Toronto Life articles from May 1999

Toronto Life archives from May 1999

Dandy young man.
May 1, 1999... They hang out at Queen Street cafes with names like Mirage, obsessing about love and sex and making it in film, fiction and fashion. They fear poverty less than getting a job. They're the blase nomads of Generation X who inhabit Russell Smith's...

Keeping up with (Tom) Jones.
May 1, 1999... You'd think that, after giving a two-hour performance belting out classics like "Delilah," any self-respecting fifty-nine-year-old lounge singer would be ready to call it a night. Not Tom Jones. The aging rocker dropped by the Reservoir Lounge...

Peter principals.
May 1, 1999... Seen recently in deep conversation over dinner at Pangaea: ex-TVOntario chairman Peter Herrndorf and ex-Alberta premier Peter Lougheed. Whatever could it mean? The two Peters have a fair amount in common: both earned their MBAS at Harvard; both...

Speaking of CBC --.
May 1, 1999... During the first few weeks of the technicians' strike, we were willing to overlook the on-air gaffes by ill-prepared journalists. That Metro Morning bit on the rising suicide rate in Toronto, for example: the reporter claimed that jumpers...

Writing on the Wallpaper.
May 1, 1999... Think what you may of the Winnipeg-born founder and editor of Wallpaper, Tyler Brule does appear to have a sense of humour. Early this year, writerartist R. M. Vaughan--a former playwright in residence at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and author...

Postcards from the edge.
May 1, 1999... I can't help but look forward to my monthly phone call from Tony Burgess. He does a lot of the talking during these calls, but I like it that way because his swooping, looping conversational spirals are weirdly addictive. Slipping in and out of...

Down the drain: Mel Lastman's council has worked hard to freeze taxes but seems less committed to stopping leakage from city coffers.
May 1, 1999... IT'S A BRISK fall morning, and two guys are standing in a fresh hole near my front porch. They're here to fix a smelly problem that sloshed up into my basement. The job involves replacing an ancient clay trap with new PVC tubing, for which I...

Black swan: James Kudelka's dark vision of Swan Lake reflects ... the daunting challenges faced by the National Ballet of Canada.
May 1, 1999... WHEN James Kudelka was a boy, he attended a National Ballet performance of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake at the Royal Alex. Although he had been taking dance lessons since the age of five, this was the first live ballet he had actually seen. On a...

Best revenge: four years after she was publicly dumped as cohost of the CBC national news, Pamela Wallin is television's biggest star.
May 1, 1999... HALF A CENTURY into the television age, a TV set still comples attention: when you turn it on, every eye in the room flicks toward it. In the CBC Broadcasting Centre, down the hall from the studio where Pamela Wallin is about to record her...

Icons: tower of power (Upper Canada College).
May 1, 1999... EVEN AS A LOWLY eight-year-old new boy in 1958, droning the stanzas of the school song--"High on a hill she stands / Her tower a landmark clear"--I was struck by the irony of the pronoun. After all, at Upper Canada College, that...

My life as a scab.
May 1, 1999... The strike deadline was midnight, Saturday. We were told to meet an orange school bus at the Yorkdale Mall parking lot at 5:30 p.m. The windows would be sealed with bulletproof Plexiglas. Bolted from the inside. Ready to take us across the line...

Rituals: exercising the senses at St. Mary Magdalene.
May 1, 1999... PSST. Want to commit forbidden practices on Sunday morning? Go to 477 Manning Avenue, where, on a narrow block of cheek-by-jowl semidetached houses, a plain brick fortress announces itself as the Church of St. Mary Magdalene, Anglican Church of...

Reesor's pieces: will the scandal at the Firearms Registration Unit slow Deputy Chief Steve Reesor's meteoric rise through the ranks of the Toronto Police Service?
May 1, 1999... STEVE REESOR WAS IN his seventh-floor office at Metro Toronto Police Service Headquarters on College Street one September day in 1997 when he took a call from John Duncanson, a young, cowboy-booted reporter with The Toronto Star....

Wright way: hell-bent Wrightophile Robert Blackburn spent twenty-three years composing an architectural ode to the master.
May 1, 1999... THERE'S NO OFFICIAL count of how many visits Frank Lloyd Wright--architect, legend, fountainhead--made to Toronto. He definitely showed up at the U of T architecture school in the fifties, when he was in his eighties, to see what the students...

What becomes an It Girl most? Hanging with downtown's designing women.
May 1, 1999... Scene-makers Jules Power, Cathy Knott and Amy Wah (from left to right) are best friends, emerging talents in the world of design--creators of urban sportswear, mod interiors and mohair underwear, respectively--and mad scientists of style. ...

Man at work: ... superchef Mark McEwan likes to have a lot on his plate.
May 1, 1999... THE CHAMPAGNE was on ice, the kitchen on high alert, the glittering private room had never looked more inviting: Centro stood poised for a command performance. En route from London to Bermuda, superchef Anton Mosimann was in town for a couple...

Tim Johnson, manager of the Toronto Blue Jays: November 1997-March 1999.
May 1, 1999... "THIS IS A victory for the turds. The turds are all the little guys in baseball, the scouts, the minor-league guys, the ones who spend all their time on the lonely highway by themselves and don't get the credit they deserve. I'm one of them....