Watson will return to face fellow cetacean lover Gregor Robertson in the October, 2018 mayoral tussle.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: With the Pride Society banning Cirque du So Gay members from parading in and symbolically doffing the all-encompassing garments some governments force women to wear, a vowel movement might move its first “i” further back in the alphabet.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

PEOPLE OF THE MAN: As in the floor-above saying, Damian Van Zyll De Jong’s other shoe has fallen. The first was in 2010 when he founded Native Shoes to design and make EVA (ethyl vinyl acetate) moulded footwear. After a corporate falling-out, he, Matt Penner and Esme Smith founded People Footwear. The Railtown-based, 10-person firm now reportedly produces 250,000 pairs yearly from plants in Shenzhen, China, where De Jong spends four months of the year. Regarding copy-cat makers, “Everywhere, we see things Damian has created that became popular,” Smith said. “He has changed the footwear business.” Latter-day changes include knitted uppers and what De Jong calls “light moccasin boots and running shoe-hikers.” Paradoxically, he plans to increase online sales to 50 per cent while opening People-owned retail stores in North America. “There are a lot more shoes in the world than there are feet,” he said, knowing that to keep looking up entails looking ever more creatively down.

Artist Robert Davidson’s wife/lawyer, Terri-Lynn Williams-Davidson, wrote the book Out of Concealment: Female Supernatural Beings of Haida Gwai.

TRANSFORMATIONS: When Haida lawyer Terri-Lynn Williams-Davidson sang her self-composed Call To The Ancestors in 2002, author-artist Douglas Coupland said: “Get an agent … just do it.” Seems she did. Her new book, Out of Concealment: Female Supernatural Beings of Haida Gwaii (Heritage, $29.95), not only sets down oral accounts of literal and metaphysical female characters but contains numerous photos of a costumed Williams-Davidson portraying them in forested and oceanside locales. Few others who took cases to the Supreme Court of Canada have likely done that.

Peter Wall took his Morgan Plus 8 roadster for a sunny-day spin but admitted its comfort didn’t match that of his Rolls-Royce Dawn convertible.

WALL’S WHEELS: Perhaps the recent Crescent Beach Concours d’Elegance and current Luxury + Supercar Weekend inspired developer Peter Wall to air his Morgan Plus 8. Substantially handmade by the same family firm since 1910, Morgans remain wholly British, unlike Wall’s Aston Martin, Rolls-Royce and two Bentleys. With his britches skimming the blacktop, Wall looked up as do his economic prospects. He recently rejected $100 million for the four-city-block Shannon estate that cost $750,000 in 1976. His 61-hectare Milner farm “isn’t for sale either.” And the ripsnorting Morgan? “It’s more difficult than driving the (Roll-Royce convertible) Dawn. At some point, comfort means a lot.” Translation: Make an offer.

With conductor Ken Hsieh on the monitor, Vancouver Metropolitan Orchestra president Kevin Chen envisages much to follow Sunday’s concert.

TUNED UP: It’ll be a step-ahead for globally busy conductor Ken Hsieh and the Vancouver Metropolitan Orchestra when they and the Vancouver Bach Choir stage Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, “the Choral” at Chan Centre on Sunday. It’s possibly a watershed, too, for three-year VMO president and seven-year board member Kevin Chen. A civil engineer, development firm partner and former jazz-rock bassist, Chen, 40, foresees the VMO as “the New World Symphony of Canada.” He’s referring to the 30-year-old, Miami organization that owns its performance hall and related facilities. Taiwan-born UBC grad Chen’s seven-year VMO goals include a permanent office and recital hall, one or two full-time staff, a much expanded education program, and performances beyond Greater Vancouver. Before stepping down, “I want to be sure that the road is clear and the tasks are defined for our (13-member) board.” That doesn’t quite echo major philanthropist and cultural director Michael Audain’s assertion that “a board’s job is to give, get or get off.” But it does imply that not only musicians have a baton to watch.

Bobo Zhao conspires on projects with composer Trevor Hoffmann whose new work Vancouver Metropolitan Orchestra will premiere at Chan Centre.

TALES OF TREVOR: Sunday’s concert will be another milestone for Vancouver Metropolitan Orchestra resident composer Trevor Hoffmann whose recent opus, titled Hoffmann’s, will premiere there. His accomplishments include music-producing the My Little Pony TV series, co-writing the Disney animation series Dr. Dimensionpants, and producing numerous music videos, some with filmmaker-girlfriend Bobo Zhao. A previous composition, Winning Team, certainly suits his and conductor Hsieh’s joint efforts.

Lana Penner Tovey earlier accompanied husband Bramwell, whose final season as VSO musical director will include some of his own compositions.

BRAMWELL STOKING: Vancouver Symphony Orchestra music director Bramwell Tovey is fuelling up for his 18th and final season launch, on Sept. 22. By now, he likely knows Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 forwards, backwards and inside-out. Ditto the concert-opening composition: his own fittingly named Time Tracks. Donor-dependent orchestra leaders must be socially adept. Tovey sure was during a first-season Shaughnessy garden party where he recalled attending a “rugby scrum” like event at Buckingham Palace without actually meeting the Queen. “I don’t know if she was offended,” Tovey said suavely. “But I’ve never heard from her since.”

Screen actor Alexandra Staseson entertained Whistler Film Festival supporters with repertoire from an album she’s recording in Nashville.

ALL TOGETHER NOW: Years of physiotherapy after being mangled by a Manhattan car kept drama-school grad Alexandra Staseson from her first two job options. “I couldn’t waitress, so I started writing,” she said. That included Big Love and 10 debut-album songs the TV-series and indie-movie performer is waxing in Nashville but sampled at the Whistler Film Festival’s recent fundraiser here.

PARRYNOIA: Maybe the NDP government will replace the George Massey Tunnel with the little ferryboat that ran there part-time until 1959.

Sensible Vancouver party candidate Mary Jean Dunsdon, a.k.a. Watermelon, could bring professional rather than accidental comedy to city hall.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Aware that some folk laugh at politicians, the Sensible Vancouver party has nominated a genuine comic for the city council byelection. Cannabis advocate Mary Jean Dunsdon, a.k.a. Watermelon, did standup shtick for always-sold-out Pink Show cabarets here. She and fellow comic Christine Taylor then took the show to L.A., Toronto, London and Amsterdam. Next stop: Twelfth and Cambie?

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

DOWN AND AT ’EM: Trousers descended and $125,000 was raised at the Vancouver Rowing Club recently. That’s where Yongku Jung and Mikhail Zalesky staged the fourth-annual Pants Off night to increase the $370,000 generated earlier for Prostate Cancer Canada. Although spared from an ailment that strikes one in seven Canadian men, several women present adopted their shirt-and-no-britches attire. They may dress more inventively at the Imperial on Oct. 21 when the Boobyball should much increase its nationwide raising of $4.2 million for Rethink Breast Cancer.

Julia Smith, Hweely Lim. Mikhail Zalesky, Janice Leung and Portia Spencer showed their axes at the Pants Off benefit for Prostate Cancer Canada.

HIGH FLYERS: Of his prodigious leaps, Ballets Russe’s Vaslav Nijinsky said: “You just have to go up and then pause a little up there.” Ballet B.C. dancers are making such pauses lately, albeit in aircraft. A third California tour has them in L.A. and Laguna Beach. They’ll whiz back for a Nanaimo gig on Sept. 23, then to New York’s Fall For Dance festival Oct. 11-12. After performing a new Romeo and Juliet ballet there Feb. 22-24, they’ll hit Britain for a five-city tour from March 6 to 24. So said director Emily Molnar when a reception on the Wells Fargo Bank’s patio coincided with her birthday. What better present than the 31-year-old company’s rejuvenation and enhanced international reputation during her eight-year incumbency?

Ballet B.C. dancers surrounded red-clad artistic director Emily Molnar before leaving for California performances and a five-city British tour to follow.

THEIRS, TOO: Mine & Yours boutique owners Jigme Love and Courtney Watkins usually acquire womenswear and accessories to resell locally. Recently, though, the garments went to Kenyan, Tanzanian and Ugandan startup retailers.  It was part of a drive by which city-based TheMarketingsmith owner Orianna Lacey may raise $100,000 by year’s end for the Emerging African Entrepreneurs organization she founded. It will provide micro-financing to many of the 52.6 per cent of Africans who are self-employed, said Lacey, whose marketing firm operated in Australia for eight years before establishing here.

Mine & Yours co-principal Jigme Love and marketer Orianna Lacey received donations to support the latter’s Emerging African Entrepreneurs program.

BON APPÉTIT: Smoke drifted around VanDusen Botanical Garden during the recent Luxury & Supercar Weekend. Not from the many new and classic cars parked there but from a popular Fatburger barbecue in the extra-charge VIP section. Among the vehicles, Le Crocodile restaurateur Michel Jacob eyeballed a full-boat Cadillac convertible that cost $5,225 in 1957. That’s peanuts beside US$3 million for a 1,500-horsepower Bugatti Chiron made in Molsheim, 25 km from auto enthusiast Jacob’s Alsace birthplace. Asked what dish from that French region might suit such Caddy owners, he replied: “Choucroute au Riesling.” That heap of wine-soaked sauerkraut smothered with salt pork, knuckles, bacon, ham hocks, three kinds of sausage, garlic, onions and spuds would be “a big meal for a big car,” Jacob said.

Somewhat distorted by the bedding-filled plastic bubble they occupied, Melissa Moree, Cici Zhang and Jill Moree toasted Luxury & Supercar Weekend.

BUBBLE TIME: Few vehicles match 1950s Cadillacs’ pillow-soft underpinnings and hermetic separation from the outside world. But Cici Zhang and Jill and Melissa Moree enjoyed both at Luxury & Supercar Weekend. Not in a car, though. Instead, they shared a 4-metre-diameter clear-plastic sphere with oomphy mattresses and pillows from Kenneth Lo’s Airland firm and champagne from Veuve Clicquot. The set-up was ideal for showery Saturday, but less than Cadillac cool when the sun broke through. 

MORE POWER TO YOU: You could spend plenty furnishing a home at Niels and Nancy Bendtsen’s Inform Interiors. But hardly the $4.5 million needed to put a Pagani Huayra supercar in the garage. Maker Horacio Pagani’s son Christopher brought one to the Bendtsens’ Gastown store prior to unfolding it like a Transformer toy at Luxury & Supercar Weekend. Each wheel reportedly costs $50,000, enough to buy a discreet Mercedes-Benz GLC SUV and relative peace of mind regarding the gendarmes.

Iran-born Aileen Bahmanipour’s grunt gallery artworks evoke King Zahak’s mythical shoulder-sprouting snakes that fed on young Persians’ brains.

STRONG WOMEN: Two city-based artists display trenchant — even macabre — socio-political views at current exhibitions. At the Second-off-Brunswick grunt gallery, the modern analogy of UBC MFA student Aileen Bahmanipour’s Technical Problem exhibition is clear. The native Iranian’s drawings dwell on 11th-century Persian King Zahak’s shoulders mythically sprouting snakes that were fed only on the brains of endless beheaded youths. At the Hastings-off-Columbia Gam Gallery, former Immigrant Services Society English-language teacher Sandeep Johal cheerfully admitted to “a kind of obsession with murder.” Her Rest In Power paintings recount the slaying of 12 women. One interprets the opening pages of Shauna Singh Baldwin’s The Selector of Souls, wherein a remote-community Hindu woman kills her newborn granddaughter because the baby’s father refuses to name it and the mother to feed it. Both shows are well worth seeing.

Sandeep Johal’s exhibition at Gam Gallery includes a work depicting Shauna Singh Baldwin’s story of cross-generational infanticide in remote India.

Marking his recent CKNW debut, John Daly and wife Shalina Kajani overlooked the Coal Harbour site of his early job at Air West, now Harbour Air.

TOO GOOD TO LAST: That would be former Global TV reporter John Daly’s 2016 “retirement.” Marking his July-launched CKNW talk show, Back on The Beat, Daly and wife Shalina Kajani hosted a party in their 40th-floor home. It overlooks the Coal Harbour terminal of Harbour Air, which was Air West when Daly was assistant base manager there. Given president Greg McDougall’s announcement of pending Vancouver-Seattle flights, maybe Daly will have him on the air, too.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

Japan Training Squadron commander, Rear-Admiral Koji Manabe, raised a masu cup of sake to guests at a reception aboard the ship JS Kashima.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: B.C. Lt.-Gov. Judith Guichon celebrated her 70th aboard ship. Not a cruise vessel at sea, though. Moored at North Vancouver’s Burrard Dry Dock Pier, it was the Japanese training ship JS Kashima where Rear Admiral Koji Manabe, Ambassador to Canada Kenjiro Monji and Consul General Asako Okai congratulated Her Honour. She then joined them and dignitaries in the Kagami Biraki ceremony of hammering open a sake barrel — no rum in this navy — and serving it in wooden masu cups. With 190 junior officers aboard, the ship had sailed 10 days from Mexico as part of a 163-day, round-the-Pacific cruise “to promote mutual understanding and goodwill,” Manabe said. Likely alluding to North Korean nuclear provocations, Monji said: “It is important that Canada and Japan cooperate in matters of security.”

TOILET TIP: According to JS Kashima’s heads, Toto porcelain fixtures meet Japanese military specifications.

Founder Wendy Lisogar Cocchia saw the 28th Women’s Media Golf Classic benefit the Pacific Autism Family Network Foundation.

ON THE GREEN: Century Plaza Hotel and Spa CEO Wendy Lisogar-Cocchia recently oversaw the 28th running of the Women’s Media Golf Classic that she founded. It has reportedly raised some $3.5 million for children’s charities, most recently the Pacific Autism Family Network Foundation that she also founded. A 1,000-person luncheon in Parq Vancouver’s JW Marriott hotel on Dec. 1 will boost the foundation’s earlier $32-million fundraising, Lisogar-Cocchia said. The complex of two hotels and a casino itself will open Sept. 29.

David Haughton’s 40 Views of Mount Baker exhibition marks his shift from B.C. Children’s Hospital emergency pediatrician to full-time artist.

NEXT STEP: B.C. Children’s Hospital emergency pediatrician David Haughton, 61, will hang up his scrubs and take up brushes permanently on Oct. 29. The longtime artist’s 1994 exhibition included etchings that reflected “what I feel when I see children die.”  In his final exhibition as a part-timer, Haughton’s 40 Views of Mount Baker exhibition at the Dunbar-off-17th Visual Space Gallery is a tribute to Katsushika Hokusai’s 19th-century series, 36 Views of Mount Fuji. “I want 10 years of painting,” said the ever-flexible Haughton, whose previous Bad Guys II series portrayed “murderers, gangster and child molesters.”

Seated in a replica AC Cobra, former marketer-sommelier Natalie Rehm was backed by one of her own paintings in Autoform’s ArtForm Gallery.

YES I CAN: Many arts — music, ballet, culinary — entail lengthy training. Then there’s Natalie Rehm who, recalling childhood interests, impulsively quit a marketer-sommelier career, became a full-time painter and developed an international clientele. She exhibited a dozen works recently in the Autoform Performance showroom alongside less ephemeral artworks from Ferrari, Maserati, Porsche and suchlike.

Ashia Mode founder-owner Jonie Zimmerman and daughter Alexa celebrated 30 years of womenswear retailing, 20 of them on South Granville.

JONIE EXPRESS: Womenswear designer Ron Leal sounded gung-ho in 1997 when Jonie Zimmerman’s then-10-year-old Ashia Mode store left Fourth Avenue for South Granville. “If there were more women like Jonie,” he said of the native Filipino who had sold 80 of his pieces to a single customer, “there wouldn’t be any doom and gloom in the retail in Canada.” That still pertains for Zimmerman, who recently had affluent west-siders celebrate her now-5,600-square-foot facility with champagne while adding pieces to their wardrobes, albeit not 80 at a time.

ALL ABOARD: Two other South Granville womenswear retailers, Bacci’s and Boboli, helped raise a reported $600,000 for ovarian cancer research this week. That was when the B.C. Cancer Foundation’s Hope Couture luncheon-fashion show at the Rocky Mountaineer station aided the Ovcare project’s efforts to prevent one in two ovarian cancers. “Every patient diagnosed … represents a prevention failure,” team director Dr. David Huntsman reminded attendees, who saw guest of honour Rob Collins donate $200,000 to commemorate wife Janet Cotrelle.

Emily Carr University grad Tajah Olson entered her Mask of Fertility self-sculpture in Bombay Sapphire Gin’s emerging-artist tourney.

GIN WIN: Few private art galleries would open an exhibition without serving wine. When the Winsor Gallery upped the ante with Bombay Sapphire gin cocktails, though, a lineup ran down the block. Those who got in saw works by 17 shortlisted local artists in the booze company’s Artisan Series. Winner Vanessa Lam will compete in the Miami final at year’s end. Others included Malawi-born Emily Carr U grad Tajah (it means crown) Olson who usually paints on her own body — aswesiarts.com — but showed her Mask of Fertility self-sculpture complete with coffee-can crown.

Attila Richard Lukacs opened a 17-painting exhibition titled Hobbs at Sarah Macaulay’s equally inventive Macaulay & Co. Fine Art gallery.

MONKEY SEE: No wine was needed to draw folk to Attila Richard Lukacs’s exhibition at Sarah Macaulay’s Second-off-Scotia gallery. The three-decade painter’s 17 works were derived from Polaroid images of stuffed monkey Hobbs — some salty enough to hang in the gallery’s backroom — in 1990-London locales. Lukacs’s Gegen Nazis (Against Nazis) T-shirt evoked and countered the huge paintings of skinheads in his 1996 E-werk exhibition at UBC’s Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery. Always inventive, he produces works (this exhibition took 10 months) that surprise and even amuse onlookers while challenging other artists to equal his skill and intelligence.

PARRYDIDDLES: The Grizzly Bear Foundation reportedly raised $400,000 at its recent Night of the Grizzlies gala. … The Mennonite Central Committee second annual Abbotsford festival generated another $1-million-and-some for global relief, development and peace efforts. … Playing a brain-damaged boxer in the short film Ganjy has earned Ben Ratner a well-deserved UBCP/ACTRA award nomination. … A $30-a-ticket remembrance of impresario Hugh Pickett will go Sept. 24 at Vancouver City Archives where his voluminous records are preserved.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

AU NATUREL: Few men can have photographed Melania Trump naked and been received cordially by her somewhat testy spouse. But Antoine Verglas was, after photographing the former Melanija Knavs for GQ magazine’s January, 2000 cover. An exhibition of the Paris-born New Yorker’s large photos of actresses and supermodels — not including la Trump — opened recently at Susanna Strem’s Chali-Rosso gallery on Howe Street. It was another in Vernard Goud and Georgia Primar’s events involving international fashion photographers. Unsurprisingly, it attracted several local women dressed remarkably lightly for a cool evening.

COOKING FOR THE CLINTONS: Mona Talbott hasn’t seen former White House resident Bill Clinton in the buff. But the one-time city resident did help keep him out of a burial shroud following quadruple coronary bypass surgery. That was when, having developed her culinary skills at a Canadian reforestation camp and polished them at L.A.’s tony Chez Panisse restaurant, Talbott prepared chow at Bill and Hillary’s Chappaqua, N.Y. home. “He would say, ‘This is marvellous,’” she recalled of such dishes as the wilted-spinach-and-warmed-trail-mix salad that artist-author Douglas Coupland also recalls affectionately. “But I knew that the Secret Service were bringing him the junk food he loved.” Clinton is reputedly now a vegan, and Talbott is executive chef and partner at upstate N.Y.’s Talbott & Arding operation

At her Franc gallery show, painter Angela Grossmann greeted Mona Talbott who was Bill and Hillary Clinton’s post-White House cook.

PAINTINGS AND PINTS: Talbott and many from Vancouver’s haute-art community attended the launch of Angela Grossmann’s Mistressworks exhibition at Ron Regan’s Franc gallery. Grossmann’s return from mixed-media works to straight-ahead painting is worth seeing at the 1654 Franklin St. gallery that, though tucked-away, has equally pleasurable craft breweries nearby.

Had Stefano Ricci master tailor Alessandro Ciprian measured a man instead of a store eagle, the resultant suit would have cost $11,000 to $50,000.

ON TAPE: Full body coverage for men was recommended at Trump Tower’s street-level Stefano Ricci clothing store when master tailor Alessandro Ciprian flew in recently from Florence headquarters. Stretched around a size 40-tall client, his tailor’s tape could cost the latter up to $1,250 an inch or $50,000 for a top-line suit, possibly incorporating gold thread. The currently favoured colour is royal blue, Ciprian said, and the most popular suit costs $13,000. Not exactly Indochino prices, but peanuts beside the $150,000 alligator jacket on display.

Chelsea Ross took a turn in father Brian’s LaFerrari supercar that may have quintupled its $1.5 million value since it was launched in 2013.

WATCH IT: The scent of money on Alberni Street’s 1000 block increased recently when Robbie Dickson and Oleg Primbetova officially opened their Hublot watch store. Next door is their outlet for De Beers, which is to diamonds what Prince Edward Island is to spuds. Exotic car enthusiast Dickson paid $750,000 in 2015 for a Hublot MP-05 LaFerrari wristwatch. Beside the store this week, Ferrari-Maserati dealer Brian Ross parked a real LaFerrari supercar worth maybe five times its 2013 price of $1.5 million. He’d biz-jetted in from Ohio with daughter Chelsea who prefers to drive a Ferrari 488 Spyder for which papa might ask US$300,000.

Pianist Lang Lang and Robbie Dickson each wore a Classic Fusion Chronograph Canada wristwatch at the Hublot boutique Dickson co-owns.

TIME OUT: Time is an artistic constant for concert pianist and Hublot “brand ambassador” Lang Lang who attended the Alberni Street reception. It was especially so later in musical 6/8 time when the Shenyang-born 35-year-old played Beethoven’s “Emperor” Piano Concerto No. 5 for 40 minutes with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Bramwell Tovey. Back at the store, Lang Lang wore a Classic Fusion Chronograph Canada from an edition of 31 at $16,000 each. Not at the Orpheum Theatre, though, where its weight might have impeded the delicacy of the concerto’s second-movement nocturne.

Chor Leoni artistic director Erick Lichte and executive director Stash Bylicki staged a 25th anniverary event at Lorne and Melita Segal’s home.

SING OUT: The Chor Leoni choir’s 25th season began with Lesley Stowe chairing a fundraising dinner-recital at Lorne and Melita Segal’s Southlands home. Last year at the Casa Mia mansion, police answered a neighbour who complained about overhearing the superb male-voice ensemble’s performance. Audiences should be more appreciative next July when Chor Leoni will be the first Canadian contestant in the Bali and Singapore international choir festivals.

Following the Dr. Peter AIDS Foundation’s Passions gala, Scott Elliott took over the role of 19-year executive director Maxine Davis.

REMEMBERING DR. PETER: Chef-stylist Nathan Fong watched as the Dr. Peter AIDS Foundation’s annual Passions gala he founded lifted its 15-year fundraising total above $1.5 million. Attendees, including the late Dr. Peter’s mother, Shirley Young, also saw Scott Elliott officially succeed the foundation’s 19-year executive director, Maxine Davis, who was warmly applauded.

Margaret Chisholm and Susan Meister welcomed chef-restaurateur Bruno Marti to a Les Dames d’Escoffier tribute dinner they co-chaired.

MARTI’S PARTY: Bruno Marti, the chef-owner of Ladner’s La Belle Auberge, is reportedly the American Culinary Federation Hall of Fame’s sole Canadian inductee. Chef Margaret Chisholm oversaw several top-flight colleagues recently to prepare a long table dinner that honoured Marti and raised $50,000 for the Les Dames d’Escoffier organization’s scholarships and outreach programs.

SAM’S SYSTEM: Remembering former premier Gordon Campbell’s fatal failure to predict PST/HST harmonization backlash, B.C. Liberal party leadership candidate Sam Sullivan said his speeches refer to “every toxic substance so that no one can say I didn’t mention it before.” Given the campaign’s preferential balloting, “If all the people rate me number 2, I will win,” he said. Better to start in number 2, of course, than end in it, as office seekers tend to do. In other political scatology, Sullivan chuckled at the anagram of “promises” being “more piss.”

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

DOUBLE DATING: City-based writer-director Mina Shum’s Meditation Park opened the Vancouver International Film Festival with a screening at the Centre for Performing Arts and a post-curtain gala at the Vancouver Club. The events produced a pair of cinema-style flashbacks as one of the picture’s stars, Sandra Oh, also starred in Shum’s  debut feature film, the million-dollar, East Vancouver-shot Double Happiness. Flashback 2 entailed Stephen Hegyes, who produced Double Happiness as well as several subsequent Shum efforts, including Meditation Park. Both movies address the empowerment of Chinese mothers, a subject that Shum touched on personally at a 1994 wrap event for Double Happiness. “My parents came on the set as I was smoking,” Shum said. “They don’t know that I indulge. So, as soon as I saw my Mom, I threw that cigarette 50 feet away.” That discarded butt metaphorically ignited the fuse on a career that by 1997 had Shum directing the Hegyes-produced, Drive, She Said. Not that everyone recognized her worth. While working on set with that project, Shum said, “People would ask: ‘When does the director arrive from L.A?’” Then, laughing: “I mean, I live on Nanaimo (Street).” Moviegoers were, and remain, the better for that.

Director Mina Shum and producer Stephen Hegyes saw their feature film Meditation Park open the Vancouver International Film Festival.

Neesha Hothi congratulated city actor Zak Santiago for his role in Meditation Park which opened the Vancouver International Film Festival.

BIG BUCKS BAX: Mary Zilba, singer, actress and former Miss Ohio, chaired the Gold Heart gala that reportedly raised $550,000 to benefit youngsters served by Variety — The Children’s Charity. One attendee paid $32,000 at auction for a painting by special-needs children guided by city artist Athena Bax, then gave it to Zilba as a birthday present. She was congratulated by former husband Frank Anderson, the city finance-biz type who now resides mostly in L.A. Zilba’s recording of city songwriter Steve Kipner’s Put Your Arms Around Me made it to MuchMoreMusic’s top 10. As Variety would understand, though, she seemed most pleased when, as a spokeswoman for tuberous sclerosis, she wrote and recorded Hero as a tribute to third son Chad Anderson.

Nancy Burke and husband Ian Telfer, the Goldcorp chair, received the Gold Heart Award for philanthropy at the Variety charity’s annual banquet.

24-KARAT: True to theme, the Gold Heart gala’s Gold Heart Award for philanthropy went to Goldcorp chair Ian Telfer and wife Nancy Burke. As well as supporting Heart & Stroke Foundation, Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and other efforts, Nancy co-chaired the Vancouver International Wine Festival’s Bacchanalia gala for four years. As she and Ian sat for a photo at the gala’s Fazioli piano, one half-expected a Variety representative to play the Golden Girls TV series’ theme song, Thank You for Being a Friend.

Ronald McDonald House president Richard Pass thanked Lindsey Turner when the Night To Dream gala she chaired netted $475,000.

HOME AWAY: Charity-gala season picked up momentum recently when Lindsey Turner chaired her second Night to Dream to benefit Ronald McDonald House. Held in the Fairmont Pacific Rim hotel, the event reportedly netted $475,000 and raised its 15-year total beyond $2.5 million. The funds help accommodate 73 out-of-town families of seriously ill youngsters in a facility on the B.C. Children’s Hospital campus.

Beedie Development Group president Ryan Beedie will hold a life celebration for late father Keith in the Vancouver Convention Centre Oct. 30.

UP AND AT ’EM: The Night to Dream gala was presented by the Beedie Development Group. Company president, Ryan Beedie, will stage a lunchtime to remember Oct. 30. The luncheon will be a celebration of life for father and firm founder Keith who died recently at age 90. Beedie Sr. did the opposite of breaking down walls to prosper in an industry he entered in 1946 when he and a friend built a woodworking shop on a city lot that cost $190. He later refined a Californian homebuilding technique into the money-saving tilt-up wall system for industrial buildings and literally never looked back.

Redfish Kids Clothing’s Kristy Brinkley attended a film-festival gala with Stephen Campanelli, who filmed most of Clint Eastwood’s movies.

STINT AFTER CLINT: Cameraman-turned-director Stephen Campanelli hit town recently to see his version of Ojibway novelist Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse screened at the Vancouver International Film Festival. The book and film address youngster Saul Indian Horse’s residential-school agonies, a seemingly promising hockey career and eventual alcoholism. Montreal-native Campanelli is familiar with stories of struggling against peril and wrong-headed authority, having been director of photography on most of Clint Eastwood’s movies. That includes The 15:17 to Paris, filmed recently from the book on a 2015 terrorist attack aboard an Amsterdam-Paris train. At the VIFF’s opening gala, Campanelli accompanied Redfish Kids Clothing principal Kristy Brinkley, whose store dresses many a million-dollar baby.

Not fitting one of two Roberto Cavalli Runway gowns she bought without trying them on, Martine Argent found it perfect for daughter Morgan.

WRONG GUESS: Dresses sometimes become too snug to wear. But how about those you’ve never tried on? That happened to Martine Argent who bought two Roberto Cavalli Runway gowns that way and figured on wearing either for the Gold Heart gala. Uh-oh. Turns out the leopard-pattern one would zipper up only on daughter Morgan, who then happily accompanied mama to the ball.

WITHOUT A PADDLE: Regarding the Furry Creek sale, B.C. Sports Hall of Famer Ted Hunt recalled playing 18 holes there with actor-pal Sean Connery, after which the quintessential 007 said: “Ted, this isn’t a golf course. It’s a bloody obstacle course.”

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Former MP/academic Herbert Grubel’s continuing desire to curtail immigration (The Sun, Oct. 3) is ironic for someone born and raised in Germany.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

TOO MANY COOKS? Not for Gourmet Warehouse owner Caren McSherry who launched her seventh cookbook, Starters, Salads and Sexy Sides: Inspiring Recipes to Make Every Meal Shine, with city chefs Angus An, Trevor Bird, Margaret Chisholm, Robert Clark, Scott Jaeger and Pino Posteraro serving dishes from it. One recipe, Pickled Vegetable Salad, came from mother Clara who coached then-flight attendant McSherry in kitchen ways. Some launch-goers goggled at sustainable-seafood proselytizer Clark serving sensational shaved beef tenderloin on multi-seeded garlic baguette with béarnaise sauce and fig-garlic-and-onion jam. Book 8? “Maybe Great Canadian Appetizers,” McSherry said.

Know for Sustainable seafood Rob Clark served beef tenderloin with fig-garlic-and-onion jam at Caren McSherry’s cookbook launch.

With 18.8 per cent cream content, Lori Joyce’s small Betterwith Ice Cream cones were a big hit with Caren McSherry’s cookbook buyers.

LICK’N’LIKE: Not in McSherry’s cookbook but seemingly in everybody’s kisser at its launch were cones from Lori Joyce’s Betterwith Ice Cream concern. The Cupcakes chain co-founder launched it this spring with exclusively contracted Lavender Farm cows contributing to a product with cream content up by half to 18.8 per cent. So you don’t need much, not that anyone at the Gourmet Warehouse event paid much heed to that.

Fire razed West Vancouverite Ray Signorello’s Napa Valley winery but apparently spared the vineyards and fermenting 2017 vintage.

MULLED WINE: Old Vancouver Stock Exchange schemes often went up in smoke. That happened literally when a wildfire destroyed Napa Valley’s Signorello Estate winery (Vancouver Sun, Oct. 12). Late oil-and-mining marketeer Ray Signorello bought 50 hectares there in 1977 and planted Chardonnay grapes for nearby wineries. Prices fell in 1988, so son Ray began making his own Padrone wines in 5,000-case-a-year connoisseur quantities. Already in fermentation tanks, the 2017 vintage should survive. Signorello’s friends doubtless look forward to tasting it in his British Properties home’s liquor-store-sized cellar.

Alongside nurse-wife Lori, Rick Baker said his Timely Medical Alternatives firm sends 15 patients monthly for surgeries mostly in Arizona.

NEXT-DAY SURGERY: In 2003, six years before Cambie Surgery Centre founder Brian Day launched his lawsuit over paid access to medical services, yacht charterer Rick Baker began sending patients south. Today, his Timely Medical Alternatives firm directs 15 monthly for general, orthopedic, neuro and coronary procedures, including quintuple bypasses. Baker claims one-to-two-week waits, and sometimes 24 hours. Most surgeries are in Phoenix, Arizona, he said, and he’s negotiating with Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic.

Paloma Kwiatkowski, Michael Karl Richards, Dylan Playfair and Alex Barima ringed agent Carrie Wheeler outside a Lighthouse Pictures party.

CORNERED: Screen actors Alex Barima, Paloma Kwiatkowski, Dylan Playfair and Michael Karl Richards looked to be seeking tips for upcoming roles at late-evening Main and Hastings Street. In fact, agent Carrie Wheeler had collared them for a photo-op from Lighthouse Pictures’ annual film-festival party at the ritzy nearby Imperial. Like some street-corner onlookers, Wheeler has ingestible goods to sell, namely vegan fare from her and husband Jaman Lloyd’s Copper Kettle Fine Foods firm on Pender Island. No hams, that is, at Copper Kettle anyway.

Seen with late clothier and fellow raconteur Murray Goldman, Hugh Pickett will have items from his showbiz collection shown on Oct. 16.

HUGH’S VIEWS: Some of late impresario Hugh Pickett’s showbiz memorabilia will adorn a Friends of Vancouver Archives’ gala Oct. 16 to help fund digitization of the entire collection. Missing will be his entertaining indiscretions, including these personally witnessed.

He told dinner companion Bob Hope that movie-star Marlene Dietrich (whom he managed for years) slept with U.S. General of the Army Omar Bradley to become the first civilian into 1945 Germany.

Enlightening Canadian Evelyn Hart on fellow prima ballerinas Alexandra Danilova, Alicia Markova and Tamara Toumanova, he recounted a fan upbraiding Dame Margot Fonteyn for drinking whisky. “Well, I’m not really a swan,” Fonteyn replied. Nor was Maya Plisetskaya, who Pickett helped fly to a Sylvia hotel suite and Warren Beatty’s arms.

More mercenary romantics entailed 1930s sex-trade workers “frenchifying their names to Hazelle and Maybelle to work the midnight Victoria ferry (with) business cards reading: ‘All the facilities for the entertainment of refined gentlemen.’”

Powwowing with author John MacLachlan Gray about a biography, Pickett admitted: “I don’t do nice.” What he did do was expressed at his 80th-birthday party by then-mayor Gordon Campbell: “Hugh is one of those special citizens who has never asked for anything from anyone. Especially, he has never asked for anything from government.” 

Author-playwright John MacLachlan Gray’s The White Angel is a smashing novel based on housemaid Janet Smith’s 1924 Shaughnessy murder.

MOVING ON: Gray sidestepped the Pickett biography. But the literary and musical all-rounder has launched another historical novel. Based on the unsolved 1924 murder of Shaughnessy housemaid Janet Smith, The White Angel presents Gray in top shape for inventiveness, characterization and scene-setting.

Vancouver Heritage Foundation’s Robert Lemon feted fellow director Dr. Stacy Reebye on staging the City Drinks recruitment event.

NOW THEN: Addressing our more respectable past, the head of the Vancouver Heritage Foundation’s development committee, Dr. Stacy Reebye, fronted the annual City Drinks event at the Vancouver Club. The $110-ticket event was no chug-a-lug party but a fundraiser to attract younger members. It included a presentation by heritage author-artist Michael Kluckner. An attending physician at the G.F. Strong Rehabilitation Centre, Reebye is a member at the rival Terminal City Club, possibly the 2018 City Drinks venue.

Maryam Namvar opened a luxury spa for the Germany-based Babor chain smack dab across Howe Street from the Holt Renfrew store.

FACING UP: Where better to pamper Holt Renfrew customers than directly across Howe Street? That’s where Tehran-born, Hanover-raised Maryam Namvar recently opened a spa for Aachen, Germany-based Babor Cosmetics. The chain’s name may betoken the founder of India’s Mughal Empire whose marauding forebears Tamerlane and Genghis Khan conquered much of the world. Namvar might settle for a slice of Vancouver.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Ford Motor Company may profit more from new electric-car operation Ford Edison than from previous big splurge Ford Edsel.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

BEST OF TIME: The recent Gift of Time gala for the Canuck Place Children’s Hospice reportedly raised a record $1.24 million and pushed its 13-year total beyond $10 million. The funds will go toward the $12 million needed every year to support 715 children and their families at the hospice’s Vancouver and Abbotsford locations. Third-time co-chair Emily Lazare and second-timer Shanni Eckford said tickets sold out in two weeks and $107,000 had been received before 600 guests filled the Bayshore hotel ballroom. Dr. Hal Siden, medical director for 18 years, once mused upon an early career “caring for a lot of kids that I couldn’t cure, but I realized I could still make a difference in their lives.” Canuck Place’s life-threatened youngsters later made a difference in his. “Shooting pucks or baskets with one of the kids, it just feels like a normal kid on a normal day,” he said.

MC Chris Gailus and Canuck Place medical director Hal Siden prepared to welcome guests to the Gift of Time $1.24-million fundraiser.

Emily Lazare and Shanni Eckford were third- and second-time co-hosts of the Gift of Time gala benefitting Canuck Place Children’s Hospice.

Marquis Wine Cellars owner John Clerides’ Enjoy It Now program offers gala attendees better wines than hosting hotels might ordinarily provide. 

HERE’S CHEERS: Marquis Wine Cellars principal John Clerides helped Gift of Time participants do themselves some good along with Canuck Place. His Enjoy It Now program “gets better wines at the tables without the hotel taking the frisk.” He offered attendees 62 bottles ranging from a $60 Nebbiolo 2014 to $625 for 1.5 litres of Il Caberlot Toscana 2008. Thirteen champagnes ran to $375 for a magnum of Philipponnat Royale Reserve. We’ll likely see more of this.

WE Day’s Craig and Marc Kielburger joined Melita Segal for a night-before event above the swimming pool at her and husband Lorne’s home.

WE NIGHT: One night before WE Day festivities occupied Rogers Arena’s usual ice rink, founders Craig and Mark Kielburger dined with local supporters above Lorne and Melita Segal’s swimming pool. Son Matthew Segal knew longer bodies of water as a stroke oarsman at Yale University where he developed the anonymous messaging app Lipsi. Following Craig’s fundamentalist-preacher-style speech, Matthew thanked the brothers as “the finest exemplars of contemporary leadership.” Pause. “Sorry, Dad.”

Lorne Segal, right, welcomed large-and-small-screen actor Martin Sheen to a pre-WE Day celebration in his and wife Melita’s Southlands home.

In a tête-à-tête with Segal pere, actor-guest Martin Sheen recited a prayer learned from New York Fire Department chaplain Mychal Judge. Sage beyond its religious context, it goes: “Take me where you want me to go, Let me meet who you want me to meet, Tell me what you want me to say and Keep me out of your way.” Four days later, Sheen said, the priest got in harm’s way, perishing in the 9/11 terrorist attack.

GOT YOUR NUMBER: RBC regional president Graham MacLachlan, whose bank partners WE day efforts, pointed to wife Sylvie while addressing Segal-event guests. “We’re over at Table 6 with Telus,” he said. “So, if you want an iPhone X, come and see us. And if you can’t afford it, we can help.”

Here with Liz Kim, former punk rocker Andy Dixon saw his sculpture-and-painting contribution to Splash fetch $17,000 at auction.

MAKING ONE: Arts Umbrella’s Splash gala-auction has run for 35 of the children’s arts organization’s 38 years. Held in the Hotel Vancouver recently with AU co-founder Carol Henriquez present, Splash reportedly netted a record $540,000. Bruce Munro Wright, partner at MLT Atkins LLP, and Christie Darbyshire, the glamorous-as-ever former Paragon Events principal,  co-chaired the TD Bank Group-sponsored event. Known for respecting contributing artists, Splash again drew 100 first-rate donations. Senior artist Hank Bull conducted the 38-lot live auction with the calm authority that non-pros seldom master.

THE NEW BLACK: Splash contributor Marie Khouri’s works — from huge concrete sculptures to delicate lost-wax gold castings — have been all over the artistic map for a decade. Now the petite Lebanon-born artist has actually made a map — of charcoal. Somewhat redolent of the PNE’s long-gone Challenger relief model of British Columbia, her 96 by 48 by 12-inch work fetched $41,000 — $7,000 above estimate — at the Splash auction.

Horses are familiar around the Southlands home-studio of Shannon Belkin whose oil-on-canvas painting fetched $8,500 at the Splash auction.

HORSE SENSE: Shannon Belkin’s 48 by 72-inch painting, Standing Horse, sold for $8,500 at Splash. It was one of the virtual menagerie of works her Southlands home-studio produces. Past paintings included pet bulldog Stinky, while one of an exotic rooster closely echoed then-gallerist Diane Farris’s explosive coif. Still, with global collectors finding her thoroughbred portraits a safe bet, there’ll doubtless be more.

Vancouver Writers Festival artistic director Leslie Hurtig and predecessor Hal Wake flanked founder Alma Lee at the 30th kick-off event.

RENEWED: The 30th-annual Vancouver Writers Festival opened with new artistic director Leslie Hurtig, 12-year predecessor Hal Wake and founder Alma Lee all present. “We’re very rich in this city with our literary talent,” said Hurtig who expects to liaise with other cultural organizations and possibly appoint program guest curators.

Vancouver Sun reporter Kim Bolan was cited for lifetime achievement at the Jack Webster Foundation’s journalism-awards banquet. 

TRUER GRIT: Vancouver Sun reporter Kim Bolan likely was bemused when honoured for work that is its own greatest reward. Still, she received her sixth professional recognition at the Jack Webster Foundation’s recent banquet, namely its Bruce Hutchison Lifetime Achievement Award. Readers and the real and alleged malefactors Bolan covers respect her tenacity and fearlessness that the late Webster would doubtless applaud. She’s also principled, fair and optimistic, the latter despite death threats and an endangered-industry job. Three-decades of trade-union convictions didn’t quell her “pride that (reporters) took a pay cut earlier this year to save journalists-to-be.” When five such beginners received $2,000 tuition awards at the banquet, Bolan congratulated them “for choosing this profession; it is honourable.” Like her.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

SHIER DELIGHT: Anticipating its official opening Nov. 17, the 25,000-square-foot Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver held an art auction chaired by board president Iain Mant and artist Stan Douglas. The waterfront facility’s name recognizes Polygon Homes, whose founder, Michael Audain, and CEO, Neil Chrystal, were greeted by gallery director Reid Shier. Audain launched the project by donating $4 million from Polygon Homes and his and wife Yoshiko’s foundation. North Vancouver, Victoria and Ottawa jointly added $7.5 million, plus the city’s land donation. Other major donors were Brigitte and Henning Freybe, the Chan Family Foundation, TD Bank Group, Denna Homes, and Dennis and Phyllis Washington, whose  225-foot yacht Attessa III gets to moor alongside. The project “finished up half-a-million under budget,” said contractor  Roland Haebler. Without penny-pinching, either. Architects John and Patricia Patkau lauded board members for rejecting a money-saving proposal to have street-level pillars support the building’s  cantilevered upper floors. The Patkaus designed Audain’s own gallery in Whistler and have undertaken one in Thunder Bay, Ont., for 95 per cent Indigenous works.

Here with Polygon Homes president-CEO Neil Chrystal, chair Michael Audain had Dana Claxton’s work echo a $4-million Polygon Gallery donation.

Polygon Gallery chief Reid Shier greeted Vancouver Art Gallery’s Kathleen Bartels with the Washington family’s Attessa III moored beyond them.

Backed by Andrew Dadson’s White Tree work, architects John and Patricia Patkau helped open North Vancouver’s Polygon Gallery they designed.

PERSIA POWER: Psychotherapist Marjaneh Halati jetted here from London’s tony Knightsbridge district to help support 500 disadvantaged young women in her native Iran. At a fundraiser in the LivingSpace home-furnishings emporium, Halati reported on the Omid Foundation she launched in 2005. Zohreh Waibel and Mana Jalalian-Ghayoumpour sparkplugged the event, Joy TV’s Carmen Ruiz y Laza emceed, and “the Bob Dylan of Iran,” Mohsen Namjoo, entertained. Attendee Hamid Abdollahi co-founded the Recon Instruments firm that developed heads-up-display sports glasses before Intel paid $175 million for it.

Cousins Mana Monargha and Sahar Rostami enjoyed the Omid Foundation benefit set among furnishing displays at the LivingSpace store.

Omid founder Marjaneh Halati welcomed Mohsen Namjoo, “the Bob Dylan of Iran,” to a fundraiser for disadvantaged younger women.

IN A NAME: Speedo swimwear salesperson Kelly Townsend spent three years persuading Torontonian Boobyball founder MJ DeCoteau to take the plunge in Vancouver. She prevailed, and the under-40s-oriented event ran at the Imperial recently with the subtitle Get Physical. It benefited Rethink Breast Cancer, a charity DeCoteau launched in 2002 to support a friend with cancer. It grew to “respond to the unique needs of young women going through it.” Boobyballs also run in Calgary, Halifax and Ottawa. “Everything was geared for the older generation,” sport-and-event-marketing grad Townsend said, meaning big-time charities whose galas raise seven figures. Although Rethink Breast Cancer’s total has yet to reach $5 million, its seemingly realistic 2017 target is $540,000

Kelly Townsend chaired the first Vancouver running of the Boobyball M.J. DeCoteau founded to raise funds for breast-cancer programs.

Boys will be girls as Clement Luah and Jason Bradstock were when entertaining at Boobyball drag-dressed as Sienna Blaze and Mina Mercury.

Lauren Maynard and Monica Gutierrez served cocktails based on 1849-founded Cointreau liqueur that added to the charitable Boobyball’s youthful flavour.

BOTTOMS UP: Tank-car loads of whisky have been quaffed at the Vancouver Club since 1893. More went down the hatch recently when Penguin Random House Canada had sommelier-author Davin de Kergommeaux dish out flights of rye along with information from his revised Canadian Whisky: The New Portable Expert. Packed with distilling history and modern-day industrial insight, the book contains straightforward guidance on gaining tasting skills that would serve wine drinkers, too. Self-described “malt maniac” de Kergommeaux’s exuberance sometimes bubbles like a distillery fermenter, most entertainingly with: “Three-year-old all-rye-grain whisky races around on your palate like a puppy with a toy.”

Davin de Kergommeaux launched his revised Canadian Whisky book at the Vancouver Club with a group-tasting of several rye-based spirits.

WAG PARTY: For those who prefer puppies eight weeks old, the SPCA’s recent Offleashed gala had guests cuddle a litter of collie/husky/beagles. Tracey Wade chaired and Wayne Deans was advisory chair of an event that reportedly raised $500,000 for programs that include a pet-food bank and free outpatient veterinary clinics that serve 6,500 pet guardians annually.

Soon to earn a UBC degree in applied animal biology, Jeffrey Kwok wrangled collie-husky-beagle pups at the SPCA’s Offleashed gala.

GOOD IDEA: Redevelopment of its Seventh-at-Keith campus might see Vancouver SPCA add 120 kennels. For humans, not animals. According to condo marketer Bob Rennie, the nascent scheme would include 250-square-foot units of “desperately needed student rental housing.” With Vancouver Community College, Emily Carr University and a SkyTrain station all close, units would help fund the SPCA’s own 50,000-square-foot redevelopment while retaining its property. “Non-profits should never let their land go,” Rennie said.

STILL ROSY: Blushing Boutique owner Shelley Klassen’s past literally flashed before her eyes recently. That was during her Richards Street store’s 10th anniversary when models showed garments the Niagara Falls native began designing and making in 1999. “Women love knowing they are unique to the boutique … coming in to be fitted by the designer,” Klassen once said. That still pertains.

Backing Blushing Boutique founder Shelley Klassen, models wore garments she’d designed and made for 18 years, 10 at her Richards Street locale.

BIGGER, BETTER: It was 2001 when Granville Island-based Bodacious boutique’s now-sole owner, Lorna Ketler, focused on “a fun, funky and sexy gap in the market for size 14-to-28 womenswear. It’s not just buying clothes. It’s how you celebrate your body.” That’s still Bodacious’s credo. Gone, though, is a doorway sign that read: “Forget love. I’d rather fall in chocolate.”

PARRYDIDDLES: Slovenian ambassador Marjan Cencen has given the Museum of Anthropology a sheepskin kurent costume that unmarried men wore to chase away winter. … Colleen Carson’s new The Guyed Book helps unmarried and other men get along better with women. … The 46-year-old and still growing literary magazine Capilano Review (thecapilanoreview.com) would get along better with some cash donations.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Car names capitalize on electricity pioneers Tesla and Volta, but there’s still room for a battery-powered RV called Ampere Campere.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca, 604-929-8456