Faint-hearted

They were bright red twenty-eight months ago.

In the weeks following the advent of the pandemic, red hearts appeared everywhere:  pinned up in windows, dangling from tree branches, painted and stencilled on the sidewalks.
 

It's now the third Labour Day weekend of the pandemic.

Things seem to have eased.  

There is music floating and bumping into buildings from concerts in the park.  At the coffee shop, few people wear masks.

 

Some glance at me sidelong. I still wear a mask in indoor shared spaces. I am, after all, still dropping in on my mother to set up her meals, and do her laundry, and the RFB, who had COVID a few weeks ago, will be attempting to get minor surgery done this week. It's been postponed twice. 

All a little too much to inscribe on a tee-shirt, so I try to smile with my eyes, not wishing to pin my heart on my sleeve.

Taking thrills where you can get them

I'm taking in an extra loop of the neighbourhood, to get in a bit of exercise before going to get Demeter's dinner.  A neighbour from down the hall in our building, spots me and scurries across the road to approach me.

"Are you on your way to Roots Cellar?" she inquires eagerly.

Roots Cellar is a local grocer specializing in local produce and "nutritious food and healthy lifestyle choices". It is, as you can imagine, rather upscale and very middle-class, despite its claims for being "dirt cheap".  The business is expanding, and has just opened its second store in Victoria, after a long wait of nearly a year.  The selling point, in addition to what has already been mentioned, is in supporting local businesses and producers, which is not to be sniffed at.

It's been a long year without a local grocery.  The small and even more specialized organic food store appeals to a very narrow (and comfortably off) vegetarian/vegan/gluten-free clientele.  

When we lived in Fairfield in the nineties, there were two supermarkets in Cook Street Village, both doing steady business for years.  The Country Grocer closed down in the aughts, replaced by (of course) expensive condos.  Oxford Foods (named because it was on the corner of Oxford Street) soldiered on in its grungy glory, featuring the kind of items prized by pensioners, of whom there are a lot in our neighbourhood: packaged foods, canned foods, cleaning products... Their produce was serviceable, but not all that fresh, and mostly imported. The owners decided to retire and sell to the younger couple who runs the original Roots Cellar.

As it happened, I told my eager neighbour, I had popped into Roots Cellar early that morning, securing a Bosc pear for Demeter (one of her favourites) and having a quick look around at dazzling stacks of every kind of fruit and vegetable imaginable, up to and including jackfruit and pineapples.

If you're in the market for dairy products (see what I did there?), you're in luck: wide varieties of yoghurts, milks, sour cream, and whipping cream in many forms, to say nothing of a huge selection of cheeses.  There's a meat counter and a deli counter, and many options for meat substitutes.  A small display of ice creams, a modest bakery and baking section.  No boxed cake blends (small bags, though, of more local mixes).  Absolutely no paper products, or cleaning aids. If you want cereal, you go to the bulk bins for rolled oats or granola. Very West Coast.

So, no one-stop shopping, but an easily accessible place for staples such as eggs, milk, or fruit.  It's been more than nine months since Demeter's fall, and my being able to quickly replace supplies will be a welcome change from making do with what I can find in convenience stores.

Our condo building was positively buzzing with giddiness.  Over a grocery store. 

The Resident Fan Boy, trying to transport a heavy basket to the laundry rooms upstairs, encountered neighbour after neighbour, unseen for months, using the elevator to get to the sidewalks and join the pilgrimage.  

Is this touching or pathetic?

My great-aunt's twenty-day marriage

This is a tale of two great-aunts.  One is mine; one is the Resident Fan Boy's. I'll tell you the tale of my great-aunt first -- although, in this case, it's more about her husband.  Not because he was more important or interesting, but because I'd never thought much about him -- until last week.

Ever since testing Demeter's DNA at Ancestry a little over a year ago, I've been working through hundreds of matches, labeling whether they are paternal or maternal, and, if possible, to which branch they belong. 

It's not boring work, but, the smaller the number of centiMorgans shared, the more likely it is that there are few clues to connections. Sometimes my mind wanders.

Last week, as I marked and noted, I found myself thinking about my great-aunt, who was swept away in the final wave of the great influenza pandemic.  She died on February 19, 1919 in Wolverhampton, at age 26, struggling to speak to her husband of six months.

It occurred to me that I didn't know when her widower died.  All I really knew about him was that he was an army driver during World War One, and that, some time after losing his wife, he asked my grandmother, who was eight years her sister's junior, to marry him.  She turned him down.  (Obviously.)  However, his name remained in her address book for at least the next decade.

I set about trying to find his death registration, but his name wasn't unusual, and there are several registrations for men bearing his name sharing his birth year, or thereabouts.

I found him in the 1891 census and narrowed down his birthdate to late February 1891, as he was noted as being six weeks old when the census was taken on April 5th.  He was the only son, with many sisters, raised in Wolverhampton, as my grandmother and her siblings were.

I found a possible second marriage for him.  My grandmother's address book, a birthday gift when she turned 19, ten months after her sister's death, has him first in Coventry, Warwickshire, then later in Newcastle-on-Tyne, as a manager for Daimler.  The 1939 National Register, taken just after the United Kingdom declared war on Germany, has a fellow born in late February 1891, a manager for a motor company, with his wife -- whose given names match those for a marriage registered in Coventry, a little over a year after my great-aunt's death.  The wife would have been almost the exact age of my grandmother.

However, the wife didn't have an unusual name either, so finding a death record was as daunting as locating one for her husband.

Before giving up, it occurred to me to double-check his World War One military record.  I don't think I'd given it more than a glance.

As I'd mentioned, he was a driver for the army, signing up shortly after the declaration of war in 1914 -- in Coventry, as it happens.  His army documents gave me a date of marriage, and it was different than what I had in my records:  11 July 1918 at St Jude Wolverhampton, my great-grandparents' parish church at the time.

I checked the dates of his postings.  He had been given a furlough in order to be married, and returned to France ten days after the wedding, so the wedding date in his military record is the correct one.  

He didn't return to Wolverhampton until nearly three months after the war ended.  He left France on February 9th, 1919 -- ten days later, his bride died of influenza.

Out of six months of marriage, they had been together barely twenty days.  (Oh gawd.  Did he bring the contagion with him?)

I'll tell you the tale of the Resident Fan Boy's great-aunt tomorrow.

From away

The neighbourhood is lousy with campervans.

They're parked up and down the residential streets, usually clustered around condo buildings.

Early Saturday morning, I marvelled at the number of people trotting up and down Cook Street, then I noticed the strolling people were in groups, and  I remembered.  It's the Thanksgiving long weekend.  Furthermore, it's our second pandemic Thanksgiving, and visiting rules are way looser than last year's rather bleak excuse for a holiday, so the ferries are full, and families are getting together with a vengeance.  Well, maybe that's the wrong word.  (Let's hope so, anyway.)

Our Thanksgiving will be the usual quiet matter, as all family coming to dinner, either live here, or barely a block away.  Pumpkin pie made by me and dinner rolls made by younger daughter.  Demeter escorted in from her own condo to dine on roast chicken -- we don't care much for turkey.  Or campervans.

Wishing you a peaceful meal, free of feuds and super-spreaders, followed by a safe journey home.

Getting miffed

October is usually one of my favourite months.

This one will have its challenges. 

Younger daughter had her first in-person recital in over two years last Sunday.  The event was masked (including the singers, who wore special "singing masks"), carefully spaced, and our British Columbian vaccine cards (mandatory the following day) were checked for admission.

At lunch, following the concert -- which went well, thank you for asking -- elder daughter's godmother remarked that she had a number of friends still refusing the vaccination.

"In the beginning," she said, "I was willing to see this as a difference of opinion.  Now, I'm getting a bit annoyed."  

Coming from a very conservative, and, to be honest, rather eccentric lady, this was a remarkable statement.

She was concerned about the surgeries, procedures, and treatments being deferred by the number of COVID cases in hospital, the vast majority of which are the unvaccinated.  I'm getting a bit antsy myself.  The Resident Fan Boy needs treatment for a condition that is not life-threatening -- yet.

Perspective

On a recent weekend, I was returning from an errand, in a blue funk. 

It had been cloudy for most of the day, so I had left my sunhat and sunglasses at home. Tired and footsore, I reached a busy intersection, and the sky cleared quite suddenly, and an overly warm sun, made muggy by the recent cloud-cover, hit me smack in the eyes. 

But that wasn't the reason for my misery. 

I was feeling closed in, burdened and crushed by things I needed to do, or thought I needed to do.  

As I made my miserable way down the hill, aiming for the leafy, shade-giving boulevard, I thought about the very latest I stayed in Victoria, out of the seventeen summers of respite during my exile in Hades -- September 4th.  Once.  We were usually hauled back to Hades by mid-August.

And it hit me.  It's September.  It's late September.  I'm not back in Hades, because I live here.  I have a bus pass, because I live here.

And I moved down the hill into our neighbourhood, near the old house where my daughters were little girls.  Children were playing, and a small knot of adults chatted on our old street. And I heard something I haven't heard in over two years:  music wafting on the breeze from a concert at the Cameron Bandshell in Beacon Hill Park, about a kilometre away.

And I was smiling.

Standing room only

For the first time in months, I shiver slightly, and battling my surprise, pull on my fleece jacket.  It's not even Labour Day yet.

I find myself remembering a very chilly morning in late January.  

A lady was standing by the coffee-house window counter, gazing out at the winter drizzle, as I set up my journals at my accustomed table, idly wondering why she'd chosen a spot within six feet of the tables.  

In those mid-pandemic days, the stools had been taken away from the raised counter, because they didn't work well with social distancing, nor with the constant sanitizing then required.  Still, if she wanted to stand at a counter, there was an identical one on the southern side, where, from May 2020 to May 2021, there were no tables at all.

I decided to ignore her, and strolled to the bar to pick up my mocha, and as I was setting it on my table, preparing to take my seat, one of the young baristas approached the lady and gently asked her to move.  She offered her a nearby table, saying something about the need to sanitize.

In response, the standing-room-only lady stalked out.  Clutching her coffee and sandwich, she glared back into the window that faced my table.  I gazed steadily back; she was clearly muttering about the injustice and embarrassment.

I then wondered if she thought I summoned the barista.

And beauty shall reign alone

No doubt the pandemic has robbed me of many experiences, but it has made many experiences possible, simply by the shifting of much of day-to-day life online. 

For example, I'm not a huge fan of queues, and hence, my attendance at festivals is somewhat curtailed.

This past winter, the Victoria International Film Festival, a great progenitor of queues, made itself available online. In the past, I've attended exactly one film at the VIFF. Now, I took in half a dozen films, and that's only because I didn't subscribe earlier and ran out of time. 

The films were available via your computer, laptop, or phone, and could be watched at any time within a two-week period. I could watch half the film, and finish it later. 

I missed being surrounded by a reacting audience, and being able to eat popcorn (the stuff I make at home doesn't quite cut it), but damn, this was convenient. 

 One of the last films I squeezed in was one I wouldn't have ordinarily have chosen (another plus), and it turned out to be my favourite. 

Echo (Bergmál) is a chronological collection of fifty-six vignettes, that take place over the Christmas period in Iceland. 

Some of these scenes reflect Icelandic Christmas and New Year customs: embracing as the bells ring in Christmas Eve, shooting elaborate fireworks for the New Year, visiting family graves at cemeteries lit with electric crosses. 

Other glimpses illustrate the joys and tragedies of contemporary life: the plight of refugees, child custody Christmas arrangements, the loneliness of the elderly. 

The movie opens with what appears to be a very sparse and modern store Christmas tree display. It turns out to be the brushes of an automatic carwash. 

Of the fifty-six mini-dramas that follow, the one that stays with me is that of a young girl, aged about ten or eleven, who arrives at the home of her father and his new girlfriend for a Christmas visit. Waiting for her father to return, she practises a Chopin piano piece that she's prepared as a surprise for him. The girlfriend's daughter, slightly older, greets her cordially; they're clearly meeting for the first time. The older girl asks if she can try the piano piece, and plays it perfectly, as the young girl's face freezes. Her father reappears, and putting an arm around her shoulder and listening with pleasure, tells his daughter that the older girl is one of his most promising students - that's how he met his girlfriend. 

The scene is understated and heartbreaking, as are vignettes showing a calm emergency operator gently talking an unseen eight-year-old through a wait for police, while his parents fight, or a young woman in her twenties encountering her high-school bully at a bus stop, and enduring a painfully awkward apology, before she flees in embarrassment. 

The film ends with a ship's view of a stormy, swelling North Atlantic, while gorgeous choral music plays. Enchanted, I slowed down the credits to find what it was (because I could) - not particularly helpful. I checked IMDb; nothing. 

It took a bit of digging, but I found it: it's the fourth "act" of an opera called Der Klang der Offenbarung des Göttlichen, which apparently means something like "The Explosive Sonics of Divinity" (yikes). The composer is Kjartan Sveinsson, who used to be with the Icelandic rock group Sigur Rós. 

The lyrics of this "Teil IV", however, are in German. In English, they mean: "You are the light of the world/ Soon the sun of the day of resurrection will shine on the bright paths where she awaits her poet / And beauty shall reign alone".

Sus. Very sus.

I wanted to share this because: a) it's funny; b) it's timely; c) it's cleverly executed; d) it's part of a series of videos (hence the "5"); and e) it's Canadian. 

Julie Nolke is a gifted comedian and writer, and despite the centre part in her hair, she's a millennial. 

(She was also born in Calgary, but I won't hold that against her.)

Barefaced guys

It was only last weekend that I first started noticing that people were entering my local coffee shop un-masked. After more than a year, it was a startling sight - and I also noticed that, with one exception, the maskless ones were male, and on the younger side. (The exception, of course, was a young female, clearly in the company of her boyfriend.) 

The same weekend, Amanda Vickery, the host of several documentaries on social history, was tweeting angrily about the men - she made it clear these were men - who were riding without masks on the trains in London. Elder daughter, who is in the first few weeks of her job in Greenwich, has similar concerns.

Meanwhile, Demeter was taken for lunch in Sidney yesterday (seventeen miles north of Victoria for those not familiar with our area), a lovely outing, but she was taken aback to see that the staff at the restaurant had uncovered faces.  I haven't yet encountered a single Victorian restaurant or shop, for that matter, which has taken that step.

In Cook Street Village, a few blocks from my doorstep, the tiny plant shop is taking a stand.  Literally.

Do I belong there?

The long months of pandemic have us reaching for comfort in familiar movies and television shows. This is particularly true for younger daughter, whose burden of autism and anxiety is a bad match with the threat of a global virus. 

We invite younger daughter to view DVDs (yes, we still use DVDs) in the living room. It's an effective way of chivvying her out of her bedroom. 

This means we've seen all the Harry Potter films in order and reverse order, all ten seasons of Friends (reminding me how rubbishy the final four seasons were), and the various Muppets films. 

I've learnt that I still rather like The Great Muppet Caper, and that I truly loathe The Muppets Take Manhatten. The original Muppet Movie is okay; it doesn't drive me into the bedroom, or out of the house entirely. 

So, one late afternoon, I'm sitting on the couch doing Sudoku, while younger daughter is perched on the Resident Fan Boy's raised seat cushion (originally made by Demeter for the RFB's late father).  She's watching the scene where Gonzo is singing wistfully in the desert, dreaming of earlier in the day, when he was hoisted skyward by a bunch of helium balloons.

Sun rises; night falls/ Sometimes, the sky calls/ Is that a song there?/ And do I belong there?/ I've never been there, but I know the way/ I'm going to go back there some day.

I'm thinking of when I originally saw the movie in a cinema, long before the advent of my daughters.  I remember the dreaminess of it -- had I nodded off?

Then I realize that younger daughter is softly singing along.  Part heaven, part space/ Or have I found my place?/ You can just visit, but I plan to stay/ I'm going to go back there some day.

And my heart is breaking, but I manage not to cry.  I hold very still, hardly daring to breathe.

We'll have to muddle through somehow

Have you noticed how when people sing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" this year, they revert to the original lyrics?

Someday soon, we all will be together, if the fates allow.  Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow...

Our Christmas Day may have been similar to other Christmas Days, but it's the line of days between Christmas Day and New Year's Eve that emphasize how this holiday season is like no other in peacetime.

I get poignant reminders, through my journals and via the FaceBook "On this date" feature, that our usual second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth days of Christmas were usually given to visiting and being visited, of seeing the movies most likely to be nominated for Academy Awards in the coming year, of making our annual trek to Butchart Gardens for the Christmas afternoon tea, even the occasional concert or play.

Yesterday, I had a series of tiny triumphs.  The current situation has slowed parcel delivery, so a handful of love offerings have not yet arrived, making the line of daily small gifts for the Twelve Days of Christmas rather sparse.  I grabbed a rare moment on my own to quickly hit a couple of downtown shops, and located a Doctor Who calendar for the Resident Fan Boy for the Eighth Day of Christmas, and a much-coveted video for younger daughter's Fifth Day of Christmas.  My finds were made all the sweeter, being from local businesses.

After lunch, we perused one of the sites for the annual Habitat for Humanity Gingerbread House contest.  Normally housed in a hotel lobby, they have been spread out to a number of different venues, where you view them through glass from the sidewalk.  A bit bleak, but better than nothing.

One of this year's candidates - yes, it's gingerbread

This morning, I awoke to "gremlins", resulting from a disturbing and accusatory dream of younger daughter's being back in school (thank god she isn't).  And as I lay there, fighting off the feelings of panic and failure, I also struggled with the recurring question that assails me every damn time:  Are these gremlins a delusion of the dark -- or an epiphany of waking clarity?  I fervently pray it's the latter.

Of course, then I checked my phone - big mistake - and encountered the doom-scroll of the situation in Britain, their hospitals with lines of ambulances outside, waiting for unavailable beds, and the country finally toppling into Brexit.  Of course, now elder daughter lives there.

Next year, all our troubles will be out of sight.  Because it will too dark to see them?

Just another day in paradox

The light is ebbing from the westward horizon, and outside, vehicles, clearly with somewhere to be quickly, streak eastward.

We in the middle, with just a few small tasks to do, are finding the stillness.

The Resident Fan Boy is on his headphones, attending Christmas Eve services at the Cathedral virtually.  

Elder daughter has wished us good night from London, where it has been Christmas Day for a quarter of an hour.  Just before we turn in this evening, we will join her again as she wakes at seven in the morning to open her stocking.

Younger daughter has stashed away the cat's Christmas stocking that she assembled this afternoon.  I can hear her warning him away.  He can smell the catnip.

Demeter dropped by to deposit her Christmas packages at the base of our tree, hurling them from her walker with soft plops on to the aluminum foil we've put down to discourage the cat, so I'm guessing we're not getting breakables.  She'll be back for Christmas lunch, ordered from the local Japanese restaurant, probably the one eatery staying open tomorrow.  (Christmas dinner, our usual tourtière, is waiting in the freezer.)

It's a Christmas like no other -- which is much like other Christmases.  

Christmas is kinda like that.

Hurricane Stacey

So I nipped into Demeter's apartment to drop off her litre of milk, having forgotten that her cleaner would be there.  It's been a while since her last visit - Stacey was prone to not feeling well long before the pandemic reared its ugly head.  Still, she's capable of giving Demeter's place the kind of cleaning that would wipe my elderly mother out, and I prefer not to get in the path of the whirlwind.

Stacey, it seems, has been bored and she tells me that she's been educating herself about China.

"Yay," I say, in a bid to be supportive, although something deep down stirs uneasily.  Stacey is a bit out there -- even by British Columbia standards.

The conclusion Stacey has reached, based on her "research", is that Canada is heading the same way as China.  Communism, she clarifies.  She's searching out protest groups, to join in demonstrations against the measures the government has been implementing.

Demeter, whose hearing hasn't been the best for the past couple of decades, looks blankly at her.

"The Canadian government," Stacey emphasizes, for Demeter's benefit.

She tells us she phoned the Unitarians - our church, as it happens (not hers; she's Church of Truth) - in search of fellow protesters, and was displeased by their response.

"I thought the Unitarians were in favour of human rights," she tells us angrily.

Standing next to Demeter, I can't help myself.

"They are. In the human right to live."

She narrows her eyes.  "Oh. You're on that side."

She continues:  "That big flu epidemic a hundred years ago, we got through that without restrictions."

She's talking to the wrong person.  There certainly were restrictions, but I go for the jugular.

"Millions died, Stacey.  We had family die in the Spanish Flu Epidemic."

"I guess you won't be protesting."

Damn right.

I avoid her for a while, shaken.  I'm not a fan of confrontation.  The next time I see her, we discuss the weather.  We don't discuss hurricanes.

Vancouver - October 2020 - Darryl Dick photo

Seeing spots

To someone whose perception of time differs from most, this pandemic has been even more of a challenge. Earlier this year, as I removed laundry from younger daughter's room, I saw that she had filled in each and every square of her calendar, clear through to December: "VIRUS - VIRUS - VIRUS . . . ."  Like a flashing alarm, blinking repeatedly, world without end, amen.

At the same time, a friend posted this equally alarming animation on Facebook.  It covers the period between January 1st and June 30th, 2020, and it uses visuals and sound effects in a simple but unsettling way.

We start, seemingly drifting somewhere in space above China (which is unnerving in itself, to tell you the truth). One screen corner shows the date, the other the number of deaths -- not case numbers, deaths; that's important. It starts at 0, of course, but once the numbers appear, it will change every four seconds.

For the first few seconds, we have silence, until the first death, sometime in January.  A beep sounds, and a red dot ripples out, like a pebble hitting calm water.

The beeps come closer together, as the circle morphs into what looks like an angry scarlet pustule -- as the Philippines, with a beep in a different tone, joins in, and we float backwards and outwards, so our view takes in all of Europe, as Iran, Italy, France, and Spain become inflamed rippling spots, all beeping on different notes.

By March 11th, the day the pandemic was declared (and the last day I shook anybody's hand), we're viewing a flat world map. European countries are obscured by red welts. 

On March 16th, Canada gets a scarlet circle. That was the day that Sophie Gregoire Trudeau was confirmed as a COVID case, and things began shutting down in Canada like a row of falling dominos. 

By April 12th, the day elder daughter came from Hades to shelter with us in Victoria, the Canadian circle is large, and the United States is pulsing angrily. 

And so it goes to June 30th, spreading and spreading, the mingled beeps becoming a cacophony, as I compare my own personal timeline - I've kept one while all this has been happening. 

I understand there will be an update covering July 1st to December 31st. 

 I can hardly wait. 

Will younger daughter fill in her 2021 calendar with anguished repeating words, flashing like an alarm clock?  To her, it seems it will never end.  I can't convince her otherwise.

Aren't they supposed to be immortal?

Woke up this morning to this treat. (I got the DVD set for Christmas.)



Not sure what an angel and a demon are doing under lockdown. "Setting an example" sounds a bit flimsy.

Instead of sheep

I've actually been sleeping quite well. Early on, when this country-shutting-down business began, I'd wake up, hoping I'd imagined it, but, for the most part, I drift off easily.

Should it ever become a problem beyond the occasional Valerian, I could always take Bing Crosby's advice and count my blessings. I have a baker's dozen, at least.

1) I am at home with all the comforts thereof, enough food, and a safe place to sleep.

2) I am with my family, including both daughters, and we all are, at the time of writing, comfortable and healthy. I get the occasional uneasiness when I'm stuffy, sneezy, or head-achy, but opening a window usually is enough.

3) We have electricity and WiFi.

4) Demeter is a two-minute stroll (a one-minute panicked dash) away, and she is reasonably comfortable and very healthy.

5) I can still venture forth and get things for my family and particularly Demeter.

6) We are on a beautiful (unusually quiet) street, and our windows afford views of flower beds, trees, and, up until recently, a steadily diminishing number of passersby -- also the occasional delinquent deer. It's spring, something at which Victoria excels.

7) I am actually hearing more from friends than usual, due to, no doubt, their own senses of isolation, but heck, I'll take it.

8) Marie Phillips, due to her own sense of isolation, is blogging again. I'll take it!

9) These days, we have free access to theatre and ballet, courtesy of the Globe, the National Theatre, and the Royal Opera House, among other sources.

10) I have opportunities to pursue family research, my go-to mental health activity in the best of times and the worst of times. I just demolished a major brick wall in the Resident Fan Boy's side of the family tree a couple of days ago. I did lose some sleep over that - due to excitement. Don't say it.

11) We still have access to take-out from several of our favourite eateries, which we support for entirely selfish reasons.

12) Miraculously, some of my favourite shops are offering limited, and very personalized, service: book stores, stationers, hosery... It's my bounden duty to help keep them open, right? And I'm shopping local.

13) I'm not in Hades. Sorry. It had to be said.

Confination

There must be something reassuring about doo-wap these days.

This is a video edited from the live concert Stronger Together, broadcast on CBC last weekend. It features Michael Bublé, the Barenaked Ladies, and Mexican singer Sofia Reyes.



The performance is a cover of a recent offering by Barcelona trio Stay Homas, who are riding out this thing by making music from their apartment.


A number of Stay Homas fans are calling out Michael Bublé for covering this song, but I notice Stay Homas has sent a thank-you to all the musicians involved, for using the song to raise money for foodbanks.

"I'm not a doctor." "No kidding."

Apparently, Julie Andrews sent Randy Rainbow a message of approval about this video -- via Carol Burnett. That's got to be Gay Guy Cloud Nine.

For all you Mary Poppins fans, who don't mind the occasional cuss-word. (I gather Julie Andrews is one of those.)

The longest time

I don't know if this video is viral, but it's going around.

This is the Phoenix Chamber Choir (and some friends) out of Vancouver, BC, with a clever take on one of my favourite Billy Joel songs. If you can, get the video to the largest view you can manage, to see what the various singers are getting up to.


Here's the 1984 video, a fantasy in which a sextet of men show up at their thirty-year reunion with most of their hair. (Despite the back-up, Joel recorded all the vocals himself.)