Room hushed for parents at hospice gala
Gift of Time: Canuck Place fundraiser features inspiring volunteers, giving
ONE, TWO, THREE: That formula pertained when Emily Lazare, Lindsay Geheran and Cathy Trimble co-chaired the 11th-annual Gift of Time gala that reportedly raised over $850,000 for Canuck Place Children’s Hospice. The trio respectively played their parts for the first, second and third time. Fivehundred attendees hushed when Amy and Regan Ross spoke about late daughter Gabrielle, who was born in 2010 with a terminal genetic disorder. “How do you raise a child you know is going to die?” Amy asked. Hope wasn’t for a cure, she said, “but knowing that my little angel had a place to turn to at any time of the day for help … and for our family to receive bereavement counselling and find meaning and steps to move forward through incredible loss.”
Making hope manifest, artist Tiko Kerr guided Canuck Place children to make table-centrepiece collages that raised further funds for their welfare.
PROSIT: Social Concierge principals Jordan Kallman and Tyson Villeneuve usually dress nattily for the Diner en Blanc, Deighton Cup and other chic events they stage. Recently, though, they donned lederhosen for Harvest Haus, a pintsized version of Munich’s Oktoberfest. Steam Whistle Brewing launched such local events by tapping a barrel Sept. 19. Such sausage-and-pretzel jollity will end Oct. 20, when the German Canadian Business Association welcomes beer- named consul-general Josef Beck at the Vancouver Alpen Club. Meanwhile, Harvest Haus generated enough gemutlichkeit to be held this weekend.
OUCH: Good bartenders can make a glass sing. But what if it gets mad? That happened to AnnaLena’s Kevin Brownlee during some wee-hours tippling with friend Andrea Demianni. A light bulb popped, Brownlee dropped his glass and, when he stood, had its still- intact stem run straight through his left foot. Stitched together again, he’ll soon do the same to vodka, cardamom, lillet, ginger syrup, lemon juice, egg white and muddled peppercorns in the Kitsilano joint’s top-selling Absolutely Darling cocktail.
ALL FOR ONE: Screen actress Tammy Gillis recently starred in Winnipeg- and-Spain-shot Menorca, “a very dark movie about a miserable woman left with a bit of hope.” More cheerfully, she fell from a helicopter to become an Afghan-held hostage in the Victoria-made TV movie Signed, Sealed, Delivered: The Impossible Dream. Her own dream is to have a romance-comedy series she directed emulate another web production, High Maintenance, that was adopted and aired by HBO. Titled The Support Group, the series has writer-actresses Sydney Doberstein, Laura Carly Miller and Lily Zarif help resolve their characters’ bleeding heart, hoarding and sexual obsessions. They’d have needed aid for shivering had some bikini- clad scenes in North Vancouver been shot after the weather turned.
YEAR TWO: If at first you do succeed, try, try again. That’s a mantra for publisher Rana Vig who launched The 100 Year Journey book at the Pacific Rim hotel last year. A digital edition of the illustrated history of South-Asian pioneers followed, and Premier Christy Clark attended a related dialogue event titled Conversations Along The Way. With public sales and school and library demand reportedly brisk, Vig drew even more to a second banquet recently that included a fashion show by Sunny and Reshu Sethi — “newer pioneers,” Vig said — who founded Sunny’s Bridal Gallery in 1992.
FILM’S FRIEND: Terry McEvoy’s amiably roughhewed mug might have scored him lucrative character- acting roles. Instead, the veteran writer-director-narrator puts others’ endlessly varied faces on the big screen as programmer of the Vancouver International Film Festival’s Canadian Images series. Of that job, the dietary locavore said: “I love the idea that people who breathe the same air and drink the same water as me can come up with these wild concepts for films.” Directors like Damien Gillis and Fiona Rayher, whose Fractured Land was rated the festival’s best B.C. film, have McEvoy to thank for screening their works. So do folk who pay to see them.
SETTING IT STRAIGHT: The Brilliant! gala, not the Reveal gala as stated beside a recent photo, generated $1.45 million for St. Paul’s Hospital’s mental- health and addiction programs.
CHOW TIME: Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor, 15th Baronet of Eaton, 9th Baron Grosvenor, 9th Viscount Belgrave, 9th Earl Grosvenor, 8th Marquess of Westminster, 6th Duke of Westminster and the world’s 91st richest person had menu options — chicken, sablefish, seafood spaghetti — shorter than his titles while lunching at Umberto Menghi’s relocated Giardino restaurant this week. He’d likely checked on the Royal Westminster Regiment, of which he is colonel-in-chief, and his luxury development on Ambleside’s 1300 block. While Giardino prepares chicken in the Tuscan manner with sage, rosemary and garlic, fellow Britons learned in 2008 that the duke also relishes Frenchstyle poule amoureuse.
DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Nine more sleeps and certain poll-hungry politicos can revert to gnashing and biting with those teeth rather than baring them endlessly in pantomime grins and belly laughs.