Soup and Stuart

Up in our favourite loge at the National Arts Centre, I peered over the edge with my trusty bird binoculars as the seats filled for this year's Vinyl Cafe Christmas Concert. The Resident Fan Boy and I have been going every year for the past seven or eight years, and for this is the fourth one to which we've taken the girls. Elder daughter usually likes the stories; younger daughter loves the music.

The focus of these concerts is the "Dave and Morley" story; the Christmas concert usually offers two or three. At that time it's just Stuart McLean who created the Vinyl Cafe radio show about twenty years ago, a lectern with notes, and a microphone. He sort of dances as he tells the stories, sometimes his left foot kicks back, and his long fingers roll through the air before he draws them to his chest like a rabbit.

Younger daughter particularly enjoyed the jazz stylings of Christmas songs by the so-called "Vinylettes", three young women who have just completed the Jazz Performance Certificate at Humber College, a performing arts college in Toronto. Elder daughter was very pleased that the guest performer this year was Hawksley Workman. (Yes, that is his stage name; he was born Ryan Corrigan in Huntsville, Ontario.) I was pleased too; anyone who spends much time listening to CBC Radio Two will have heard him at one point or another. I'm always delighted to listen to the beautiful back-up of Dennis Pendrith and John Sheard who have to be amongst the ablest session musicians in Canada.

After the concert, we swam through the crowd (these concerts nearly always sell out) and the Resident Fan Boy bought Hawksley Workman's Christmas CD for elder daughter. Here's a sample of how he sounds. This YouTube film of a performance in Toronto a few years back joins him as he's beginning the second verse:


Let's make some soup 'cause the weather is turning cold
Let's stir it together 'til we are both grey and old
Let's stir it together 'til it tells the story of its own
Let's make some soup cause the weather is turning cold

Pumpkin and parsnip, carrots and turkey bones
Bay leaf and pepper, potato and garlic cloves
You stir a moment while I put more wood in the stove
Let's make some soup 'cause the weather is turning cold

Moon's almost full and the candles are burning low
It's almost midnight you wouldn't even know
The light gets reflected on freshly fallen snow
Let's make some soup cause the weather is turning cold

We'll make enough to feed everyone we know
We'll make enough to feed everyone we don't
No one is different and everyone's alone
Let's make some soup cause the weather is turning cold

Let's make some soup because everyone feels the cold
Let's make some soup cause the weather is turning cold

Almost a full moon
almost a full moon
almost a full moon
almost a full moon

Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run, run, run...

Watership Down by Richard Adams

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Younger daughter, who is on the autistic spectrum, needed a novel for her independent reading project, so I googled "middle school books" and up came Watership Down which I'd never got around to reading. Perfect, I thought. It's about animals, which younger daughter adores, and there's a well-reviewed animated film which will provide badly-needed visuals for her very concrete-thinking mind.

In preparation for helping her get this read over the Christmas holidays, I downloaded an audio version from our public library, and listened to it on bus commutes. Ralph Cosgrove's narration is lively and doesn't distract the listener from the story. I particularly enjoyed his portrayal of Kehaar the gull as a straight-talking Scandinavian. Three things you need to know about this novel: it's gripping; it's dated; it's looooong.

Adams tells us in the forward that the novel came out of stories he would tell his young daughters on lengthy car rides. Apparently, it was the girls who suggested the stories were good enough to be written down. I can see why. This is the epic tale of a group of rabbits, led by the heroic and self-effacing hero Hazel, who flee their warren on the basis of the mystical warnings of Hazel's psychic brother Fiver. Their journey to establish a new rabbit colony in Watership Down in Hampshire is dangerous and full of death-defying deeds. (I trust it isn't a spoiler to say that surprisingly few rabbits die during the course of this novel.)

Dated? Well, it was published in 1972, and despite the fact that Adams was writing these stories for his daughters, all the main characters are male. We get a hint of heroism from the doe-rabbit Hyzenthlay who helps in the escape from the oppressive warren Efrafa, but she barely figures in the story and few of the other does are even given names. It is clear that Hazel and his fellow-bucks expect little from the female rabbits except for breeding purposes. Adams includes a rather quaint apologetic passage explaining that rabbits are practical and not romantic by nature -- as if the attitudes of the males in the story somehow differs from the attitudes of men of Adams' generation. (Adams' military background is very evident throughout.)

That said, it's an entertaining and clever book, but it does go on, including four or five rabbit legends which, although illuminating, break up and slow down the narrative. It's going to be tough going over Christmas. I wonder if younger daughter will ever forgive me.

View all my reviews

Qu'est-ce c'est? (Fa-fa-fa-fah, fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fah...)

This morning, my Friend With Whom I Have Coffee turned up on my doorstep to whisk me away to select our Christmas tree from the Byward Market. (I am known throughout her van as the woman who can pick a tree in under five minutes. And that usually includes paying for it.)

FWWIHC knew our dog was a veteran of francophone homes and as she stepped over our threshold, bathed our new pet with caresses and endearments Québécoises. We had been told by the Humane Society that the dog responded more readily to French commands. We had noticed no such thing over the past week (the Resident Fan Boy being reasonably conversant en français), but, judging from the joyful tail-wagging and shivering, it became painfully clear -- we have opened our home and hearts to an accent snob:

Madame! Sauvez-moi des têtes carrées!!

Ungrateful brute.

Poop post

I have gone on record as stating that I have little patience with those who refer to their pets as their "furry children". I have children. I have never locked them in the house with food on the floor while I went out for a few hours.

Now I'm a dog-owner, I'm being inundated with emails, flyers and pamphlets addressing me as a "pet-parent". Puhleese.

I'll tell you, though, there is one particular parallel between caring for babies and caring for dogs: you find yourself thinking about in-put and out-put a lot. Particularly the output.

I'm not quite sure when it became mandatory in Canada for owners to pick up dog droppings, but this occurred after the last time I owned a dog, when I was very much younger. We just walked the dog, and, uh, left his leavings. In the interim, after poop-scooping became the rule, I would come upon dog-droppings and shake my head: Another irresponsible owner. Shouldn't be allowed. Doesn't deserve to have animals.

I came up against the hard (well, rather gooey) reality about this time a week ago when I took our newly-adopted canine for his first walk after the interminable ride home from the humane society. He made a beeline (dog-line?) for a neighbour's garden and did his business in a pile of dead leaves. I realized that I couldn't possibly locate what he'd done in the dark and shamefacedly skulked off into the night. I've resolved this problem by being the one who does the daytime walks. The Resident Fan Boy, who is a bit more O/C about this matter, has been out more than once with a flashlight, searching for the contents for the little blue bag.

And rather like when we had babies, we quickly got over our queasiness, and I find myself, along with my fellow neighbourhood dog-walkers, making the rounds with the dog pulling on the lead in my one hand, while the other clutches the little bag, which means I find I have to ignore any itches on my nose until I can get home to flush the thing. The past week has been full of little discoveries like these.

Children grow up to be toilet-trained voters if one does one's job. It seems, however, that this is unlikely to be the case with a dog. So, I'll pass on the title of "pet-parent", thank-you. I'll also refrain from writing on this topic again, for which you may possibly thank me.

Oblivious (write of passage number twenty-three)

I could hear her long before I saw her, the steady and inane chatter of someone on a phone in transit: "OH HI!....I'M ON A BUS...YEAH, WHAT'S YOU UP TO?...."

When I rose to make my way to the exit, I found my way blocked by the usual crowd of people who cling to the space near the exits. One was a stocky woman, shopping bags slung on her arms, both hands gripping the bars on either side of the door. She had her head severely tilted to one side, gripping her cell phone between her ear and her shoulder, her eyes fixed in the middle distance, talking incessantly.

As we reached our stop, I managed to trade places with one young fella, so that I was standing at yakking lady's shoulder. The door opened and someone stepped down. The woman's arm dropped but she had not moved, so I nudged into the narrow space between her and the door.

"I'M GETTING OFF AT THIS STOP, SO YOU DON'T NEED TO PUSH," declared Yakking Lady over her shoulder as she clambered out. She proceeded up the flights of stairs, keeping up the commentary into the phone, with periodic backward glares at me. When I got to the bridge over the station, I watched her toddling off down the road and into the evening, cell-phone glued to her ear, packages swaying, possibly regaling her listener about the pushy woman on the bus. (The nerve.)

Wake me up before you nonny-nonny

Watching David Tennant and Catherine Tate in a filmed performance of Much Ado About Nothing downloaded to my computer is a bit like the live-stream videos of the Sunday services at my mother's church. Now there's something I never thought I'd be saying.

See, last week word came from DT fan sources that last summer's West End production of MAAN at Wyndham's Theatre would be available on DVD come February. Almost immediately, Amazon.co.uk seemed to back-pedal, announcing it wasn't happening just yet. Then word came through Doctor Who channels that this production is available now for downloading. You have to install something called Digital Theatre (DT - nice symmetry, wot?), and the downloading process takes more than four hours. Mind you, my computer is a bit of a dinosaur -- the programmes on it are almost two years old -- so that may be at the root of what ensued.

When I finally completed all this and settled down to watch, I found the images beautifully defined -- when the actors don't move much. Unfortunately, this production involves plenty of physical comedy, a revolving stage, and gyrating to eighties-style pop. When this happens, the images tend to freeze and jerk, and often the speech isn't quite synchronized to the moving lips. As I said, it's rather like the live stream of Unitarian church services in Victoria, which tends to freeze every time the camera pans or the congregation rises to sing a hymn. When the actors are still, they are beautifully visible, though; if you want to feast your eyes on Tennant's stubble and Tate's mole, you can do so. The audio, likewise, is crystal clear.

Anyway, it took me the first half hour to get over the distraction of the flashing and freezing and get into the story.

I've probably seen more productions of Much Ado About Nothing than any other Shakespeare play, although I've never sat down and done a tabulation. It is the one play I've seen at Stratford-upon-Avon (set in the British Raj with a line of Indian guards bellowing: "Stap in the niem of the Prince!"). It is a fine play, a rollicking play, but I actually have more difficulty with it than I do with The Taming of the Shrew or even The Merchant of Venice. This is because I find it hard to concentrate on the humour when, like Beatrice, I want to kill Claudio.

I wrote about a Company of Fools production of MAAN a couple of years ago which dealt with the problem of the Hero-and-Claudio plot by making both wronged Hero and cloddish, self-righteous Claudio attractive airheads. It worked very well. After all, why else would they end up married at the end of the play after Claudio has shamed Hero at their first attempted wedding on the flimsiest of evidence, unless both parties were not all that bright?

Tennant and Tate's version puts heavy emphasis on the rage of the wronged family: the reactions of Beatrice, Leonato, Ursula, and finally, Benedict to Claudio's (and the Prince's) appalling behaviour and lack of remorse. There still remains the problem of restoring the Prince and Claudio back to the status of "good guys", so we get to see Claudio go into paroxysms of grief in a vigil for the supposedly dead Hero with the aid of a bottle of whiskey, a ghetto-blaster and a pistol. He doesn't use the latter because he catches a brief glimpse of Hero whom he presumably mistakes for a ghost before the Prince arrives to escort him to his wedding to Hero's "cousin" (who turns out to be Hero herself, of course). It still doesn't quite work, but it's a nice try.

Things I liked about the production:

1) The neat conceit of paralleling Hero in this eighties-flavoured show with the late Diana, Princess of Wales, right down to her wedding dress. Too bad they didn't find a jug-eared actor to play Claudio.

2) The predicaments in which Benedict and Beatrice find themselves as they eavesdrop on their friends' staged conversations about their passion for each other. Benedict gets tangled up with cans of paint, and Beatrice is hoisted aloft by the seat of her pants (although the harness is clearly visible).

3) The serious scenes following Hero's shaming at her own wedding. I found myself, despite the technical distractions of this download, getting totally absorbed in events and believed, for the first time, that there was indeed a deep connection between Benedict and Beatrice. There was a truth there that simply hadn't been in the comedy which, coming from performances by Tennant and Tate, surprises me. Maybe they did too good a job of eighties shallow.

4) Elliot Levey's portrayal of the villainous Don John. This is a fiendishly difficult role to pull off because Don John is supposed to be a thoroughly unlikeable chap. He's shown here as being rather socially inept and it's clear that his princely brother Don Pedro loathes him. This rescues him from the second dimension and makes his actions more understandable.

On the downside, the director and Catherine Tate evidently decided to give Beatrice an awkward side. When Don Pedro suggests marriage, and when Benedict declares himself to her, Tate dissolves into odd vocalizations and hyperventilation. I can see what they were aiming for, but I found it more grating than humanizing and it rather spoiled my favourite line in the play (and possibly in all of Shakespeare), when Don Pedro comments that she was born in a merry hour and she replies: No, sure, my lord, my mother cried; but then there was a star danced, and under that was I born. In a flash of lyrical poignancy, we get the measure of Beatrice, but I think it was lost here.

I also didn't care much for Tennant's and Tate's more obvious playing to the audience. I'm sure it was far more amusing for those actually there, but it leaves us poor schmucks who couldn't come up with the airfare to London out in the cold.

All in all? It's good fun, but I feel I'm missing a lot due to the technical difficulties of this download and I really hope this is released to DVD soon.

They did the Christmas Mash...

Followers of this blog (a small and discerning group) may have noticed that I have a bit of an irritation going, on the topic of songs about winter being called "Christmas Carols" -- when they're neither. Vancouver's musica intima (they go for the lower case) may have found a way around this:



Mind you, we'd always shout: "Like a flashlight!" then "Like a lightbulb"; and we said "Monopoly" instead of "Basketball"....



Ya gotta love the YouTube commenters who have never heard of "Once in Royal David's City". Bless. It's not quite such a tradition on this side of the Atlantic ocean unless you have British parents, or are Anglican.

Psychology lab

Way back in the dark ages, children, if you wanted a dog, you went down to the SPCA, picked a dog and brought him home. You fed him, played with him, left him in the house or tied up outside if you had to go out. You didn't buy him coats and booties, you didn't spend hours crate-training him, and you certainly didn't send him Christmas and birthday cards.

We put in our application with the Ottawa Humane Society just under a year ago. There's a multiple-choice form you fill out, which you are encouraged to answer keeping your "ideal dog" in mind. We soon found out that you need to think of a "less-than-ideal" dog, otherwise you won't be considered a candidate for any of their animals. Strikes against us: we live in a semi-detached without a fenced yard; we don't have a car, we lack recent canine experience (the Resident Fan Boy and I last had dogs in our adolescent years); and we made the mistake of ticking "non-shedding" (well, they said "ideal") and apparently that sort of creature rarely shows up at a shelter. We also don't jog, which seems to be the criteria for several of the more active breeds there.

After our application ran out twice, we resubmitted it last fall and broadened our parameters considerably. We saw dogs everywhere, being walked by people who apparently were far worthier of dog ownership than we. Perhaps everyone in New Edinburgh purchases their dogs through puppy mills?

Last Thursday, a co-worker, a hard-core animal-fan whose dog lives in her car while she's at work so she can walk him during breaks, encouraged the RFB to try for a ten-year-old lab cross. His profile (the pooch's, that is) indicated that he was afraid of riding in cars. We'd hoped for a younger specimen, but heck, we're car-free and this was a medium-sized dog, short-haired and not small and yappy, so we decided that, after eleven and a half months, it was now or possibly never.

Dog-crazy co-worker offered to drive us out to the Humane Society which, in the past year, has moved from its accessible quarters near Dow Lake to an isolated crescent way the hell off Hunt Club Road, a half-hour hike from any bus stops. With the Friday evening traffic, it took the better part of an hour to drive out there, even though the RFB and DCC had left work at three-thirty.

Once arrived, we went through another long vetting process. We were required to read the dog's full profile, which included a report from a recent month-long fostering. Then we had to wait for an available staff member to bring the dog out to meet us. We followed a strict protocol: a long greeting session, followed by a walk outside on the AstroTurf, then a play session in a small room. All during this process, we were giving a dizzying list of tips, including never saying goodbye and not greeting him effusively on home-comings to allay separation anxiety. Oh. Okay...

Then the staff member was required to remove the dog back to his holding room while we made the decision.

By this time, we'd been there well over an hour and our kindly ride was now late for a dinner being given in her honour for her fiftieth birthday. (We hadn't known this.)

"He's very thorough," I offered, apologetically.
"He's slow," she scoffed. "The other guides don't take this long," She purchased a large bag of dog food and assisted me in picking out a collar, lead, and (gulp) crate, probably to speed us along as much as anything. Meanwhile, our thorough (slow) staff member was typing up the forms on the word processor -- with one finger...

Finally, we bundled our canine companion into the back seat between younger daughter and me and yes, he really hated the car ride, all thirty minutes of it, whining piteously and only stopping for red lights and heavy traffic. (Sandy Hill was closed off, if you please, by police monitoring the demonstrations at the Congolese Embassy.) During the final five minutes, the dog made a dive for the very back and thrashed around a bit. We arrived, and I quickly escorted him indoors. Our ride had made her escape by the time we'd completed a lightening tour of the house.

On the first night, we discovered that Labradors chew. Our duvet will never be quite the same. By the third night, we discovered this dog is obsessive about marking the boundaries of his territory, and the Resident Fan Boy was a whiter shade of pale from fretting and lost sleep, blaming DCC for "pressuring" him into adoption. He seemed to have a particular horror of this dog-gone fella piddling and pooping in the house.

I pointed out that our new family member did not bite, kept the barking to the occasional mild woof, and, best of all, waited quietly in his crate for us to return from two (2) plays over the weekend. (We'd bought the tickets before we had any idea we were imminent dog-owners.) As for the occasional accident, hadn't his boyhood pet ever messed in the house? No, declared the RFB stoutly, but admitted that, since the said sainted pooch had joined his household when the RFB was but a pup himself, he doesn't have any real memories of actually training her. My bet is, his mother, a farm-girl from Alberta and rector's wife to boot, did all the dirty work. (She usually did.) At my childhood home, the rule was, whoever discovered deposits and/or puddles had to clean them up, the result being that stuff would sit around for days. My late mother-in-law wouldn't have been a bit surprised.

This evening, we're at the seventy-two-hour mark. The Resident Fan Boy seems to have spent most of his day swapping doggy tales at the office. Younger daughter has banned our new friend from her room because he makes off with the long dis-used items in her toy basket, but greets him joyfully on her return from school. Me? All of a sudden, I have way less time, but this seems to be forcing me to do things without dithering. And my pedometer is looking impressive.

The best moment of all was elder daughter's face when she saw the lithe black form on Skype. When she was eight, she did an oil painting for art lessons entitled "Dream of Having a Dog". We've hidden it in the basement all these years, possibly to spare our late cat's feelings.

Let's see how well the Resident Fan Boy sleeps tonight...

Kalamazoo-zoo-zoo-zoo-zoo-zu-zoo-zu-zu-zu-zooo

Must go to bed. Might tell you why tomorrow. In the meantime, you've heard of Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, but did you ever hear of the fabulous Nicholas Brothers? Watch and learn....

Take joy

It's not Christmas yet, but it's bearing down upon us. This has been an extraordinarily stressful weekend. Not sad, depressing, or hopeless. Just a weekend of great change about which I will write.

But not yet.

I found this famous prayer long ago and liked it so much that I made copies to stick in with my Christmas gifts in that distant year. Demeter still has her copy on her fridge, because it's not just for Christmas:

Fra Giovanni’s Christmas Prayer
I salute you! There is nothing I can give you which you have not; but there is much that, while I cannot give, you can take.

No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today. Take Heaven.

No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in the present moment. Take Peace.

The gloom of the world is but a shadow; behind it, yet within our reach is joy. Take Joy!

And so, at this Christmas time, I greet you, with the prayer that for you, now and forever, the day breaks and the shadows flee away.

And it's a little early for the following, as well, but I'm ready for it, even if I have written only six Christmas cards. It's beautiful, and I love the exhortation: "And therefore, be you merry/ Rejoice and be you merry/ Set sorrow aside. . . .":