Toronto Life articles from February 2002

Toronto Life archives from February 2002

Health nut.
February 1, 2002... I expect she'll be rather severe. After all, as the city's medical officer of health, Dr. Sheela V. Basrur tends to figure in the public consciousness, when she does at all, as rather admonishingly schoolmarmish. As in: smoking bad. Or:...

Staff inspector.
February 1, 2002... There's nothing wrong with a little bookstore micromanaging if you're Heather Reisman and you happen to own the joint. If you don't want to sell a particular book (say, Mein Kampf), you don't have to. You're the boss. And if you want to...

Take my wife --.
February 1, 2002... As if we needed any more proof that the Bay Street boys' club is alive and well. George Weston Limited's corporate Christmas party at the King Eddy featured Dick Currie, the company's retiring head honcho (i.e., the real president of...

Buyee beware.
February 1, 2002... When Rob Prichard left the leafy grounds of the University of Toronto, no one doubted he'd be able to hack it in the private sector. After all, he spent much of his 10-year campus stint schmoozing bigwigs for big dollars. But when he became...

Sex offender.
February 1, 2002... Most writers will tell you that sex is about the hardest thing to put down on a page. The flip side is that it's the easiest thing to lampoon. Hence the Globe's first annual CanLit Bad Sex competition, judged by Globe editor Sandra Martin,...

Food fight.
February 1, 2002... Heard the old joke about the great chef who walked into another great chef's restaurant? Neither have we, but the punchline no doubt involves an incomplete meal. That's how things ended when Rob Feenie, the loud, leather-panted TV host and chef...

Promo donnas.
February 1, 2002... Collectively, they eat more skewers of chicken satay in a month than most of us do in a lifetime. But these gals aren't just about party poultry. Publicists, flacks, handlers--call them what you will, they launch as well as they lunch. Whizzes...

This issue.
February 1, 2002... AMERICANS LOVE HALLS OF FAME. THE MOST FAMOUS IS the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, but there are hundreds more. All the sports have one, including volleyball (Holyoke, Massachusetts), bowling (St. Louis), Frisbee (Lake Linden,...

Reconcilable differences.
February 1, 2002... To use the schoolyard vernacular of her precocious character, Claudia, Kristen Thomson is a brain but no browner. The double-Dora-winning actress is scary-smart without the intellectual's showoffy pride. She speaks in lucid paragraphs that...

Beautiful ache.
February 1, 2002... To the Greenwich Village folkies of the late '60s, it didn't seem Emmylou Harris would last long. She was delicate, tall and slim as an orchid and could play guitar. But she appeared a bit hesitant and unfocused. It wasn't until country music...

Dream Team.
February 1, 2002... Emily Carr, Eugene Delacroix and Jasper Johns are among the 30 artistic giants starring in Gordon Rayner's series of portraits. A who's who of modernism, the paintings--each limned in a different style--reflect Rayner's take on his subjects'...

It spot.
February 1, 2002... Brasserie Aix, 584 College St., 416-588-7377 Where: Windows graffitied with menu offerings shield this elegant bar, as chic and well trodden as the Champs Elysees. What: A sliver of Parisian paradis, Aix (more Montparnasse than...

Almost famous: for the man who built his name on mournful bedroom music, becoming a rock star was hellish.
February 1, 2002... For the man who built his name on mournful bedroom music, becoming a rock star was hellish. So when Hayden's second album tanked, he went into hiding. Three years later, he's back--recording, touring and attempting to keep celebrity at bay ...

Heroes welcome: in an era when the sports pages are filled with stories of million-dollar contracts rather than athletic achievement, players on the Toronto Rock ... are all about the game.
February 1, 2002... In an era when the sports pages are filled with stories of million-dollar contracts rather than athletic achievement, players on the Toronto Rock -- by day ironworkers, policemen and teachers -- are all about the game: famous for their talent,...

Motive, means, opportunity: on the night of November 25, 1994, John Sikura was found incinerated in his Cadillac ...
February 1, 2002... IT HAD BEEN A QUIET FRIDAY AT THE AURORA FIRE STATION when the 911 call came in. The night was cold, a bitter wind whipping snow across the road. Bill Gardner was in the jump seat and first off the pumper when it turned up John Sikura's long...

Trial and error.
February 1, 2002... If a society's rules of conduct reveal something about the dark recesses of its collective psyche, then there must be much to plumb in Toronto's fixation with the parking ticket--that scornful kick in the shin of city life. We can find there an...

Sins of the fathers ... Dr. John Gerald FitzGerald was a Canadian hero ...
February 1, 2002... AS A SMALL BOY, I BELIEVED OUR HOUSE WAS HAUNTED. In my bones, I felt that 186 Balmoral Avenue--the gloomy stuccoed brick three-storey where I lived until age seven--was inhospitable to children. Sometimes, when I wandered alone through the...

Shore leave.
February 1, 2002... You lose sight of the horizon. That's the trouble with cities. Architects know this, throwing up ever taller skyscrapers in a race to keep the horizon within sight, like trees breaking through the forest canopy to sun themselves. Older, smaller...

Song corpse.
February 1, 2002... It seemed like an answer to the industry's prayers. Allan Gregg's record label promised to combine the artistic integrity of an indie with the corporate clout of a major. But in the end, the clashing cultures at Song Corp. couldn't make...

Light box: rigorously geometric, with expanses of glass and concrete, it's like an exclamation point among the neighbours' gables and gewgaws - a thin slice of modernism on Marlborough.
February 1, 2002... DENISE COOPER HAS DECIDED NOT TO SEEK "outside help," as she delicately puts it, for her problem. For years, she has hoarded shoes, including a pair she's had since she was 14. Asked for numbers, the 34-year-old lawyer shakes her curly mop in...

Mr. Big: he started it as a hobby, a simple pizza place in the burbs, but Phil Sabatino had grand ambitions. Five years later, Via Allegro is an opulent 180-seat establishment.
February 1, 2002... He started it as a hobby, a simple pizza place in the burbs, but Phil Sabatino had grand ambitions. Five years later, Via Allegro is an opulent 180-seat establishment with the best wine list in Ontario HOW FAR DO YOU HAVE TO DRIVE FOR THE...

Tasting notes.
February 1, 2002... Mail storm Early winery supporters nearly always get the best bottles. In California, those who made Screaming Eagle's mailing list before it reached cult status now have first right of refusal on $125 bottles that fetch thousands at auction....

$25 gourmet: Vienna Home Bakery and Cafe.
February 1, 2002... Vienna Home Bakery and Cafe, 626 Queen St. W., 416-703-7278 The scene: Right out of a storybook, this little cupboard of a room. A mother bunny cookie jar oversees the counter action from the top of a white wooden cabinet with scalloped edges;...

Hilary Weston, Lieutenant-Governor: 1997-2002.
February 1, 2002... Whatever imperial prestige once clung to the post was lost in 1937 when then Premier Mitch Hepburn kicked his lieutenant-governor out of the viceregal digs in Chorley Park. No palace, no tin-pot king, figured the wily populist, who resented...