Town Talk: Jammies-clad celebrants benefit Covenant House
Credit to Author: Malcolm Parry| Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2019 14:00:00 +0000
COLD COMFORT: Actors Rebecca and Todd Talbot, who met in an Arts Club staging of West Side Story, headed for Vancouver’s East Side recently to help youngsters stay on the safe side. Held in CF Interiors’ East Hastings Street showroom, the fifth annual Pillow Talk fundraiser saw now-TV-personality Todd and pyjama-clad participants reportedly raise $43,000 for Covenant House’s annual Sleep Out. That Nov. 21 event will have men and (for the first time) women raise an expected $1 million by sleeping outdoors. The cash will go toward Covenant House programs to bring homeless and at-risk young folk indoors and to better their future chances. The parents-of-two Todds may find the outdoors night’s hard, cold concrete more challenging than CF Interiors’ Sprout Firmus queen-sized mattress on which they reclined during the Pillow Talk party.
A Halloween labyrinth’s skulls and severed heads backed curator Kat Single-Dain and Jude Kusnierz at the latter’s Beaumont Studios Artist Society.
TRICKS AWAIT TREAT: Beaumont Studios Artist Society founder-head Jude Kusnierz started Halloween early with a two-week production called Tours For The Recently Deceased. Curated by Dusty Flowerpot Cabaret principal and Parade of Lost Souls producer Kat Single-Dain, the labyrinth-like installation acknowledges gothic-horror filmmaker Tim Burton. Kusnierz’ own horror is having property taxes triple to $110,000 in five years based on two-floor Beaumont Studios’ theoretical “highest and best use,” meaning highrise development. That’s crippling for a 13-year-old outfit that strives to help Vancouver culture keep kicking.
Some of the many hotel doormen attending the $100,000 Doormen’s Dinner ringed the benefitting C.H.I.L.D. Foundation’s head, Mary McCarthy Parsons.
GENERATIONS: Politician-florist Grace McCarthy died in 2017. But the C.H.I.L.D. Foundation she launched lives on. So does the annual Hotel Doormen’s Dinner that reportedly netted $100,000 recently to help the foundation fund Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis and liver-disorder programs. McCarthy’s daughter, Mary McCarthy Parsons, now heads the foundation. She is proud that it jointly developed the Canadian Children Inflammatory Bowel Disease Network and a world’s-first, the Canadian Biliary Atresia Registry.
David Yarrow’s wildlife photographs were priced to $175,000 at a Chali-Rosso gallery exhibition that aided the Pamela Anderson Foundation.
BIG GAMER: Stockbroker-turned-photographer David Yarrow, 53, looks to be the kind of tough hombre who’d get dangerously close to wild animals. More prudently, the scion of Clydeside’s Yarrow shipbuilding family sometimes coats remotely operated cameras with scents that attract especially threatening species. Impresario Vernard Goud did something similar when folk packed the Chali-Rosso gallery for a Yarrow exhibition of up-to-$175,000 works that partly benefited the Pamela Anderson Foundation. Of course, such a budget would fund trips to observe all manner of real-live creatures pretty well anywhere.
John Coupar fronted a 50th-anniversary celebration for the Bloedel Conservatory that he and four others saved from closure by raising $2.4 million.
FOR THE BIRDS: A recent sold-out gala celebrated the Bloedel Conservatory’s impending 50th anniversary on Dec. 6. That Little Mountain facility barely lived past 40 when roof leaks resolved the park board to close forestry leader Prentice Bloedel’s $1.5 million gift to Vancouver. The Friends of Bloedel committee’s John Coupar, Thomas Hobbs, Terri Clark, Vicky Earle and Sherry Hamilton promptly spurred a $2.4-million campaign to save it. The conservatory’s saga will be told in a soon-releasing booklet co-edited by Earle and Sun medical reporter Pamela Fayerman. According to Coupar, 2018’s attendance of 185,000 more than doubled 2009’s. As gala-goers partied, the conservatory’s resident birds whistled, warbled and shrieked, too, as well they should.
The late Evan Kemp shared hats with fellow singer Michael Fraser who grew up to perform, produce and found the Get On Point artist-development concern.
BACK TO BASICS: Those wearied by certain vote-seekers’ lies, churlishness and bovine scat might appreciate a song in which the latter commodity played an honourable part. It is the late Evan Kemp’s exuberant Cariboo Trail about a yodelling cowboy at day’s end. With The Beautiful Nicola Valley (YouTube), Home By The Fraser and Kemp’s other B.C.-specific songs, it evokes the simpler, more decent characteristics of folk resistant to electioneering burlesques.
WRIGGLE ROOM: Vancouver Centre MP Hedy Fry’s ninth consecutive election win is the political equivalent of her university-days limbo-dancing beneath a 48-cm bar for Irish television.
At the Pillow Talk event, Victoria family physician Gordon Henderson accompanied son Craig who sings and plays piano in the jazz-saloon-singer style.
ONE MORE TIME: Victoria-based singer-pianist Craig Henderson, who performed at the Pillow Talk event, is being touted as yet-another Harry Connick Jr. So was now-stellar Michael Bublé when father Louis attended his early-days gigs at Granville Street’s old BaBalu Lounge. Henderson goes one better with family-physician-dad Gordon accompanying him on guitar. Craighenderson.ca/photosvideos/ is appealingly informative.
Rarely seen together, brokerage head Peter Brown and former Sun reporter David Baines almost gave their names to Open Outcry menu items.
Here with cocktail server Angela O’Genski, late stock promoter Murray Pezim was to be commemorated in an Open Outcry bar concoction called Pezimist.
NAME YOUR POISON: Pender Street’s new Open Outcry bar-restaurant occupies the old Vancouver Stock Exchange’s trading floor. Pre-opening notions included naming menu items for past stock-market luminaries — the Pezimist cocktail for late arch-promoter Murray Pezim, Peter Brownies for the brokerage head. Even VSE-scourging former Sun columnist David Baines inspired the Baines In The Neck drink. Those speculations faded. Still, a “No Shirt, No Service” plaque could acknowledge naive investors who figuratively lost that garment there.
THE RAITT STUFF: There’s a link between our town and Olympian gold-medal kayaker Adam van Koeverden who outpolled former Tory deputy leader Lisa Raitt this week. After moving to Britain from Coerverden, Holland, three centuries ago, a couple anglicized their name to Vancouver. In June, 1792, their son, Captain George Vancouver, anchored off what would become a city commemorating him.
DOWN PARRYSCOPE: That ballyhooed non-stop New York-Sydney flight — in business class, no less — would have been a piece of cake for companions aboard a Kettle Valley diesel railcar that reached Vancouver 20 hours late.
malcolmparry@shaw.ca
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