Town Talk: Vancouver Chinatown Foundation gala raises $5.5 million
Credit to Author: Malcolm Parry| Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2019 19:04:23 +0000
PENDER’S BIG SPENDERS: Time was when future notables vacated downtown theatres and bars to dine on neon-glittering, late-night Pender Street. That migration reversed recently when Lieutenant-Governor Janet Austin, Premier John Horgan, Mayor Kennedy Stewart and other heavies attended the Vancouver Chinatown Foundation’s third annual fundraising gala in the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver. No old-time chow mein, foo yung or sweet-and-sour pork was served. Neither were barbecued duck, soy chicken or curry beef brisket from foundation chair Carol Lee’s two-year-old Chinatown BBQ. Instead, gala co-chairs Sam Feldman, Darlene Poole and attendees ate ahi tuna carpaccio and mushroom-crusted beef filet while generating a reported — and remarkable — $5.5 million. That will help build the foundation’s proposed 230-home 58 West Hastings project with integrated health-care facilities. Lee’s Chinatown history includes entrepreneur-grandfather Ron Bick Lee arriving from Guangdong in 1911 and living to be 104. Accompanied by siblings and mother Lily, Lee doubtless missed 86-year-old father Robert, the Prospero International Realty founder, who is ailing.
Mandy Carnahan and hundreds of others dressed accordingly when the Little Black Dress charity event filled a Fairmont Vancouver Hotel ballroom.
Help Change My City Alliance founder Alpha Kirabira staged the Little Black Dress concert and fashion show to benefit at-risk-homeless youth and others.
WELL DRESSED: The Hotel Vancouver’s B.C. Ballroom filled again when Uganda-born Alpha Kirabira staged another Little Black Dress show to benefit the Help Change My City Alliance he founded. Featuring a seven-act concert and 15-designer fashion show, the event funded Alliance programs for at-risk and homeless youth, single mothers, youth bursaries and drug-prevention efforts. Many attendees wore the event’s signature attire, and some otherwise-impecunious Alliance beneficiaries received such dresses and tickets gratis.
Countdown Events’ Soha Lavin gave the Vancouver Chinatown Foundation gala a golden glow that likely encouraged attendees to donate more.
HER SHOW: If the glittering Chinatown gala’s pure-gold lighting strengthened attendees’ generosity, credit Countdown Events’ Iran-born owner, Soha Lavin. One of the usually anonymous folk who stage events, Lavin undertook her first at age 15. Several of her larger productions were private, although Joseph Fung and Michelle Tam’s 1,200-guest 2014 wedding reception made news here and across the Pacific.
Easter Seals president-CEO Lisa Beck toasted fellow gymnast Ashara Xirkovia serving drinks to Chrome & Cocktails fundraiser guests from a trapeze.
BAR ROUTINE: Barely a month into her job as president-CEO of Easter Seals B.C./Yukon, Lisa Beck fronted a fundraiser titled Chrome & Cocktails. With costly cars from Miles End Motor’s parked outside the Roundhouse Community Centre and Mad Lab Distillery mixing beverages inside, the event benefited programs for “persons with diverse abilities … to improve independence, address challenges and support personal and family goals.” Although happy with the event, former national-level gymnast Beck didn’t perform celebratory cartwheels as she did during her two pregnancies’ ninth months.
Their 1930 Ford completed a Singapore-to-Mandalay rally, but Gary Anderson and Enrico Dobrzensky had politics thwart a Cartagena-Lima run.
GROUNDED: Gary Anderson and Enrico (Harry) Dobrzensky’s recent fundraising project for CARE Canada involved an A for effort. An A for driving, too. That was Anderson’s 1930 Ford Model A cabriolet entered for the 7,200-km Flight of The Condor Rally to begin Nov. 10. As the venerable vehicle had survived the 12,247-km Peking-to-Paris Rally and an 8,200-km Singapore-Mandalay event, the two had no qualms for the Cartagena-to-Lima run. But an Ecuadorean crisis cancelled the trans-Andean event, stalling the car on a Colombian dock while pre-committed donations to CARE Canada kept running.
Seen elsewhere with wife Sandy, Dr. Michael Hayden presented a family-and-Kristallnacht-related exhibition at the Holocaust Education Centre.
SHINING LIGHT: One of Nazi Germany’s darkly predictive incidents was recalled at the Jewish Cultural Centre’s Holocaust Education Centre recently. Internist-human geneticist Michael Hayden spoke and presented an exhibition based on the lives of grandparents Max and Gertrud Hahn whose artworks and other property were stolen on Nov. 10, 1938. That was Kristallnacht — Night of Broken Glass — when Jewish homes, businesses, schools and hospitals were looted, 267 synagogues destroyed, 30,000 Jews sent to concentration camps (the Hahns died in one) and unknown others perished. Recovered from the Hahns’ looted collection, an 18th-century silver-gilt kiddush cup is in the exhibition which runs to Nov. 27. Occurring on the eve of Remembrance Day, the Nazi-regime-encouraged Kristallnacht remains a horrific reminder of how civilization’s veneer can be stripped away.
Ocean Wise executive chef Ned Bell recruited others to prepare a gala banquet with each course reminding guests of plastic pollution in global waters.
WATERWORKS: Susan Pratt chaired an inaugural gala that reportedly raised $459,000 for the 63-year-old Ocean Wise Conservation Association. It “drew attention to plastic pollution and the opportunity for innovative solutions.” The newly installed association president-CEO, Lasse Gustavsson, saw executive chef Ned Bell and volunteer colleagues serve banquet courses that each addressed the event’s theme.
SETTING IT STRAIGHT: Lawyer Seema Lal and hotelier Philip Meyer’s names were misspelled Nov. 9
Jack Webster was pictured in a 1970s broadcast studio equipped with two microphones, a reel-to-reel tape deck, rotary-dial phone and brimming ashtray.
JACK BE QUICK: The recent Jack Webster Awards named Vancouver Sun journalist Daphne Bramham Commentator of The Year. Retired Postmedia colleague Fabian Dawson received the Bruce Hutchison Lifetime Achievement Award. Both would remember print-radio-TV journalist Webster, who died in 1999, although younger awardees and nominees might not. Accustomed to today’s digital aids, the latter might marvel at the low-tech appurtenances of Webster’s 1960s-1970s radio heyday. A contemporary photo shows a reel-to-reel tape machine, rotary-dial phone and butt-filled ashtray on his broadcast-studio desk. But native Scot Webster had one reporting aid forgotten today: shorthand. Learned at U.K. newspapers, that high-speed notetaking enabled fledgling Sun reporter Webster to outperform others during a sexually lurid 1950 capital-murder trial that made his reputation and “$300 in overtime — unheard of in those days.”
DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Before sampling all the Beluga vodka cocktails created for this year’s International Chess Federation tournament, maybe check with your mate.
malcolmparry@shaw.ca
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