Tags: Therapy

PEOPLE FORGET.

Last week Louise Penny pulled the plug on her appearance at The Kennedy Center to launch her new mystery, The Grey Wolf.

Said Penny: “I’m in DC, but in the wake of Trump taking over, I have pulled out. It was, of course, going to be a career highlight. But there are things far more important than that.”

“Trump taking over” means his self-elevation to the Chair of the previously bipartisan leadership of Washington’s leading concert hall, which he engineered earlier this month. Trump promised to “make the center GREAT AGAIN,” adding “The Kennedy Center is an American Jewel, and must reflect the brightest STARS on its stage from all across our Nation.”

Since then, Trump has fired the board and its CEO, Deborah Rutter, and appointed a new board who then appointed him Chair – and ticket sales have dropped by 50%.

Read on…

BIG LESSONS FROM SMALL PLACES.

For live music lovers, Hugh’s Room was a tiny perfect venue on Roncesvalles with a name as big as the El Mocambo and even the Cobra Lounge in Chicago and the Blue Note in Greenwich Village.

It opened in 2001 and for the next 16 years featured hundreds of amazing artists. But it never made a dime and closed in 2017.

Nonetheless, its name lived on as Toronto’s serious listening room, and what happened next is as rare as it is filled with lessons for every arts group, big and small. Especially these days when all the arts are under threat from fickle funders, changing tastes, technologies, audiences, and soon, politics.

Read on…

A FIRST-TIMER’S GUIDE TO BEING A TARIFF WARRIOR.

My $200 cheque arrived in the mail this week: a gift from Doug Ford to every adult in Ontario. I hadn’t thought much about what to do with it. Donate it to a charity? (Dozens have been asking.) Add it to the grandkids’ RESP? Buy eight $25 Tim Horton’s gift cards to give to street people for whom three hot meals a day is not a trivial gift?

But then The Saturday Morning Massacre happened and Donald Trump announced a 25% tariff on all Canadian goods entering America. Suddenly, every media outlet was filled with advice on how to fight back.

I remember back in 2002 when Canada’s dollar fell to an all-time low of 61 cents US, an economist said on CBC that if we all went out and spent $1,000 on a Canadian-made refrigerator or stove or TV, thousands of Canadian jobs would be saved, the dollar would instantly rise and our crisis would end.

Read on…

Quiet, please, there’s a lady on stage.

I’ve always liked Celine Dion’s songs more than I’ve liked Celine Dion.

I’m not sure what it was: too slick, too produced, too perfect.

Then she started cancelling shows claiming she had a rare and mysterious disease. Since 2020 she’s been silent. No new songs, no new shows. Nothing. But…

Not.

Any.

More.

Her performance last Friday at the opening of the Paris Olympic Games, where she belted out Hymne à l’amour, was stunning in its own right.

But when you think how terribly sick she’s been, and still is, those four minutes singing in the rain became a global event.

It used to be that people asked: “Where were you when..?” and they would follow with some tragedy or assassination. The only good-news-version I’ve heard is: “Where were you when the astronauts landed on the moon?” But it’s not far-fetched, even when Ms. Dion’s 15-seconds of fame have already stretched to 40 years, for us to ask: “Where were you when Celine Dion sang in Paris?”

Read on…

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