Thursday Thoughts - 3 - Life as I Love to Live It

1 - The writers' retreat organized by my local chapter of Romance Writers of America is a huge highlight of my year.















2 - A visit to my friend Donna's in Toronto. What could be more lovely? I used to be her daughter's live-in nanny, and now her daughter is 23. Time flies, doesn't it? But it always feels good to sit and catch up, enjoy coffee together and eat her homemade cookies with edible gold.












3 - One of best things when we lived in Toronto was the availabilty of cult movies. On a recent trip to The Big City my husband made sure he stocked up on the essentials.


















4 - Hanging out on Queen Street West is also a must when we're in Toronto. Especially because my good friend Chris manages Bakka-Phoenix Books at Queen and Spadina. The city was tearing up the intersection during that visit.














5 - Is there any place I'd rather be than in the lobby of the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, a glass of champagne in my hand, my dear friend Jacquie by my side and a performance of the Sleeping Beauty ballet just moments away...?

Not really, no.














6 - Well...there's always meeting friends at a funky coffee shop and whiling away an hour or two over cafe au laits and delectable yummies. That's good, too.













7 - It's always exciting to discover the creative things my friends get up to. Like these fun tea cozies my friend Pam knitted, as well as little hats that looked like pumpkins and strawberries.














8 - Since I haven't been invited to the Oscars yet, last year's evening on the town at Haliwood - a Halifax Oscar-themed fundraiser - felt like the next best thing.


















9 - My gram's funeral was held this summer in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. This was a beautiful angel candelabra behind the altar. It was a perfect service officiated by a handsome young priest of whom my gram would have heartily approved. A clear, blue-sky day, surrounded by family and uplifted by love - no one could ask for a better farewell.














10 - My dog Xena is a light in my life that can't really be explained. I just love her.















11 - Last year was a particularly sad year for saying final goodbyes - but it was also an odd dream-come-true year where so many things on my wish list came to me. I'm a life-long horse lover without a horse. But I had a serious Barbie horse with a horse trailer and realistic tack, and I had pretend horses I rode whenever we went for a family walk in a park or in the woods. I even groomed these pretend horses in their pretend stable in the backyard.

I've always wanted to go to Vienna to see the Lippizan stallions at the Spanish Riding School. And what do you know - the Lippizans came to me, here in Halifax!
















12 - Another thing I've always longed to do was see the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Musical Ride. Once again, who showed up right here in my fair city? You guessed it!

I've always had a thing for war horses and cavalry, and both the Lippizans and the RCMP Musical Ride are basically cavalry maneuvers.



The RCMP unit even did a charge at the end. A total thrill! In this next clip (which has no audio) the Charge comes at the 1:15 mark.
















13 - I took this shot of a sunset at Lawrencetown Beach in very chilly November, a year ago. This is a beach on the Atlantic Ocean, 20 minutes' drive from my house. I played here as a child, and I head out there as an adult because it's one of my favorite places on earth. Ten minutes of walking this beach, and I promise you - all is right with the world.

Richard Bradshaw 1944 - 2007

"I never allowed myself to disbelieve," Richard Bradshaw remarked on the eve of the opening of the Opera House in Toronto last September.

He called his relentless ambition to move the Canadian Opera Company out of its prior home venue at the Hummingbird Centre to its proper home in the new Four Seasons Centre his 'Thirty Years' War'. Colleagues and friends describe him as 'a genuine titan, 'fiercely proud', 'tenacious and passionate'. Elaine Calder, President of the Oregon Symphony in Portland, Oregon describes Bradshaw as 'avid for life. He was funny. He was hugely intelligent. He was interested in a range of things beyond music.'

As an usher at the former O'Keefe Centre, now the Hummingbird Centre in Toronto for eight years, I was privileged to work with Mr. Bradshaw whenever the Canadian Opera Company performed at our theatre. Opera performers, management and patrons lived up to their diva status on many and numerous occasions. But the conductor/artistic director never displayed any of that sort of behaviour. Not even to Front of House staff like myself, who was obliged to ask him to show his pass over and over again.

He often stopped to chat with me, and was the epitome of erudite urbanity. He always, always had a twinkle in his eye, regardless of what financial and artistic burdens he carried on his shoulders. He dressed in hip, casual style that never reflected his age, since he plunged forward into life with the gusto of the truly young-at-heart.

"Most companies rely on a regular diet of popular operas to bring in the crowds," writes John Terauds for the Toronto Star. "But Bradshaw was convinced that, if they were presented well and performed convincingly, a general audience would come to appreciate even the most challenging works in the repertoire.

Even that bold undertaking proved true.

A couple of years before he was officially named the company's artistic director, Bradshaw conducted while Robert Lepage directed a 20th-century double bill of Bela Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle and Arnold Schoenberg's Erwartung in 1993. Torontonians loved it, as did audiences in New York, Australia and Scotland, where the touring COC won the Edinburgh Festival's top prize."

I worked those shows during this production, and it had a huge effect on me as far as understanding the role of design in a production, how it serves the story/performance.

"Bradshaw was hailed for both his accomplishment in bringing Wagner's Ring Cycle to the stage and his conducting.

'I've never heard such a range of hues and intensities from this orchestra, or a more deeply grounded bass. The famous 163-bar opening elaboration on an E-flat major chord felt like the tuning of the building itself,' Globe and Mail critic Robert Everett-Green wrote." - CBC.ca Arts

"He always treated me with tremendous, wonderful kindness and respect," says Canadian Baritone John Fanning.

This piece was published in the Globe and Mail Thursday, December 28, 2006:

"June 16, 2006. Baton in hand, Richard Bradshaw stands on the podium. Before him sit the 70-odd members of the Canadian Opera Company orchestra, playing the death scene from Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov. Behind him, in the auditorium, an invited audience of COC friends and patrons come to celebrate an evening many thought would never arrive: the imminent opening of Toronto's $181-million Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts.

For Mr. Bradshaw, the COC's general director, this is the consummate moment. Rendered all the more meaningful by the power of the music, it's the culmination of an impossible decade. Of lobbying, schmoozing, fundraising, pleading, cajoling, squeezing, begging and, yes, praying -- what Mr. Bradshaw has famously referred to as the Thirty Years War.

When the piece concludes, he rushes off stage, overcome, brushing past well-wishers, tears welling in his eyes.

That was a pretty amazing experience," he says now. "You really had to hold on."

But one must be careful of such emotional surrenders, he adds. Armed with an amusing quip or anecdote for every occasion, Mr. Bradshaw remembers what the British director John Dexter once said: "If you weep, they won't." They, as in the audience.

No worries on that score. Far from weeping, it's been a ringing chorus of bravo, bravissimo, maestro." - Michael Posner

Wordless Wednesday - 12