Bikinis parade through Pink Elephant Thai eatery for good cause
EYE OF THE BEHOLDER: Near- irreducible bikinis popped a few eyes at Desmond Chen’s aptly named Pink Elephant Thai restaurant recently. Although the parade of Qispi Kay Beachwear principal Sandra Higueras’s styles was frolicsome, the intent was dead serious. Staged by Chen and Luvngrace Entertainment’s Vernard Goud, the event benefited the Beauty Night Society ( beautynight. org) that screen actress Caroline MacGillivray founded in 2000 to help marginalized women gain integration skills and contacts.
The society helps 200 women weekly on a picayune annual budget of $ 44,825. Still, MacGillivray will have two clinicians ( she’s seeking more) begin offering homoeopathy and acupuncture on Sept. 12. A Self- Management & Recovery Therapy ( SMART) program will also launch that month, as will operations in Surrey. “We’ve managed to do a lot with very little,” MacGillivray said. Just like Higueras and her bikinis.
• DAD DID IT: Yes, Elmo, the Beauty Night founder’s father is Alex MacGillivray, who reviewed restaurants in The Sun before the designation “foodie” could dismay those starving elsewhere.
• HATS OFF: Hive Mind Millinery principal Dominique Hanke produced fedoras, berets, skimmers and suchlike for Beauty Night’s models, for herself and for children Oscar and Bracken. Brimming with confidence, the latter worked the room, saying: “My mommy made all the hats — and here’s her business card.” She’ll go far.
• BRAND GNU: Restaurant pros James Iranzad and Josh Pape opened their 110- seat Wildebeest this week. The strange- looking antelope for which the joint is named, is also known as gnu in East Africa’s Serengeti region. West Hastings Street’s 100 block has been rather wild, too. Still, with gentrification and restaurantification migrating that way, Iranzad and Pape staked their claim and devised a partial “whole- animal” menu off cuts from the extremities and deep inside. What they may see is patrons stampeding to get there just as animated wildebeests did in Disney’s 1994 The Lion King.
• THAR HE BLOWS: At Science World on Sept. 19, Fan Yang hopes to set a Guinness World Record by generating the biggest- ever bubble. Amateur contenders include the chap who took a bath after downing six pints of Guinness stout and a 10,000- calorie meal of beans and pickled eggs.
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MARTÏNI? Certain folk once wore low- heel “earth” shoes, drove Volvos and fermented their own yogurt for pennies. This week, having reportedly invested $ 70 million, Ultima Foods launched its mass market iögo brand here. Giving a once- respected cocktail yet another kick, the Quebecbased firm served “martinis” of raspberry- strawberry yogurt, vodka, cinnamon- infused syrup and muddled strawberries. “It’s the new way to say yogurt,” posters proclaimed. No kidding.
• LOTSA DOTS: Kaitlin Chapple, Soraya Raiszadeh and Raina Dutchyn modelled polka- dot- bikinis this week. The locale was the Loden hotel’s rooftop terrace, where owners and Amacon family- firm principals Marcello and Lilliana de Cotiis held their annual barbecue party. Cut in the style of the 1960 hit song, the swimsuits were, by today’s measure, far from “itsy bitsy teeny weeny.” PR person Shannon Heth, who swears that men are drawn to polka dots, attended approvingly with artist- husband George Vergette and two- month- old son Mauritz. The latter, being diapered, refrained from joining the models in an inflated pool appealingly filled with rubber duckies.
• BETTER THAN ONE: Old- time loggers blew their accumulated pay on sprees in Vancouver, then returned to the bush “with nothing to show but a new hat and a head too big to fit in it.” Non- lumberjill TV reporter Erin Cebula wore her veiled hat comfortably for the recent Deighton Cup party at Hastings Racecourse. But, when another head — a bleached skull — wouldn’t fit inside, the Makeover Wish host stuck it on top beside a silk rose rather than the piratical crossbones one might have expected.
• FLY IN THE SKY: Newspaper publisher David Black’s proposal for a Kitimat oil refinery may remind some of vacuum- cleaner mogul Axel Wenner- Gren beguiling then- B. C. premier W. A. C. Bennett by proposing a monorail to northern resources based on lines he’d built for Disneyland and Seattle Center.
• RENEWAL TIME: It was 1996 when Vancouver Public Library’s former Burrard- and- Robson main branch had its street- level windows disastrously masked on the inside by Richard Branson’s Virgin record store. Let’s hope that doesn’t continue when the Victoria’s Secret lingerie store opens in the Semmens and Simpson architectural firm’s modernist 1957 building next year. Happily, the nearby Sears ( formerly Eaton’s) department store should acquire windows and shed its publicurinal character with the Nordstrom chain’s expected takeover.
• DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Bully for Google Street View detailing Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. And double bully for missing the dead- end byway, 23 minutes from downtown, where I live.