Courage to Come Back aptly named
Recognition well deserved: Annual award honorees overcome challenges with physical and mental health, addictions and social adversity to inspire us all
LOOKING UP: Few gala events are better named than the Courage To Come Back Awards, the 16th running of which will take place on May 8. Recipients are cited in categories for mental health, physical rehabilitation, medical, addiction, social adversity and youth. It is no cakewalk to get on to the winner’s podium, as Michael Coss demonstrated. Recovering from a coma following an industrial accident, he had to relearn how to go to the bathroom and even eat. It was assumed he would never walk again. However, leaning on two sticks a year ago, he told award nominees he’d already parked his wheelchair. When awards chair Lorne Segal, Coast Mental Health chief Darrell Burnham and Scotiabank executive David Poole fronted the 2014 nomination meeting this week, Coss needed only one stick and vowed to get rid of that, too.
Also on hand were 2013 awards recipients Andy Fiore and Curtis Miller Joe. Each had recovered from drug addiction, Fiore to be a filmmaker and Downtown Eastside advocate, Joe to be a youth worker. The latter said his treatment and award had made him “a better parent, a better teacher and a better man.”
You couldn’t want a better endorsement.
• LOOKING DOWN: Those witnessing Courage To Come Back nominations on Scotiabank’s Georgia- atSeymour 34th floor observed another recovery at street level. In readiness for retailer Nordstrom, the former Eaton’s/ Sears department store is having its blank walls stripped away and new welcoming windows installed. When the modernist structure was built in 1972, Vancouver Sun columnist Jack Wasserman called its style “early washroom,” and colleague Allan Fotheringham likened it to “an unending urinal wall.”
• ORDER, PLEASE: The at- home event marked bandleader Dal Richards’ 96th birthday. It was also an informal Welcome To The Club party. That was for an inductee to the three-rank Order of Canada, of which Richards is a member and fellow musician and global business mogul Jim Pattison an officer.
At the candle- blowing wingding, the two welcomed opera singer- turned-University of B. C. professor Nancy Hermiston, who was named an officer of the order days earlier. She joins another singer long connected to the Richards band, “our pet” Juliette Cavazzi, who is a member.
• FURTHER ORDERS: West Vancouverbased author- artist Douglas Coupland was named an officer in the Order of Canada recently. Congratulated on the honour, he replied from holidaying in Chile: “It’s hot and rural here: cows and vineyards. Reading a generic Scandinavian procedural crime thriller and am surrounded by three dogs who love nothing more than to fall asleep on top of me. It’s great.”
Coupland automatically joined a club, too. It was of authors who began their professional prose careers at Vancouver magazine.
For his June 1987 debut, seventime contributor Coupland reported on shenanigans in the Los Angeles art- selling world ( his seminal Generation X came three months later). Fellow Order of Canada officer John MacLachlan Gray had already written and performed in the musical Billy Bishop Goes To War before turning to journalism with his first of five contributions. It was an October 1983 feature article on counter- culture Cold Mountain Institute founder Richard Weaver.
The two could start a club today of bearded scribes who resemble prerevolution Russian archdukes.
• AWAITING ORDERS: Bruce Allen and Sam Feldman founded the A& F Music firm in 1972. Since 1979, they have operated its independent musicbiz- management subsidiaries: Bruce Allen Talent and S. L Feldman & Associates. They have managed and mostly continue to manage several Order of Canada recipients.
Allen’s are Bryan Adams, Randy Bachman and Anne Murray. Client Michael Bublé will likely join them soon. With partner Stephen Macklam, Feldman’s are Leonard Cohen, Diana Krall, Sarah McLachlan and Joni Mitchell. Despite giving Canadian artists worldwide roles, there’s been no Order of Canada recognition for Allen or Feldman — not even a half order.
BRIA IN GEAR: Richards band alumnus and Capilano University jazz- program graduate Bria Skonberg has been on a roll since she, her trumpet and flugelhorn hit New York in 2010.
Two years later, Wall Street Journal music columnist Will Friedwald wrote that she “looks like a Scandinavian angel, plays trumpet like a red hot devil, and sings like a dream.” As well as her own three CDs — Fresh, Alone With My Dream, and So Is The Day — Skonberg has recorded with many jazz luminaries. Also with similarly rising friends. Among the latter, drummer Colleen Clark’s just- released debut CD has a track at colleenclarkmusic.com that has Skonberg show her ever-tasty chops.
• ONWARD AND PUPWARD: Same- sex marriages were far in the future in 1997, when rock- band manager Su Bailey and banker- turnedentrepreneur Holly Kemp did the era’s next- best thing: a blessing ceremony.
“May they have many, many years of love and happiness,” Kemp’s father James said, toasting the couple. That they did, and were married when changing times permitted it. Although a planned baby never arrived, Holly and Su did what many folk, straight or gay, single or dual, do. Today, pup Daisy seems to find them just the parents she — or anyone — might desire.
• DOWN PARRYSCOPE: The Bitcoin Marketing Co- op plans to enlighten free- admission attendees on digital “cryptocurrency” when its daylong Coinfest runs Feb 15 at 250 Smithe Street, with local vendors renting show tables for $ 50 — real cash.