Can You Handel This? (Our First Time at The Messiah)

As the holiday season shifts into a higher gear, this weekend featured multiple excellent visits with dear friends and family, but we kicked it off with an elegant night out.

Yet another friend was able to gift us tickets to Handel's Messiah at my favourite music Venue, The Winspear, but we decided to extend the experience by dining out at Continental Treat Bistro.

I love my family and appreciate children, and enjoy a fun casual night out where the food is good, but I can't remember the last time we dressed up for dinner in an almost child-free space. The bistro is on the corner of Jasper Avenue and 97th street (where Hardware Grill used to be) but the flagship location has been on Whyte Ave since 1982. 

In addition to a diverse menu featuring a lot of German and Czech dishes, they also have a creative cocktail menu and stellar beer list (including Westvleteren XII, 'the world's rarest beer'!). Our server was wonderful and we enjoyed escargots, a shrimp salad and rouladen for dinner, and added tiramisu, streudel and a maple whiskey coffee simply because it was too early to walk to the venue.

A jazz trio serenaded us and it was only afterwards that we realized the entire menu is gluten-free; we will have to come back and try their schnitzel, which they claim is best in the city...

After a short walk to the Winspear, we picked up our tix from the box office, checked our coats and made our way to the third floor gallery. I maintain that there are no bad seats in this place, and even two rows back on the highest level, we could still see and hear everything clearly.

'Everything' in this case includes a 27-piece orchestra, The Richard Eaton Singers (a 90+ voice choir), 4 vocal soloists and the enormous Davis Concert Organ.

Now, like most people, I am familiar enough with the famous Hallelujah chorus from The Messiah, and recognized another piece from Audrey's extensive collection of Christmas music, but neither of us had ever heard it all the way through before, and it is spectacular.

I wish I had thought to bring a libretto or whatever you call the lyrics and liner notes for an oratorio because despite being sung in English, I could discern very little, but can tell you it all sounded marvelous. Handel was born in Germany but composed the Messiah 15 years after becoming a naturalized British citizen, but I honestly thought I had heard at least two other languages on Friday night.

My lack of understanding did nothing to hamper my appreciation though; just watching the conductor weave together so much instrumentation and so many voices was completely spellbinding to me as a layman, and the beauty of the performance spoke for itself.

I don't know that I would go every year, as I know some people do, but I am confident we will return!

The Paper Telly

A couple of weekends ago I finally decluttered and dusted the top of the hutch over the liquor cabinet. Most of the items on top of it needed cleaning, the space itself required rearranging and some items, well, it was just time for them to go.

I finally parted with the bottle that contained 40-year-old port that my dear friends gifted me back when I turned 40. I decanted the bottle caps that had been accumulating in the pewter mug Dad got as a member of the CFB Gimli "Corporal's Club." And I realized that a paper keepsake had become too dusty to clean or salvage, and needed to be recycled.

It was a tiny paper replica of a television Fenya had made when she was eight or nine years old. The 5" screen depicted a hockey game in a packed arena, with the words "Go Lemons Go!" displayed on one of the concourses, presumably referring to the team in yellow. Such was the attention to detail that the set even has a triangular antenna affixed to the top of it, something I don't think Fenya had ever seen in real life.

I don't remember the circumstances clearly, but she had made it for me out of scrap paper with tape and crayons when I worked at GE Money. It was not a job I relished going to, and I think she made it to cheer me up, which it did.

The paper tv had a prominent spot on my desk until I left the job about a year and a half after starting (to take a position where still I work today). I didn't have the heart to simply 86 it at the time, so atop the hutch it went. 

When I took it down, some of the structural integrity of the cube was lost due to the adhesive on the tape drying out over a decade and half. It was tragically dusty and unlikely to survive a cleaning, and I admitted it was time to say goodbye to this keepsake - but not before doing three things.

First I took a picture of it, no longer trusting my memory to maintain such things.

Next I called Fenya, and sent her the picture. I related the story as I remembered it, and she corroborated parts of it, not remembering many more details than I. I told her how happy the little tv had made me at work, the whimsy it would provoke when my glance fell upon it, the gratitude for having such a creative and thoughtful child (two of them, in fact). It got a little misty.

Lastly, I vowed to write about it here, to affix it a little more firmly in my memory, and give me a place to re-visit it periodically.

Surreal Estate - Re-watching "The Wizard of Oz"

"Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again." -  Rick Polito's summary of The Wizard of Oz for the Marin Independent Journal

I had no interest in joining Audrey and Glory at Wicked last week, but was only too happy to watch The Wizard of Oz with them tonight, and I am glad I did.

There are those (including the American Library of Congress) who feel it may be the most "seen" movie of all time, what with the decades of holiday season television screenings piled on top of all the VHS/DVD/BluRay/4K/ad infinitum home releases.

It has to be over a decade since I last watched it, and with younger kids I around, I was probably doing something else at the same time, or leaving to pop corn or some such. Sitting down and soaking in it as an adult and a movie buff is a genuine treat. 

First, it is a well crafted adventure musical, that clips along at a ridiculous pace like any fairy story should and veers effortlessly from silly to sweet to genuinely terrifying without missing a beat. And if it comes off as excessively coy or genteel, well, it is a prodcut of its time, after all.

But before the majority of North Americans had ever heard of Gandalf the Grey of Middle Earth, this adaptation of L. Frank Baum's book was pop culture's very first iteration of a fantasy realm with borders, factions, wondrous creatures, inscrutable and powerful rulers and an epic quest.

From the moment Dorothy opens the door to Munchkinland, exposing everyone to the Technicolor brilliance of Oz, I kept thinking of just how mind-blowing this must have been to those initial audiences in the 1940s. How many midwesterners quailed sympathetically at the sight of the Kansas cyclone? Who in the audience gasped, like I did tonight, and the amazing entrance of the Wicked Witch of the West in a plume of flame and densely coloured smoke? 

The costumes and makeup of the Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman and Cowardly Lion (whose outfit weighted 90 lbs!) hold up tremendously well even in high definition. The production numbers, particularly in Munchkinland, are intricate and enormous. When they say, "they don't make 'em like they used to," I am starting to think they are talking about The Wizard of Oz.

If you are looking for a family movie to screen over the holidays this year, don't pass up an opportunity to show this 85-year-old marvel to new eyes. It is available with a Crave subscription and reantable on many digital platforms (but not Cineplex unless you havce a 4K tv, grr...).