Beth Kaplan's Blog, page 11

A romantic surprise

The loveliest day of the year today, so far – 20 degrees with saffron and tangerine leaves falling. Everyone was out in my ‘hood looking at the absurd Hallowe’en decorations, giant skeletons, monsters, and ghosts all over the place. Riverdale Farm was crawling with families, there for the Boo Barn.

A magical event yesterday. I met John at the Y a decade ago at least. When I learned he was vice-president of a finance company, I asked his advice, saying, You speak money and I don’t. He explained things to me and has helped both me and Sam with our taxes ever since. John volunteers for all kinds of things and is a kind and generous soul. I sensed he wasn’t happy in his longterm marriage and wasn’t surprised when he separated. And then, a few years ago, he had a girlfriend. When he invited me to a birthday party he was throwing for her Saturday night, I almost didn’t go, thinking, I won’t know anyone. I went and didn’t until Carole and James, also Y friends, arrived. Met John’s lovely Brazilian girlfriend Vanessa.

I couldn’t get over the spread – a very fancy setup with tons of exotic food and sweets, a bartender for drinks, vases of flowers on every surface. And then John made an announcement: he and Vanessa were going to get married, right then and there, in the living room! We all gasped. Vanessa walked in; she’d changed into a white satin dress. An officiant who spoke Portuguese appeared, and the bilingual ceremony was on. They spoke vows to each other, we toasted with champagne – it was so moving. Beautiful. Two people find each other and make each other happy. What’s not to like? I said to the crowd, John is one of the world’s good men. So needed, especially now.

Have been doing a lot of editing. As a friend pointed out, it’s good to have work but it takes away from my own writing. Yes, it does. But I love doing it. Was at a book club a few days ago to talk about Midlife Solo. Nice things continued: someone wrote about listening to the audiobook of Loose Woman: “I’ve spent a good part of the week listening to you tell me the story of your life in that warm distinct voice of yours. It is an extraordinary piece of work. I found it incredibly moving, so tender, funny at times, at times painful, intimate, remarkably brave and uninhibited, and so full of insight and wisdom, honesty and of course love. And did I mention the wonderfully vivid descriptions of people and places and…food. I am in awe really. Very few people in the world could do what you have done. It will live with me for a very long time.”

Nice Things indeed! Thank you very much, kind listener.

Busy promoting So True next Sunday and The Giants November 18; rehearsing the So True readers in person or on Zoom; editing for several people. Still winterizing, though it feels like spring out there. But we know it’s a temporary glimpse of bliss. Just finished an entertaining, well-written book, Impossible City: Paris in the 21st Century, by Simon Kuper. He says, “There is a right way to do everything in Paris, and it was probably decided before you were born. If you overlay an intellectual capital on an artistic and fashion capital in a former royal capital, all of it in the country that invented how to eat, the result is a civilization so highly evolved as to require its own user manual. Paris abounds in behavioural codes.” And he proceeds to break that down, and point out how critical the French are as a result of a very critical, demanding education system. Helped me understand my friends there.

Tomorrow, 23 degrees, feeling like 26. Easy to shut out what’s happening on the planet, for a day or two. A blessing.

Mazel tov, John and Vanessa. I wish many years of happiness to you both.

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Nice Things #4396

Good news: We only need to sell a few more tickets and The Giants is a go for November 18. So it’s definitely a go. I hope to sell lots more tickets than necessary, because everyone should see this beautiful, inspiring film.

Writer friend Judy sent me this very welcome picture of the five books she bought to give to friends. Thank you!

A writing student just wrote: “I shared one of your articles with my son and daughter-in-law. They are expecting their first baby and getting tremendous pressure (not from me) to move out of their apartment in their beloved city neighbourhood to the burbs. Your piece about apartment living, raising kids in the city and affordable housing was a perfect fit right now, along with their dislike of Doug Ford and his policies.”

Which means a lot, because the myth that Canadian children MUST have a backyard is fiercely ingrained. It drives me crazy that families think they have to move way to hell and gone to get a tiny patch of green and an endless polluting commute, instead of staying in the city. Not to mention the pure gem-like flame of hatred I feel for Doug Ford, who is dragging us back to the fifties – besides slaughtering trees for a spa, now outlawing new bike lanes. Disgusting. Hatred.

That article from the Toronto Star is on this website under, yes it’s true, Articles. Feel free to send to relatives feeling pressured to move to the burbs. Hell no, you should not go!

A current writing student just wrote: “I am so happy I sought you out. I am getting so much out of this course. There is so much I didn’t know I didn’t know. Hearing other people’s work really does help me with my own.”

Love to hear it.

Okay, enough nice things. While I gloat, the world is disintegrating, along with Trump’s brain and American democracy. Terrifying. For comfort, we had Thanksgiving here, also Sam’s 40th birthday. I got ready to bake the sour milk chocolate cake my mother used to make for me. Poured some vinegar into a cup of milk and watched it curdle, then went to do some errands, and when I returned, the milk, sour as it was, was mostly gone. My cat is wicked.

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Who’s the shrunken old woman beside that handsome 40-year-old man? I used to think of myself as fairly tall! Ha! Also at Thanksgiving, the boys were sent off with markers to draw birthday cards for Uncle Sam. They returned covered with marker themselves — tattoos, like their uncle. Sigh.

Very busy still. Tonight, speaking at a book club about Midlife Solo. Tomorrow, beginning rehearsals on Zoom for the So True readers – So True is coming up on Sunday Oct. 27 –  plus meeting with a writing client who needs help with her admission essays for Harvard, something new for me and very interesting. Friday, I meet with an old friend whose 300-page novel I’m critiquing. Plus new requests for coaching coming in. I like it, even if it all means constant sitting in this chair.

A lot of time, too, preparing for winter: plants to wash off and bring in and settle somewhere, the clothing switch to continue. I’m furious several of my best sweaters are graced with small holes that I’ll have to try to mend. Moths are also wicked. Several friends are sick, but I, for once, am not. Luckily. No time for that nonsense.

This came up on my phone — a reminder of the peaceful retreat that my mother’s little condo near Bradenton Beach used to be for us in Florida. Bradenton Beach was the epicentre of the hurricanes. That little boy is now as tall as I am. And covered with marker.

Great memories. Moving on.

PS Had posted but then this just came in. One more Nice Thing, from a friend’s aunt who was given Midlife Solo as a gift.

Thank you, universe. 

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The Giants, the YMCA, Wonderful Joe: busy days

So much going on! Hardly slept last night, so much whirling in my head. Mostly, I’d just received word that my application to sponsor the film The Giants is going ahead. It will be shown on Monday November 18th if I can sell at least 35 tickets by November 7. So I was preoccupied with that at 4 a.m. It’s such a powerful, moving, beautiful, and inspiring film; I hope lots of people see it. Please see my post a few days ago about it, and if possible, buy a ticket and join us!

https://tickets.demand.film/event/13094

I wrote to my Vancouver friend Colin Thomas about it, and he is sponsoring a viewing there also on Nov. 18. So, West Coasters, you can see it too. It’s a good cause — our one and only planet.

But also, yesterday was quite a day. I was at the Y by 11, in a dress for the first time in what feels like years. And tights! For the 40th anniversary celebration of the Metro Central YMCA, a place that’s central to my life, as for many others. I’d been asked to be the M.C. and to talk about what the Y meant to me, which I did — in summary, it’s not just a workout place, it’s a building filled with good people who value community. And what a community; my runfit friends sat together and were overjoyed when Brian arrived, once a regular who’s not been back since Covid and the death of his wife. It was a grand celebration.

And then I was at the Arts and Letters Club by 6, to introduce my writing client Sheila Waengler at the launch of her first book, Growing Up in Toronto the Good. Sheila is 95, born in 1929, and as I said in my talk, she is a force of nature — phenomenal.

So that was a two speech day, which is a first. No wonder I was jazzed.

On Wednesday Kathleen came to visit; we were roommates, with one other, in my first apartment in Ottawa when I moved out of home for good at just 18. We had a two story three bedroom apartment above an Italian family for $120 a month — $40 each. She has lived in Montreal for many years so we’ve not seen each other often; it was good to reconnect. She was in Toronto to see Ronnie Burkett’s latest play Wonderful Joe, so she came here for dinner first and we went together.

Why do my eyes disappear when I smile? Sheesh.

Burkett’s work is an extraordinary thing to witness: he creates an army of detailed, lifelike puppets, writes the script, and voices and moves them on his own, one man creating a world. This one is a story of gentrification destroying lives, almost all of them gay. It’s wonderful, imaginative work.

I’ve been watching the next season of Slow Horses when I can squeeze in the time — two more episodes to go. It’s a treat, very entertaining although I have absolutely no idea what’s going on, who is chasing and trying to kill whom and why. I had to Google to try to figure it out. And out there, Hurricane Milton, which took out much of Anna Maria Island where Mum had a condo, albeit on the second floor. Devastating pictures. I’m glad she isn’t here to fret.

Today, the boys had a PD day; Anna had to work and asked if I’d take them. It was such a lovely day, we went out to the Beach to see Annie. And what a day. We flew a kite, they played soccer and wrestled in the sand while Annie and I sat up high on the lifeguard stand and talked — “My grandsons are feral,” I told her — then we had burgers at the outdoor café and more playing in the sand. The kind of blissful day we won’t forget, since the cold is hovering; I turned the furnace on yesterday.

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Things settle now, though still busy, after such a quiet summer. Better too much than too little, at least, sometimes. And now, another episode of Slow Horses, which will speed by while this slow horse tries to catch up.

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The Ontario Conservative government – unforgivable!

Two days ago, under cover of darkness, the provincial government cut down over 800 mature trees near the waterfront at Ontario Place. This desecration, this massacre, the cruel and venal stupidity are beyond belief. All for a luxury spa owned by a Belgian company. And to encourage everyone to drive there, in case there’s not enough gridlock near the water, we taxpayers will pay for thousands of parking spaces.

Takes my breath away with rage and sorrow. And on the world stage, much worse — brutality, horror, war, starvation, destruction. Men, out of control.

Okay, my anger and despair do no good. I loved Helen Humphrey’s beautiful Followed by the Lark, an exploration of the life of Henry David Thoreau, who lived close to nature and never stopped relishing and observing. He too suffered from the brutality around him, the cutting down of trees, the slaughter of animals and birds; as he died, the American Civil War had just begun. Each generation has its horrors, its loathsome, destructive fools, but also its blessings. I’ll focus on the latter.

Which includes our surreal October that continues hot and bright. I just went to buy one last bottle of rosé; I only drink rosé when it’s warm outside, and it still is, so lovely, so welcoming.

The coleus in Riverdale Park is dazzling. My cat sleeps on a throw rug in a patch of sun. My stomach heaves when I think … but I will try not to. Nap time. I’ll go curl up beside her, in the sun.

Oh –  and the raccoons left a message on my deck cushion, to let me know they’re doing just fine.

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The Giants: a must see

I’m ashamed to say that when my friend Ruth invited me to go on a senior’s march for the climate today, Tuesday, I sighed. A tiny, useless gesture, I thought. And then last night I went to see a film sponsored by the David Suzuki Foundation. It’s called The Giants, and it – as they say – blew me away.

It’s about the life of an extraordinary man, Dr. Bob Brown, an Australian eco-activist, Green leader, and the sort of great human being we need to protect our planet. He’s idealistic but realistic, kind but tough, and he rallied the troops to save a river and then vast swaths of landscape about to be pillaged by lumber barons and mining companies. It’s gruelling work; we see how often he’s arrested and taken to jail, always polite, because many in his family, including his father, are police officers. He’s insulted and shunned over and over, especially because as well as being an activist far ahead of his time, he’s gay at a time when homosexuality was illegal. But he never gives up.

David Suzuki is often heard interviewed in the film; his love for and knowledge about trees and soil is, as always, infectious and inspiring. Afterwards, he spoke in the lobby to admirers, including me, about environmental degradation leading to a huge increase in cancers, how money controls everything in our western world without regard for the future — “You can’t eat money,” is the song that ends the film — and how he worries the environmental movement in Canada has been too timid.

As we left the cinema and he and Tara went out into the mad swirl of Yonge-Dundas Square, I thanked them again for their work trying to save the earth. And David said, “Your father was my hero. I loved him.” Tears in my eyes, and a renewed determination to tell Dad’s story so others can meet him too.

It won’t surprise you to know that I’ll be on that march today. But also, I want everyone, locally at least, to see this inspiring, powerful, and extremely beautiful film. I’ve applied to sponsor a screening, possibly in late November or in January — specifics anon. If I can sell enough tickets, Demand Films will show it again. My first activist activity.

Adding this to my tiny list of Things To Do.

I was in the same cinema on Saturday to see One Hand Clapping, a less serious but also stirring film about Paul McCartney and his band Wings in the studio in 1973, recording an album. What’s breathtaking is the sheer musicality of the man, his genius, his joy; the music pours out of him, it’s almost insufferable, so much talent. And there’s his wife Linda, singing backup and banging the piano. How many rockstars record with their wives? Another stellar human being.

Bob Brown, David, and Tara have worked tirelessly to induce respect for the natural world. Macca brought and still brings joy to millions. Thank you to them all from a grateful citizen of this embattled planet.

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I’m a Yuval Noah Harari fan girl

Dinner last night at Pho Asia, way across town, with two spectacular human beings who happen to be closely related to me, and to each other. As I just posted on FB, these two kind and funny human beings, believe it or not, share 100% of their DNA. Many people look like their siblings. My offspring do not — one a six-foot-eight red-blonde with all my mother’s British/Viking genes, and the other five-foot-five, a dark-haired social justice warrior with all my father’s Jewish ones. One of the things I’m happiest about in my life: that these two love and care for each other, a gift that will last beyond my lifetime.

And then they went back to their busy lives, and I to the Black Box Theatre almost next door, to see George F. Walker’s new play Girls Unwanted, directed by him. It’s a tiny theatre and they sat me in the front row so I was nearly on the set, and a fabulously detailed set it was; I wanted to borrow some of the books. I’m glad Walker is still writing, decades after he was one of the kickstarters of Canadian theatre. But I have to say that this play was unremittingly grim, with rage and screaming and not much redemption – though Walker does show us that the one supposedly “normal” character in the play, from a family with a mother and father and a home, is still wounded.

I know the lives of our abandoned or neglected street children are horrendous. And now I’ve seen some of their tragedies played out a foot from me.

Tonight, a movie about Paul McCartney and Wings making an album. There will be music. I suspect it will make me happy.

Listened to Oliver Burkeman’s webinar about productivity — actually, about NOT forcing ourselves into productivity — while doing the Big Switch in my bedroom from summer to winter clothes. I know the minute I do that, we’ll have a spate of hot weather and I’ll have to dig some lightweight stuff out again — in fact, yesterday was hot, and lots of people were downtown wearing shorts. I note the big style thing for young women is extremely short shorts with high boots — very practical. Taking an Uber home, I marvelled with the driver at the crowds on King, Dundas, and College, thousands of people out, dining on the street, strolling, gathering, noise, music, laughter. “It’s Friday night,” he said. “They need to let off steam.” There are places in the city where it looks like no-one is over the age of 35. I don’t know how it works, but sometimes, despite the dunderheads running this province who are doing their best to destroy everything good about this city, it does.

The driver told me he delivers mail from 9 to 5 and drives an Uber from 6 to 12. Immigrants, keeping us all going. He also said he hoped Donald Trump got back in because the world was better off under him. “There were no wars, like now.” Ye gods. Speaking of controversial opinions, as you know, I watch the crabby and sometimes very annoying Bill Maher, and yesterday, he had on one of my favourite people on earth, Yuval Noah Harari. He knows so much and is so articulate, so terrifying in the clarity with which he sees the world — that never before AI, for example, have we humans invented something that’s “an agent, not a tool,” which can make its own decisions and may eventually take over, that needs to be regulated right now.

World, let’s listen to a wise, knowledgeable man for once, shall we?

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Helen Humphreys and “Followed by the Lark”

Gorgeous summer weather over for now, it’s damp and gloomy out, though still mild. I am officially clear of Covid, have tested negative twice. Woo hoo! Life returns to these old bones. Just a quick word today.

My friend and former student Pearl took this during the WOTS webinar. Lovely sunset. Jabbering woman.

Rode to the Toronto International Festival of Authors — love that name — at Harbourfront on sunny Sunday, to hear Kyle Wyatt interview one of my favourite writers, Helen Humphreys. She has the most diverse subjects and styles of any writer I know — heavily researched nonfiction, memoir, novels. The talk was about her new novel, Followed by the Lark, which imagines the life of Henry David Thoreau, American naturalist of Walden Pond fame. She spoke about reading the million words of his diaries, and the words of others at that time, including his neighbour and mentor Emerson. I asked her during the question period how she discovers, from such an eclectic range, the subjects she’s going to devote countless hours of research to, and if she’d ever started on one and abandoned it. The answers were obvious: yes, occasionally, and – something sparks her imagination and won’t let go until she does something about it. Like all writers.

She told us her next book is about her grandfather, who wanted to become a novelist but did not, and how she wonders if she inherited his trauma — his deep need to write that was never fulfilled. It’s about epigenetics, she said. Since I too will be writing about a family member and inherited traits, I found that fascinating. Am very much enjoying the book. She’s a beautiful writer, and she models the most important lesson for writers: pay attention to everything.

Yesterday my dear friend Tara, one of the most interesting, accomplished women on earth, came to lunch. Her husband was in New York at a meeting of the “Planetary Guardians,” a vitally important group that sounds like something out of a sci-fi novel. She came at 12.30 and we didn’t stop talking until 5.30. I apologized for the spaghetti sauce, made on Sunday out of my tomatoes but which I wasn’t sure tasted very good, since on Sunday I couldn’t taste much. And still can’t. She said it was good, to my relief. We covered just about every world and personal issue in five hours, including being mothers to daughters and Alice Munro. The fate of feminism. World affairs. Much much more. Loved it.

I want to go to St. John’s Bakery, am desperate for their bread after a week without, but it’s raining. Phooey. The one disadvantage of bike riding – it’s hard to do in bad weather.

I just counted. So far, from now till mid-December, I have tickets already for five plays, a film, and a concert (Angela Hewitt at Hugh’s Room, ten minutes away. Yay!) I’m going to two book launches, one memorial event, and three birthday parties, including my son’s fortieth here. I’m speaking and MCing at an anniversary event at the Y, attending three book club discussions of my book in person or on Zoom, and producing my So True reading event on Oct. 27 with eight edited and rehearsed readers and myself. Plus teaching the U of T and home classes, editing privately including a 350-page document that just arrived, trying occasionally to practice the piano and get to the Y, to read many books, magazines, newspapers, and online sites, to produce a Substack essay every two weeks, and to put out a chronicle every few days to you. Oh, and every so often, to eat. Oh, and at some point — when oh when?? — to start my own new heavily researched book.

It’s enough.

I said this to my son after this year’s successful crop, and he decided to turn it into a meme, or whatever this is, for Instagram. Beware what you say to the media savvy with a sense of humour!

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Life resumes, and Dear Audrey, and Place

“You certainly are a magnet,” said my friend Ken today, “for bronchial bugs.” Yes, I am indeed. No idea why. Quit smoking in 1991, eat pretty well, work out every so often, etc. But over and over, they get me.

Getting better, however – almost human today. I was desperate for good bread and cheese and Tangelos, so put on my strongest mask and went to No Frills and the Epicure; it’s been five days with this thing, I don’t have a fever, and I need to eat. The isolation and enforced solitude are hard, although the internet helps. I’ve been able to work just fine. Last night’s webinar for Word on the Street was a particular thrill; they’d set the maximum participation at 50, and when they reached that, set it again at 70, and reached that. In the end, over 40 people actually attended, apparently more than they expected. People register but don’t come.

I’d done my vocal and physical warmup and had my lemon honey tea and lozenges nearby. This is when acting training really helps, and I sailed through. My only complaint is that it could have been much longer; there were a ton of questions we didn’t get to. Thank you, WOTS and the Chang School, for giving me yet another opportunity to mouth off about memoir.

The other day I had the pleasure of watching an NFB film, Dear Audrey. It caught my eye because it’s about Martin Duckworth, cameraman and documentary producer, son of Muriel Duckworth, a phenomenal Quaker peace activist and feminist, far ahead of her time. The Duckworths were good friends of my activist parents; Muriel stayed with my mother when she visited Ottawa and then Edmonton. I adored her and was a guest at one of her hundredth birthday parties — there were three, in different places — where she was as cheerful and indefatigable as ever.

The film is a profoundly moving chronicle of Martin, in his eighties, as caregiver to his third wife, photographer Audrey who has Alzheimer’s, and one of their children, Jacqueline, who’s autistic. It’s the portrait of a good man caring for a good woman with the deepest love and patience — the kind of lovingkindness we desperately need to witness in our nasty world. The film requires you to slow down to the pace of the participants. One scene, where Martin gives his son the doctor an album of photographs of him taken by his mother, and the son breaks down, made me weep. It’s difficult to see a once vibrant, beautiful woman so diminished and vacant. Yet so well cared for, respected, loved. It’s a wonderful film. Hooray for the National Film Board!

BTW, Martin’s father Jack ran the YMCA in Halifax, so my family joined. It’s there I began my lifelong attachment to the place, so much so that recently I was asked to M.C. an event celebrating the 40th anniversary of my Y. Of course!

I’m here on the deck in this summer weather, with, at last, some food in the fridge. The sparrows are lined up to drink from the bowl on the bannister, loud chirping in the trees. So much piling up on my calendar: plays, gatherings, classes, films, talks, book launches, book clubs. So grateful. And I think of a haunting piece of writing I noted while visiting Gallery Stratford. It comes from Place, a book by my friend the photographer Geoffrey James, who, with the writer Rudy Wiebe, explored the prairies around Lethbridge. At one point, Wiebe writes:

“Two of us remain the deck overlooking the deep end of the river, the eroded cliffs and gigantic cottonwoods below, turning pale, May green thunderheads piling higher over mountains in the West.

            “It’s really not fair,” says the woman from South Africa, or is it Kosovo or Afghanistan or Sierra Leone or Cambodia or North Korea or Colombia or Bosnia or Iraq or Somalia or Palestine, or a country we have not yet heard of in Canada. This gentle woman says, “It’s not fair.”

“What?”

“You just drive us around for days over this incredible land anywhere you please, and no one stops you with machine guns hanging on their shoulders. And you never have to show papers to anyone or explain a word about where you’re going or with whom, and you come down a track to this isolated, empty house with no seven foot steel fence with electrified barbed wire along the top, or guard dogs or bars at the window, or bulletproof glass. Just birds singing while the river runs and all the trees grow.

            There’s a thunderstorm coming over there with the wind.” She laughs aloud. Her companion leads out over the balcony rail above us.

“No, it certainly is not fair,” he says, into that sudden hush before the wind bends the trees along the river below us with a roar, “to be able to live in one of the rarest places on Earth.”

            And momentarily, all around in this delicate spring, there seems to be nothing at all in the world, but weather.”

Right now, in the summer-like heat of autumn, it’s good to pretend there is nothing in all the world but birdsong and weather, in one of the rarest places on earth.

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The Covid chronicles

Stratford gave me many gifts — time with dear friends, great theatre, and a pound of dark chocolate. It also gave me Covid – perhaps contracted on the bus there or at one of the theatres. I was fine on Saturday, on Sunday morning felt I was getting a bit of a cold, by Sunday evening felt it was the flu, and on Monday morning tested positive. Apparently there’s a powerful new wave, and many have this vile bug. Yesterday I was very sick and spent much of the day like my cat, just lying around. Today, a bit better, which is good because I teach tonight. Hooray, once again, for Zoom. And that, unlike in the spring in Europe, I am sick at home.

Have had to cancel everything except the essentials — tonight’s class and the big Word on the Street webinar on Thursday, also, thank God, on Zoom. On Wednesday I’d been invited to a memorial event for Rollande Ruston, a favourite student whose book I edited, If the Rocks Could Talk, about her childhood in an isolated part of the Gaspé, like something from a hundred years ago. Her husband wrote “Rollande had great admiration for you and greatly appreciated your help in completing her memoir.” I wish I could be there to celebrate her talent, courage, and elegance. But I will not.

An important word for Canadians: if you have a radio, I urge you to listen tomorrow morning at 9 to CBC, to the second part of Matt Galloway interviewing Yuval Harari about AI. Brilliant and terrifying. It’s not a tool, he says; it’s an agent, with its own agenda, and within ten years, it’s possible it will be smarter than we are. Humans are not making the decisions for the first time; it is. He calls it not artificial intelligence, but alien intelligence. And he posited a time when, for example, a paranoid dictator could put AI in charge of his nuclear codes. Or it could cripple our financial system, far worse than previous meltdowns. My first thought was, I must dig up my entire garden to plant food. And suddenly I saw my daughter’s sense in the way she’s raising her sons, not focussing so much on what they learn in school, but what they learn to get through life.

My friend Anna in Stratford is obsessively concerned with the degradation of the environment; my daughter Anna with injustice everywhere, especially in Gaza and to our Indigenous peoples. Others, including me, with political degradation in our country and elsewhere, including you-know-where. Famine, slaughter, violence. There have always been these things; the problem is that now, we are confronted daily with all of them, all the time. I should try to shut them out sometimes. But scrolling is addictive.

However, it is yet another incredibly beautiful day here. I will go into the garden and pick beans and admire the zinnias. This has been a great year for the splashy dazzle of zinnias.

Over and out, coughing and sneezing, from Covidland.

To cheer me up, my favourite photo of Paul McCartney, dad, with his son James.

 

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Stratford report: Salesman in China, a must see

I’ve spent this entire beautiful, very hot and quiet Sunday on the computer — editing student or coaching client work, responding to the comments on the two, yes, two essays that came out today, and now writing to you. By chance, an excerpt from Midlife Solo came out on Alice Goldbloom’s Substack A Considerable Age, on the same day as my own Substack was sent out with an ecstatic description of how much I love the theatre, prompted by my trip to Stratford.

https://substack.com/@bethkaplan/p-148918823

I stayed with Tom and Anna, he an artist and she a former film producer turned environmental activist. They have a hot tub. I had dinner with Lani, who lives nearby and who hired me for a LIP grant show she was producing after seeing the very first play I was in after arriving in Vancouver in January 1975. We’ve been best friends ever since. The miracle is, we both survived our youth, she especially, a wild and crazy woman. Not now.

And as you’ll read in the essay, I saw one stunning production. It was a glorious weekend; I got to walk around town, visited the terrific Gallery Stratford, made friends with a woman who was gardening in her lush front yard — we are now exchanging photos and advice — and of course, bought dark chocolates at Rheo Thompson and a hat from the Green Room, as I always do. The bus there, the train back. I hardly looked at the news, which was a relief for a few days. At home, had hardly any food in the fridge but luckily picked a big pile of beans, chard, and tomatoes from the garden. Proud mama.

Now it’s nearly 5, wine o’clock after a day of sitting, and I need to go for a walk. So, short and sweet for today. It’s like full on summer. I haven’t watered. I haven’t begun to think of all the other things I need to do, including preparing for the Word on the Street webinar on Thursday, which is nearly sold out. Busy busy busy!

Below, the view before you enter the theatre. If only Broadway were tranquil like this! The famous theatre. Tom in his sculpture studio, surrounded by his people. The Starlight bar, owned by friends of Sam’s and THE place to be in Stratford, don’t miss it if you go.

Gone walking. A bientot.

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