Gala raises $900,115 for Mount St. Joseph Hospital
FORTUNE SMILED: While gamblers’ dreams fizzled in the Parq casino recently, the St. Paul’s Foundation raked in a $900,115 jackpot several floors above. That was at the JW Marriott hotel, where the 11th annual Scotiabank Feast of Fortune gala helped fund mammography equipment for Vancouver’s 97-year-old Mount St. Joseph Hospital. Greeting 650 guests with wife Patricia Yeo, the gala’s founding chair, Royal Pacific Realty senior vice-president Sing Lim Yeo recalled the debut event raising $200,000. Margaret Chiu and Hao Min co-chaired the current running. Global News Hour co-anchor Sophie Lui and Omni B.C. News’ Bowen Zhang emceed. Guests were entertained by Hong Kong-based pop singer Pancy Lau Fung Ping who had received cancer treatment at MSJ Hospital’s Providence Breast Centre. Following a set with Max Zipursky’s jazz combo, Marie Hui diverted from her style at Vancouver Canucks games to sing O Canada in Mandarin.
MORE FORTUNE: Accompanying steady friend Sophie Lui at the Feast of Fortune gala, Rosewood Hotel Georgia managing director Philip Meyer saw how the newish JW Marriott handles fair-sized events. Meanwhile, he alone knew that U.S. News & World Report would soon rate the 156-room Georgia Vancouver as B.C. and Canada’s best hotel, thus nudging aside The Ritz-Carlton Montreal.
TIME WAS: In the Hotel Georgia’s Prohibition lounge that evening, Vancouver Heritage Foundation executive director Judith Mosley and board members staged a soiree that sold out, as the annual Heritage House Tour (June 3) does. The $50-ticket event had author-historian Daniel Francis recount B.C.’s 1917-21 legally booze-free period. Architect-heritage consultant Robert Lemon related the hotel’s history, and Prohibition head bartender Robyn Gray demonstrated his skill. No word on a followup, but the Coquitlam Heritage Society will have Lace Embrace corsetiere Melanie Talkington demonstrate 1920s lingerie Feb. 13. Serving cocktails might enliven that event no end.
FURTHER CHANGE: Instruments of Change executive director Laura Barron fronted the organization’s annual concert in the Main-off-Hastings Imperial recently. As usual, it benefited the organization’s efforts to enhance societal well-being through arts education. Also as usual, it featured Barron’s former Forbidden Flutes partner, Liesa Norman, whose hip-hop band, XL, will release its Trial by Liar album in March. Also on the bill, four members of the 12-strong Babyface band reflected the instruments-of-change motif with a peculiar instrumental combination — drums, trombone, soprano and baritone saxophones — that was entertainingly vigorous even without the ensemble’s tap-dance squad.
HE KNOWS BUBOES: To ease medical-duty pressures in 2005, St. Paul’s Hospital emergencyphysician Dan Kalla wrote Pandemic about a China-spawned virus putting the world in peril. Eight similarly grim but popular novels followed that instant bestseller. Now he’s returned to the well by completing a still-untitled shocker about the grand-daddy of all pandemics. That’s the 14th century’s Black Death that killed possibly 200 million people, recurred often until modern times, and still has toeholds today. In the first of a two-book, global-sales deal with new-for-him publisher Simon & Schuster, Kalla resurrects the plague via the observations of a modern-day physician and a barber-surgeon in 1348 Genoa. That’s where, after depopulating Asian and Middle Eastern nations, the Yersinia pestis bacillus came ashore to do the same in Europe. That cosy opus put to bed, Kalla is writing his 11th: a contemporary murder-mystery.
SEGAL HONOURED: At a convocation ceremony on Thursday, Justice Institute of B.C. presidentCEO Michel Tarko conferred a doctor of laws degree on Lorne Segal. The Kingswood Properties president was recognized for youth advocacy and such mental-health programs as the Courage to Come Back Awards he founded in 1998.
HOT STUFF: Surrounded by senior firefighters at a 1998 Justice Institute event, wisecracking late clothier Murray Goldman said: ‘We’re just talking about my next fire.” Less humorously, Goldman had lost considerable stock and many business records when his second-floor premises were gutted by an arson-sparked blaze below. “We didn’t own the building,” Goldman said, milking the situation, “but it happened anyway.”
UP OVER: Icy rain lashed the Law Courts Inn’s windows as expatriate Australian and New Zealanders celebrated their respective national days there recently. Along with diplomats Kevin Lamb and Nick Fleming, they likely reflected on fellow nationals basking in summer weather back home. Not all, though, as record numbers of Australians continue to visit B.C. Only Americans and Chinese eclipsed them in 2017, Lamb said, That despite Australia’s tiny 24 million population beside the U.S.’s 322 million and China’s 1.4 billion. As for reversed seasonal celebrations, a colleague once photographed a turkeyand-plum-pudding Christmas dinner in humid, furnace-hot Papua New Guinea. In it, Aussies wearing only khaki shorts toasted a stuffed-suited Santa with “tinnies” of beer as he dispensed presents from a battered pickup truck.
DOWN PARRYSCOPE: As Elon Musk’s Falcon Heavy rocket conveys his Tesla sports car to their neck of the solar system, Martians may plan to trade in the Oldsmobile Rockets, Ford Galaxies and Meteor, Mercury and Saturn sedans that earlier flying-saucer crews teleported home.