Deighton Cup features flirty hats atop sharp minds
CUP AND SORCERY: Deighton Cup founders Dax Droski, Jordan Kallman and Tyson Villeneuve’s inexplicable mastery of the weather had record crowds pack Hastings Racecourse as the event’s 10th-annual aided Variety: The Children’s Charity. Despite less cigar smoking this year, attendees still dressed to the high eights. Men in snappy jackets and fedoras accompanied women wearing sky-high heels, girly-girl frocks and filmy fascinators. Pure pantomime, of course, especially for Nisha Khare who had worn a hard hat and steel-toed boots for a summer job driving a forklift in hometown Prince George. That helped pay for two UBC undergrad degrees and a masters in counselling psychology. Later she addressed a United Nations audience on the theme of Powerful Partnerships. Her career focus: “(Guiding) people who elevate one another in life and business.” At the Deighton Cup, Khare lowered herself into a McLaren 675LT Spider for which David Bentil, the Mile’s End Motors dealer and hospitality pavilion host, wanted $400,000. That, the open-top supercar’s wind blast and the real-life accomplishments of Khare and other women present would blow the flirty chapeau off anybody’s noggin.
TO THE NINES: Some Deighton Cup attendees spent much time readying their own ensembles. Not so Jeevitha Kandasamy, who is a professional clothier with the Tom James menswear company. Her efforts were focused on boyfriend Julian Bell, the custom motorcycles and car designer, for whom she created an entire outfit of jacket, trousers, shirt and pocket square. The ensemble was likely approved by Julian’s mother, Liz Bell, the city-based fashion-model agent and former international model.
BORN AGAIN: “This is the future of West Vancouver,” Mayor Michael Smith said at a ribboncutting for the three-building Vinson House Cottages project at Gordon off 15th Street. No word on his own future as Smith hasn’t announced he’ll seek a third term. Built in 1903 for Smith’s political predecessor, Reeve Valient Vivian Vinson, the house was moved back 10 metres on its lot and renovated to become two residences. New 2,600- and 2,400-squarefoot “cottages” were built alongside. Architect-developer Michael Geller and constructiondevelopment firm partners Rob Chetner, Bob Dagg and Paolo Trasolini undertook the $7-million strata development. Common in Vancouver since a 1980s bylaw permitted them, “laneway” residences are new to West Van. Geller will soon complete another such project involving a 1923 home at 12th and Jefferson.
EYES OPEN: When Marie Khouri began sculpting metal a decade ago, the pieces would just circle her wrist. Now they stand six metres or more high. That’s the case with a $400,000 dual work called Eyes On The Street that Khouri and collaborating sculptor Charlotte Wall unveiled at Concert Properties’ False Creek Voda project recently. The twin stainless-steel artworks stand in an ornamental pool (voda means “water” in some Eastern European languages). Such a location would have dissolved a sculpture of cattle salt-lick blocks that Wall exhibited in 2004. Having made several concrete public-art pieces, Khouri now favours metal for her and Wall’s large works. Their powder-coated steel triplesculpture titled Let’s Roll now stands in Richmond. Another named Air will debut in North Vancouver District on Sept. 15.
POST PERFECT: Occupants of the Deighton Cup’s trackside hospitality boxes were pleased when jockey Aaron Gryder strolled in to say hello. Those who had bet on Under Par in the day’s first event, a $14,000-purse claiming race for three-year-olds and upward, were happier still. That’s because Gryder had ridden that filly to a win paying $3.80.
MEN OVERBOARD: Jill Sinclair, who watched races from a Deighton Cup private box, has made many bets lately. Not on the gee-gees, though. Her winners and mostly losers were the 47 variously eligible men aged over 30 she sized up during research for her latest book, Date Did What? Some encounters must have been perfunctory as Sinclair admits to seven in one day. An earlier opus recounted pirates firing bullets into an anchored yacht where she slumbered while raising funds to build huts for Malaysia’s homeless. The cruising and book-writing began after Sinclair was laid off from a hospital job and returned home early to discover her male companion and another woman in a Mate Did What? situation.
ZED TIME: Greeting BMW auto dealer Brian Jessel from a sojourn in Cabo San Lucas, business partner Jim Murray gave him a 2003 used car. But not some clapped-out beater he’d taken in trade. It was a silver BMW Z8 with near-unbelievable 7,000 km total mileage. One of a 2000-2003 series of 5,703, the roadster is likely worth twice its original US$129,000 price. Jessel had long tried to uncork a Z8 from Mission Hill winery mogul Anthony von Mandl who has owned it since new. Having sleuthed one out in Toronto, Murray snapped it up and, for Jessel, wrapped it up.
DOWN PARRYSCOPE: The term “Band-Aid solution” seems hardly fair for a 98-year-old Johnson & Johnson product that solves scrapes reliably and thoroughly. malcolmparry@shaw.ca604-9298456