CEO donation raises bar
Bonbon boon: Purdy’s boss makes candy move to benefit Pacific Autism Family Foundation
SWEET SPOT: Purdy’s Chocolates CEO Karen Flavelle hit one when the 26th annual Women’s Media Golf Classic benefited the Pacific Autism Family Foundation recently. As golfers banqueted in tourney founder Wendy Lisogar-Cocchia and husband Sergio’s Century Plaza hotel, Flavelle donated $100,000. SunRype Products’ $52,000 contribution further sweetened a pot brimming with $500,000 from the Autism Speaks Canada organization. No wonder the sun obligingly shone for once.
• FULL KALLA: Writing the 2005 novel Pandemic gave Dan
Kalla respite from his day (and night) job as an ER physician at St. Paul’s Hospital. The book became an international bestseller that Hollywood-Vancouver writer-director-producer Chris Leitch optioned as a feature film. That went nowhere. Fast forward a decade and Kalla was in the Winsor Gallery recently, launching his 11th book, Nightfall Over Shanghai. It’s the final volume of a trilogy titled The Far Side of the Sky set around the Jewish community of that Japanese- occupied Second World War city. Leitch attended the launch with Defiance writer Clay Frohman. More hopeful this time, Leitch figured the two will develop a feature film and multi-season TV series based on Kalla’s “incredible, inspirational journey.” Comparing the project to a much-lauded prohibitionera series, he said: “This is our Boardwalk Empire.”
• FATHER OF INVENTION: Robert Blaney scored a hat trick when the recent Monogram Dinner by Design event invited 14 designers to devise table settings at which $300-a-plate dinners would be served. In 2013, Blaney had diners perch on tree butts around a tree trunk and moss-topped circular table. His candlelit 2014 assemblage of junked furnishings evoked a post-catastrophe environment. This year, he built an ice-block wall in the event’s CBC studio. Although stable in igloos, it melted rapidly enough to need constant mopping-up at an earlier cocktail party, and was nixed for the dinner proper.
Of his non-appearance next year, Blaney said: “I’m taking a break to let the other designers show their stuff.”
• BETTER YET: Western Living magazine staged its recent Designers of the Year awards in Oakridge’s former low-priced Zellers store. Locale aside, many awardees represented client budgets’ upper reaches. Still, there was warm applause for top podium finishers, Measured Architecture firm principals Clinton Cuddington and Piers Cunnington, who have three homes pictured in WL’s current edition. Lengthy acceptance speeches are common at such events. But interiordesigner winner Nigel Parish accepted his trophy silently, and chose not to be photographed for the newspaper. With no apparent ego and the skill to harmonize minimalist interiors with surrounding landscapes, he may be someone you’d want in your corner.
• ARRR, JILL: Pirates fired bullets into a small vessel that anchored overnight while taking Jill Sinclair to help build huts for Malaysia’s homeless. The one-time furniture designer and custom- car video- series producer took that gig when, laid off from a hospital job here, she returned home to find her male companion in bed with another woman. These and other adventures prompted her to write the mildly fictionalized ebook Pirates, Snakes, Sharks & Miss Fancy that she released aboard an ersatz pirate ship here recently. A sequel will include further mayhem and opium trading in Thailand and Japan.
• GOT THE TIME? Nobody just walks into Ferrari dealerships with $1.5 million for a hybrid La Ferrari car. You must be invited. Local enthusiast Robbie Dickson hoped to be, but wasn’t. Instead, he received the consolation prize of paying $750,000 for a diamond-encrusted Hublot MP-05 La Ferrari wristwatch with enough spinning sprockets to be an exotic car’s gearbox. Not a racer, though, as Dickson said his “loses 15 minutes a week.”
• CLASSIC ROCKER: $10,000 or so should get you a Pontiac Firebird Trans Am like the one Marcus Bowcott piled atop four other jalopies on a cedar trunk beside Creekside Park. When another 1978 model amused 28-year mate Helene Aspinall by teetering on forklift tines, Bowcott said: “Wouldn’t it look good on rockers?”
Classic Custom & Hotrods owner Ken Powers stripped the paint and mechanicals, and Bowcott mounted the body on a cedar base and machinery that rocks it like a slow-motion low rider. For a title, Aspinall suggested the last two words of Walt Whitman’s poem Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking. Exhibited in the HSBC tower, it complemented a giant pendulum’s seven-per-minute oscillations that, like the eagle decals covering some Trans Am hoods, can reportedly induce nausea.
• TAKING CHARGE: Shaw cable host Fiona Forbes and former Real Housewives of Vancouver TV-series character Mary Zilba have behind-thecamera roles developing. Their LadyPants Productions firm has reportedly made co-production deals for three docu-reality TV series. One may entail the LGBT community, and a cooking show will start shooting in Vancouver imminently. As for their company’s name, the 15-year friends both wore J Brand jeans from Holt Renfrew to Women’s Media Golf Classic beano.
• DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Sayonara, Yogi Berra. It wasn’t over till you were.