Wednesday, November 26, 2008



Subject: Tragic - Ballet BC terminated

Dear Friends,

We have our work cut out for us. The cancellation of the CBC Radio Orchestra, huge cuts within the CBC with more potential layoffs announced today and now this. In my opinion, Ballet BC is the best arts organization in Vancouver and we need to save it. It's cutting edge artistic and run by the brilliant, creative and innovative mind of John Alleyne. We are so lucky to have them in our city and to have them represent Canada abroad. Please encourage people to go to the Nutcracker - if there are enough seat sales, we can save this jewel and hopefully save an important part of culture in our city.

Thank you all,

Tiko Kerr



I received the above this morning. My friend Richard Dal Monte and editor at Tri-Ciy-News had sent me the Vancouver Sun article yesterday morning so I was already in a bit of a shock. I thought about it all night and slept badly. The above letter from artist Tiko Kerr made me think on my relationship with Ballet BC which began sometime around 1995 when I started shooting dance pictures for the Georgia Straight. Here (above) is one of my earliest ones with Ballet BC Director John Alleyne and dancer Gail Skrela.

It all began with an infatuation (love perhaps?) of watching Evelyn Hart dance, meet her and take her photographs. Evelyn Hart was my introduction into the wonders of ballet. From there I had to see more ballet so Ballet BC became my ticket. I became such a fan that I would notice when dancers would lose or gain weight or when they got new hair cuts. I could not understand why more people did not try to secure access to back stage or rehearsals. I felt many years younger because I became a groupie. I watched my swans prepare back stage. Many wore fluffy rabbit bedroom slippers to keep their feet warm!


But there was another awakening in myself that was all due to my experiences with Ballet BC. Going to some of the premiere performances I would note groups of men usually dressed in black (with some wearing leather pants). They were evidently gay and were there to enjoy the beautiful male dancers. I felt a bit on the dirty side as I was there to admire the beautiful female dancers. It was at about this time that I wrote a piece for the Vancouver Sun and for the CBC Arts Web Page about the sexual aspect of ballet and dance. I felt that as a man I should be able to proudly assert that I especially liked ballet and dance because the women were beautiful and graceful. Why was it that only the men who liked the boys could get away with it?



I soon found out what those men were enjoying because I too began to feel within me the excitement of seeing men dance and I was affected by their sexuality much in the same way as I was when I watched the women dance. Soon I was a fan of the men, too and I noticed when they had new haircuts. It was as if my pleasure at being a fan of Ballet BC was twofold. It was!

I began to realize that manliness and passion had nothing to do with sexual persuasion. My most favourite male dancer ever, (seen below painting on Tiko Kerr's head), was passion on the floor. I enjoyed every performance of his as if it were his last and to this day I regret that he never played Dracula! The three young men are from left to right, Chengxin Wei, Justin Peck and James Russell Toth.



Thanks to Ballet BC and dance in Vancouver I persuaded my daughter Hilary to put Rebecca into dance at Arts Umbrella. Her first teacher was Ballet BC's Andrea Hodge.It was at Arts Umbrella that I noticed the young boys and men of the company and how I could watch them without any personal embarrasment. I was watching dancers dance well. Their sex was irrelevant. It was thrilling. I even managed to write about it for a local magazine VLM. The interviews helped me understand the intelligence and approach of the taciturn Ballet BC dancer Edmond Kilpatrick, seen below, left with Acacia Schachte and Sandrine Cassini.



I will not argue that culture is important and that we must put more effort in attending (and buying tickets) dance, theatre, opera and musical performances. Not having a ballet company in Vancouver is a tragedy and Tiko Kerr points out that they represent Canada very well abroad.



I would only add that in many respects even with the death (I hope a most temporary one) Ballet BC represents us well even now. Lauri Stallings, seen here inspiring composer Owen Underhill at the piano, recently choreographed (one of the dancers she directed was Paloma Herrera) for the American Ballet Theater in New York City. And our very own Arts Umbrella alumnus and Ballet BC dancer Acacia Schachte dances for the prestigious US Cedar Lake contemporary ballet company. One of the choreographers is Crystal Pite also a former dancer from Ballet BC who went on to dance for the Frankfurt Ballet and is now in Vancouver directing her own company Kidd Pivot. And Ballet BC talent doesn't stop there. Some years ago Ballet BC Director and choreographer (seen here with dancer Gail Skrela) lured Frankfurt Ballet dancer Emily Molnar to Vancouver who was one major reason for steady shift from the company's classical ballet into the exciting new direction of modern ballet and modern dance. Emily Molnar now has her own dance company and she is busy traveling the world as a highly rated choreographer. There is Ballet BC blood there seeping into the dance culture of the world.



And we must not forget that through the years Ballet BC has attempted, when possible and when budgets permitted, to use original and live music to accompany its dancers. One of the more elaborate performances was Carmina Burana and Carmen where full-sized orchestras were used. This meant jobs for free lance musicians and composers as in the recent Fairy Queen. In recent times many of the new ballets (like the Fairy Queen) were choreographed by John Alleyne. I wondered why we had not recently seen anything (as an example) by choreographer William Forsythe. After all when Alleyne started at Ballet BC we were exposed to many of Forsythe's ballets. The answer (from that graceful horse's mouth, Alleyne himself) was a teling one. I asked him a couple of months ago. He said,"In order for us to mount a Forsythe ballet we have to pay a royalty upwards of 75 thousand dollars plus we have to pay air fair and accomodation for one of Forsythe's'representatives to monitor our production.

There is one more debt of gratitude that I have for Ballet BC. The company in the many photo assignments that I had with them inspired me to shoot some of the best photographs of my career. This inspiration has not stopped as dance is now a very big chunk of my life. John Alleyne, Ballet BC, Miroslav Zydowicz, Andrea Hodge, Simone Orlando, Acacia Schachte, Edmond Kilpatrick, Lauri Stallings (seen in last picture here with Miroslav Zydowicz), Crystal Pite, Emily Molnar and so many others thank you and come back soon.

Tuesday, November 25, 2008


Some 29 years ago I went Claudia Beck and Andrew Gruft's Nova Gallery on 4th Avenue and saw a print (printed by the photographer) of Moonrise Over Hernandez, New Mexico by Ansel Adams. It was superb hanging in the middle of the room suspended by wires from the ceiling. For many of us this was the Holy Grail of the landscape photograph. It was the perfect landscape. We knew that Adams had been able to take but one exposure from a camera on a tripod on the roof of his pickup. We also knew that the one exposure was close to perfect because Adams knew the luminance value of the full moon. For many who dabbled in landscape they would often say that Adams's pictures were good only because he had the money and patience to wait for the best light.

What is the best light? As an example consider the problem of a landscape that has three separate areas.

1. A dramatic sky with puffy or storm clouds.

2. A middle region that is often a mountain chain with snow capped peaks.

3. A third region which us usually a valley (streams or lakes) in the shadow of the mountain range.

No b+w film or slide film can accommodate the three values. If you expose for the dramatic sky the snow on the peaks will go gray and the valley will be black. If you over-expose to get detail in the valley the snow will lose its detail and the sky will be disappointing. Adams waited for the best light and had his own personal trick that he called his Zone System. It worked with separate sheets of b+w film in larger formats but it failed with transparency or slide film.

For many years pristine and perfect landscapes were rare. We photographers would be wowed when we saw them. There was a large postcard demand for these pristine landscapes.

Then about 40 years ago a French company called Cokin revolutionized landscape photography with the mass distribution of its partial neutral density filters which were made of plastic. They were relatively expensive and you really had to take care of them as they scratched easily. Here you see such an example. This filter was large enough for most of my 35mm wide angle lenses. If you positioned the dark area on the top of the lens, the darkness would prevent light from entering your camera and exposing your film. As you took an exposure that was correct for that dark valley the neutral density (meaning it did not add or subtract colour) the resulting overexposure on the dark dramatic cloud was compensated by the top half of the Cokin filter. These filters came in all sort of gradations with narrower or darker bands of darkness. Then Coking came up with coloured neutral density filters. Instead of dark areas these areas would be in colour. The most popular was a reddish one that was called the tobacco filter. These filters started creeping into movies particularly the ones that were about the rosier time of yesteryear or in old cheddar TV ads (this is the way we used to make our cheese and this is still the same way we make it now).

One of the first things I did after marrying Rosemary in 1968 (but there is no connection) was getting a membership (this was before the magazine went public and you could buy it in newsstands or get a subscription) to the National Geographic. Thanks to the inept and corrupt Mexican postal system I never got more than 8 issues per year. I vowed to someday move to a country were I would get all 12 issues per year. This finally happened in 1975 when we moved to Vancouver. At the time I was dazzled by the photography of the magazine. But it was also at this time that Cokin was making itself known and I was disappointed and dismayed to see photograph in the Geographic (Robert Louis Stevenson's tomb on top Mount Vaea on Upolu, Samoa) at about that time that had used the tobacco filter. The photographer had not waited for the light. The photographer had cheated.

I am happy to report that the Geographic from my vantage point has become again a magazine that is most important in my life. The photographs of animals in the current issue (December) in an article on Alfred Russel Wallace are terrific and the article so interesting I am going to look for a biography on this man that the Geographic calls The Other Darwin. The magazine is a delight to read as it no longer seems to tow the US political line and when it reports on a country that is a dictatorship is says so. At one time the Geographic photographers would keep the horizon near the bottom of the picture. You never saw the squalor, the poverty or the dirt. That is long gone as the horizon has increasingly moved upwards.

Cokin is still in business but the digital camera industry will soon probably do it in. Photographers are now able to shoot that landscape (the sky, the mountain range, the valley) in three separate exposures and there are many cheap programs that will meld all three exposures seamlessly. If you pick up any photo magazine your eyes will soon grow tired or even blind to the page after page of perfect landscapes in intense colours. The reflections of the mountains on the lake are as perfect as the mountains themselves.

Looking back at the picture of Stevenson's tomb on Samoa I now don't see it so much as a travesty. It was only a modification of existing conditions that film could not handle. The eye can look at those three separate aspects of the landscape. It is the camera with film that fails. Now landscapes can all be perfect. As perfect as all those photographs of perfect models that even lack pores in their faces.

Click and it will sharpen to read

Can it be that we will no longer be thrilled by a picture taken from the roof of pickup as a one shot?

Monday, November 24, 2008


Memory and its selectiveness has fascinated me for a long time. I cannot fathom how it is that I spent close to six months seeing my father every Sunday afternoon in Buenos Aires in 1965 before he died and yet I cannot remember any of our conversations. Perhaps the only proof that it all happened is a photo that I took of him with my Pentacon F camera. I do remember that I snapped it on a Buenos Aires street named Carabobo which I have always thought to be a funny name even though it was the name of the decisive battle that Simón Bolivar won against the Spanish in 1821 and gave Venezuela its independence. And I have a fond memory of the oddly named Siam Di Tella car that my father (far right, in picture, left) is leaning on.

Some 28 years ago I used to frequent Vancouver's Commodore Ballroom with Vancouver Magazine rock journalist Les Wiseman. There was a young man that Wiseman kept introducing me to who was always at the concerts. I would invariably forget the young man's name. One day I ran into him on the street and told him I would never forget his name again because I used the trick of associating his name with Scottish patriot Robert the Bruce. Unfortunately this never did work. When I would see him at the Commodore I would think, "Is his name Robert or Bruce?"

Bud I do pride myself for my good memory for historical facts, for botanical names, the names of books and their corresponding authors and my memory for rose smells is acute as I can discern variations within the myrrh scent varieties of English Roses. I don't say I am good with botanical Latin because a friend, Donald Hodgson a Latin teacher told me that botanical Latin has more of the Greek than of the latter. I have noticed that my botanical nomenclature in both Greek and Latin is good from Spring until late fall and then as the garden collapses and disappears my nomenclature fades, too. As soon as those plants begin to emerge in the spring their names are instantly retrieved from my memory banks!

Memory is much in my thoughts as I am reading Umberto Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana . It is about a man who wakes up with selective memory. On Wednesday I was browsing at Chapters on Granville and Robson. One novel (a period novel) caught my eye because the author's name was in what looked like classic Latin. I looked at the author photo and found out she lived in Alaska. I was intrigued. I put the book back when my eye caught a large print edition of a Donna Leon, Commissario Guido Brunetti mystery and I instantly bought it as I have a few relatives with poor eyes. I forgot about the Alaskan author with the Latin name.

On Saturday night Rebecca and I went to see Twilight. When the credits were running in the end I was struck by a name. The unit manager of the film was Michelle Imperato Stabile. I dropped Rebecca off and as soon as I got home I punched the name into my computer but I found no mention of this woman being an author. Was my memory playing tricks? I tried different combinations of the name but found no novelist with a Latin name.

Today on my way to Van Arts I stopped at Chapters. I remembered exactly where the book had been and it was gone. I returned later and asked Nancy (she has a prodigious memory for the names of her book in the store) and we drew a blank. I told her that my only remaining solution was to stop at the other Chapters on Broadway and Granville and look there. Either I was crazy or the bookstore computer bank was in error.

In the other store I did not find Michelle Imperato Stabile. As I was about to leave I noticed a novel called The Spanish Bow. The author's name was Andromeda Romano-Lax. I looked for the author photo. Yes! She lives in Alaska. And yes, this time around I purchased the book.


The picture you see here of the author is taken by her husband Brian Lax. And of course my friend Donald Hodgson would have immediately pointed out that Andromeda was a Greek mythology name and that she was the daughter of Cepheus and Cassiopeia and wife of Perseus, who had rescued her from a sea monster.

Sunday, November 23, 2008


Today I read every article in my Sunday NY Times Magazine twice. In particular I was struck by Becoming Screen Literate by Wired writer Kevin Kelly. The second and third paragraphs of his essay hit home and you wonder what Marshall McLuhan would write about a world he might have had a inkling of but could never have predicted the present we live in now.

When technology shifts, it bends the culture. Once, long ago, culture revolved around the spoken word. The oral skills of memorization, recitation and rhetoric instilled in societies a reverence for the past, the ambiguous, the ornate and the subjective. Then, about 500 years ago, orality was overthrown by technology. Gutenberg’s invention of metallic movable type elevated writing into a central position in the culture. By the means of cheap and perfect copies, text became the engine of change and the foundation of stability. From printing came journalism, science and the mathematics of libraries and law. The distribution-and-display device that we call printing instilled in society a reverence for precision (of black ink on white paper), an appreciation for linear logic (in a sentence), a passion for objectivity (of printed fact) and an allegiance to authority (via authors), whose truth was as fixed and final as a book. In the West, we became people of the book.

Now invention is again overthrowing the dominant media. A new distribution-and-display technology is nudging the book aside and catapulting images, and especially moving images, to the center of the culture. We are becoming people of the screen. The fluid and fleeting symbols on a screen pull us away from the classical notions of monumental authors and authority. On the screen, the subjective again trumps the objective. The past is a rush of data streams cut and rearranged into a new mashup, while truth is something you assemble yourself on your own screen as you jump from link to link. We are now in the middle of a second Gutenberg shift — from book fluency to screen fluency, from literacy to visuality.

In my own way I have written here how our computer monitor and flat screen TV viewing has changed our perception of three dimensionality as we go towards a future when exploring a museum will be all with our Dell 2408 monitor as we pay Getty Images for a two minute viewing of La Gioconda.


I am so used to injecting hyperlinks in this blog that I feel frustrated when I read a novel or non fiction book and I notice a word I don't know or the mention of a historical character I want to know more about that instant. The Kindle will take off only when it comes with a built in hyperlink.


The air beyond the window touches each source of light with a faint hepatic corona, a tint of jaundice edging imperceptibly into brownish translucence. Fine dry flakes of fecal snow, billowing in from the sewage flats, have lodged in the lens of night.


The above is the third paragraph from William Gibson's 1993 novel Virtual Light . It is the scene looking out from a Mexico City hotel room and the paragraph describes to perfection what that Mexico City sky looks like and where I have seen puffy white clouds float by with dense pollution above them. Gibson confessed to me that when he wrote that paragraph he did it without ever having traveled to Mexico City. On a Kindle of a most immediate future readers would be able to find the definition of hepatic, corona and even fecal should they be curious.

The liniarity that Gutenberg brought with his press is just about dead. Consider the first paragraph of NY Times film critic A.O. Scott's essay The Screening in America in today's NY Times Magazine:

A short time ago, in honor of the impending holiday season and the looming depression, I settled in for a viewing of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” I watched it on the same laptop on which I’m writing these words, with headphones plugged in to filter out distraction, though from time to time I did shrink the image so I could check my e-mail or my favorite blog.

The above sentences may be linear but A.O. Scott's actions are not. I have been often reminded by a friend that a computer's ability to multi-task is not a prerogative of the computer but an ability that is most human that has been programmed into the computer by humans. My friend reminds me that we don't scan rooms like computers but that computers scan like humans. While I may be shocked (and so would my friend John Lekich) on the travesty of admiring Donna Reed's eyes on a laptop or heaven forbid in cell phone's tiny screen, I just might accept that our ability to do this is probably hard-wired and that Gutenberg's influence on our liniarity may have been a passing phase.

Consider the ad for P.D. James's latest The Private Patient in today's NY Times Book Review. It says, "Curl up with her new and immensely satisfying 14th Adam Dalgliesh mystery."

Who coined this term that is so often repeated that is as much of a cliché as the use of flawed by film critics? Can one curl up with a laptop? The term for me is alien as I prop myself up with three or four pillows and read in bed. Are the folks advertising the James book convinced that all who read her are of a certain age. And that would eschew the laptop, the Kindle and would curl up in the family sofa in the living room? How many would be able to read in a living room having as potential competition that huge flat screen TV over the gas fireplace?

In Umberto Eco's 2004 novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana ( a remarkable $10 bargain at Chapters for which I received a further 10% off with my irewards card) a man wakes up in a hospital:

"And what's your name?"
"Wait, it's on the tip of my tongue."
That's how it all began.

The man, Yambo, a Milanese rare-book dealer does not remember his name, recognize his wife but can remember the plot of every book he has ever read and quote most accurately, He speaks in incredible almost disjointed streams of consciousness that seem to me to be stuff of the present. His utterings might disjoint Gutenberg's successors and crusty book reviewers. I was simply dazzled. Could Yambo's speech patterns be what ours will be as soon as hyperlinks operate in our brain?



I stroked the children and could smell their odor, without being able to define it except to say it was tender. All that came to mind was there are perfumes as fresh as a child's flesh . And indeed my head was not empty, it was a maelstrom of memories that were not mine: the marchioness went out at five o'clock in the middle of the journey of our life, Abraham begat Isaac and Isaac begat Jacob and Jacob begat the man of La Mancha, and that was when I saw the pendulum betwixt a smile and tear, on the branch of Lake Como where late the sweet birds sang, the snows of yesteryear softly falling onth the dark mutinous Shannon waves, messieurs les Anglais je me suis couché de bonne heure though words cannot heal the women come and go, here we shall make Italy, or a kiss is a just a kiss, tu quoque alea, a man without qualities fights and runs away, brothers to Italy ask not what you can do for your country, the plow that makes the furrow will live to fight another day, I mean a Nose by any other name, Italy is made now the rest is commentary, mi espíritu se purifica en Paris con aguacero don't ask us for the word crazed with light, we'll have our battle in the shade and suddenly it's evening, around my heart three ladies' arms I sing, oh Valentino Valentino where art though , happy families are all alike said the bridegroom to the bride, Guido I wish that mother died today, I recognized the trembling of man's first disobedience, de la musique où marchent de colombes, go little book to where the lemons blossom, once upon a time there lived Achilles son of Peleus, and the earth was without form and too much with us, Licht mehr licht über alles , Contessa what or what is life? and Jill came tumbling after, Names, names, name": Angelo Dallóca Bianca, Lord Brummell, Pindar, Flaubert, Disraeli, Remigio Zena, Jurassic, Fattori, Straparola and the pleasant nights, de Pompadour, Smitth and Wesson, Rosa Luxemburg, Zeno Cosini, Palma the Elder, Archaeopteryx, Ciceruacchio , Matthew Mark Luke John, Pinocchio, Justine, Mari Goretti, Thaïs the whore with the shitty fingernails, Osteoporosis, Saint Honoré, Bactria Ecbatana Persopolis Susa Arbela, Alexander and the Gordian knot.

The encyclopedia was tumbling down on me, its pages loose, and I felt like waving my hands the way one does amid a swarm of bees. Meanwhile the children were calling me Grandpa, I knew I was supposed to love them more than myself, and yet I could not tell which was Giangio, which was Alessandro, which was Luca. I knew all about Alexander the Great, but nothing about Alessandro the tiny, the mine.

Saturday, November 22, 2008

For a child, parents’ warning is like a rose blooming in the brain; it opens with difficulty and fades quickly.
Galileo Galilei, Berchtolt Brecht




Last night John Lekich and I went to see the Main Street Production of David Mamet's play Glengarry Glen Ross at the Little Mountain Studio on East 26 Avenue at Main Street. The experience was so intense that when we had a coffee at the nearby coffee shop, The Grind I was just about commanded by Lekich,"You must blog this." My retort, "I only have a picture of actor Bill Dow that I took some years ago in a trio with Lois Anderson (centre) and Sheelah Megill (right). Lekich looked at me and said, "So what?"

The intensity of this production, besides a stellar cast including my fave Bill Dow playing Shelley "The Machine" Levene, was because we the audience weren't watching a play on a stage. We were in the stage watching the performance about a meter or two away from the actors. In the second act the chairs are re-configured and the audience surrounds an office situation. The swearing, the yelling the slamming of doors, all up front, made me forget I was watching a play. I was watching a real life drama involving men with questionable ethics or perhaps with no ethics.

I told Lekich that my first play (I forget the circumstances and obviously my parents gave me no choice on going or not going) was Bertolt Brecht's Galileo Galilei performed in Spanish in a Buenos Aires theatre-in-the-round configuration sometime in 1952 when I was 10. I will never forget the immediacy of seeing people talking there in front of me when my previous experience came only from movies. There was that visceral feeling all over again at last night's Glengarry Glen Ross.

Around 1960 when I was officially an adult in Mexico City (I was 18) I was able to go to the Frontón Mexico (minors were not allowed because the frontón is a betting game) to see mostly Basque pelotaris play the super exciting juego de pelota (ball game) or frontón. I remember in particular a player called Chicuri and the sole Mexican who liked Chicuri was considered a fenómeno (great player). The Mexican was a short and very quick man called Rafael Solana whose other talent of Formula 1 racing finally killed him. The form of frontón that I liked so much is usually called jai alai in North America. Jai alai in euskera (the language of the Basques) means "the happy game".



It is played with a basket called zesta-punta. This is supposed to be the fastest game in the world as the pelota (ball, handmade of virgin rubber, layered with nylon thread and two goatskin covers. Slightly smaller than a baseball and livelier than a golf ball, the pelota weighs about 4½ ounces.) has been clocked at over 300kph and can shatter bulletproof glass.

Watching my favourite pelotaris play the game was a thrill that has rareley been equalled. I get ráfagas (a lovely Spanish word that means flash or streak) of this thrill when I listen to solos by Marc Destrubé or a rose super-performs in my garden, the bloom drawing my attention with its perfection of shape and scent. I had several ráfagas of this thrill watching the virtuoso performance of the all-male cast last night of Glengarry Glenn Ross and in particular that of Bill Daw and of Alex Ferguson playing Richard (Ricky) Roma. The latter could be an inspirational speaker at a $500 a plate dinner. He was that convincing and smooth. Bill Daw with the simple movement of his semi-closed eyes or the raising of an eybrow was triumphant one instant and defeated in the next. Watching Dow was like watching Chicuri or Solana gather the ball with their cesta and hurling it at the frontón (wall) with that dizzying speed that thrilled me so many years ago.

If I didn't get 100% satisfaction at the play it had all to do with the fact that I don't work from nine to five from Monday to Friday. If this were the case, after a frustrating hard week of the office, Glengary Glenn Ross, much like Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, is the perfect play to see on a Friday night. It was funny too. We were sitting next to Vancouver Sun theatre reviewer Peter Birnie. The three of us seemed to laugh in unison. What fun to have fun!

Friday, November 21, 2008




When I scanned this panoramic slide last night for my history of photography class at Van Arts today (the class was about landscape photography) it almost broke my heart. Here you see Rebecca taking pictures of a flock of flamingos in a lagoon in Yucatán. That's Rosemary on the left. The sky is so blue and Rebecca so slim and girlish. The world was at her feet.

Rebecca (11) has been crying these days as she maneuvers into adulthood in what could be a highly shortened teenagehood. Many in school shun her. I am sure it has all to do with her perceived sophistication. Math isn't all that easy and taking care of her guinea pig Pablo is not the pleasure she thought it would be before she received him as gift. Life is hard.

If there is anything I am completely helpless about, it is in dealing with crying women. I will do anything (within my power) to make a crying woman stop. So I called Rebecca's mother and told her to ask Rebecca if she would want to go with me tomorrow afternoon to see Twilight. I wasn't there to see her expression but I am sure Rebecca smiled. Even if the film is a dud satisfaction has already come this way. I look forward to my date tomorrow.

Thursday, November 20, 2008



It is hard to believe that only 10 years ago a magazine (Nuvo) sent both Sean Rossiter and I to do a story in San Miguel Allende, Mexico. The story hinged around a BC aviation pioneer called Bob Engle. It was Engle (here with his wife Roxy) who provided us access to his Cessna Citation which flew us from Vancouver to Querétaro, Mexico where we were then driven to San Miguel.



In San Miguel we stayed with the Engles and we had as a visitor their landlord who happened to be ex Olympic skater Toller Cranston who now was a well-known painter in the San Miguel De Allende artist community. Here you see him in his large and beautiful studio.



While there I never stopped thinking at the luck I had in having been flown there and being able to share the hospitality of the Engles and enjoy the food, the sun and the smells of Mexico.



One other visitor was Jennifer Hamilton. She was in her 70s. She was a retired ballerina from New York City. I fell for her and became her lap dog. I watched how graceful she was and questioned my senses, after all she was at least 18 years older than I was. I don't think I had ever fallen for an older women before or since. It had to be the dance aspect of her!