Heart and Stroke Foundation sprints ahead with Olympian help
10th annual gala: Charmaine Crooks and company raise more than $ 900,000
TO THE WIRE: Five- time Olympian runner Charmaine Crooks chaired the Heart and Stroke Foundation’s recent 10th annual gala that reported a gross take of $ 920,000. That was a decent sprint ahead of last year’s $ 745,000.
Crooks, who carried the Maple Leaf flag at the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics, greeted another woman who’d represented Canada in the U. S. She was former Miss Teen Canada Parise Siegel, who tried for the North American title in Orlando, Florida. Today, the growing Rosemary Rocksalt firm she heads produces a million or so bagels annually, although not for the gala’s presumably heart- healthy late snacks of pizza, pretzels and mayo- dipped yam fries.
• OF DEGREE: As many parents await public- school shutdowns, those with sons at St. George’s private school are bracing to be hit by a $ 44- million new buildings campaign followed by a $ 15- million one for boarding facilities.
• GENERATION BZZZZ: With his exhibition drawing many through Vancouver Art Gallery’s Hornby Street entrance, Douglas Coupland sold out a related event four blocks to the north Wednesday. At the Vancouver Club, he and cultural historian Michael Prokopow fronted authors William Gibson and James Gleick, longtime R. E. M. band leader Michael Stipe and artist- filmmaker Sophia Al-Maria during an “evening of ideas” titled The Future of the Future.
One night later, many panelists and Coupland shared a Gastown patio with creatures whose future may be grim. They were bees occupying a hive on the rooftop lawn of Neils and Nancy Bendtsen’s Inform Interiors store. Longtime friends of Coupland, the Bendtsens staged a tented but otherwise al fresco dinner that — tip for other banquet organizers — provided Lego blocks for attendees to engage themselves should conversation lag, which was hardly the case Thursday.
• THAT’S THE SPIRIT: The Vancouver Heritage Foundation dedicated a Places That Matter plaque for pioneering city archivist Major J. S. Matthews’ former Maple Street home Thursday. Current archivist Heather Gordon said the major’s ghost began making wee- hours rumpuses in her Chestnut Street offices until a bust of wife Emily was returned to a locale in sight of his bust.
• NO WAY BUBLÉ: Warner Music has nixed one- onone interviews with Michael Bublé at Wednesday’s media scrum. That’s not like his gigs at Nelson- at- Granville’s old BaBalu lounge, where Bublé would yack with most Toms, Dicks and Harriets between or during sets.
• BUBBLEFEST: Veuve Clicquot champagne bottles drained rapidly at Monaco honorary consul Jacques Becker and wife Marie Jeanne’s skyhigh West Van penthouse this week. They included the 1.5litre magnums known as “the perfect amount for two people — if only one is drinking.” In fact, some 50 guests drank, including the guest of honour, Veuve Clicquot CEO Jean-Marc Lacave. In 1834, his firm anticipated modern champagne by answering English requests for something dryer than was in vogue then. Married to Jacques Becker’s daughter Carol, Reims and Paris resident Lacave applauded caterer Susan Meister’s interpretation of another classic tipple. It was the raw- fish “tunatini” she serves in the appropriate glass but sans gin and vermouth.
• TAKE A LOAD OFF: Guests at the Becker- Lacave soirée included Egypt- born, Lebanon-raised, Vancouver- based Marie Khouri, whose multi- sculpture installation fills one of the Equinox gallery’s large rooms. With 18 pieces carved from a dense form of Styrofoam, the work is titled Let’s Sit And Talk. It certainly encourages both. But a metre- long maquette in the Becker home showed something else, namely that Khouri carved and arranged the units to spell out her work’s title in Arabic. Very clever. Very comfortable, too.
• LIKE MOTHER: Raised in the Yukon, where she worked summers with bush- camp prospectors, global designer Catherine Regehr hit town Wednesday. So did the womenswear collection she’d shown at another northern locale, St. Petersburg. Accompanying her, and wearing a Regehr- designed silk- faille Alassio dress, daughter and forensic- psychology student Alexandra could have joined pro fashion models on the Pacific Rim hotel catwalk. Unlike them, though, she didn’t turn in her attire at show’s end.
• ADAD’S DAY: Artist Adad Hannah, who also exhibited at the Regehr event, enjoys the incalculable benefits of having Westbank Projects developer Ian Gillespie as a patron and professional clowns as parents. Adding icing to the creative cake, he spent student days here cooking for feted sci- fi scribe William Gibson. Wednesday, Hannah served up another in his tableau vivant series of videos wherein subjects remain motionless for long periods. Bar patrons sometimes achieve that involuntarily, of course, although hardly in the Pacific Rim lobby lounge where entertainers’ PA levels would raise the dead.
• CHEERS: Teetotalling Pacific Western Brewing owner Kazuko Komatsu wants 16 more athletes, coaches or community mentors — hit www.pwbrewing.com — to receive the $ 2,000 Hometown Heroes bursaries she funds from sales of Cariboo Genuine Draft 20 packs.
• DOWN PARRYSCOPE: With guards forbidden to fire on jail breakers’ helicopters, perhaps there’ll soon be a scheduled carrier named Prisonair.