Toronto Life articles from October 2000

Toronto Life archives from October 2000

Storyteller.
October 1, 2000... When she was lonely, she would whisper her stories to the walls. "They have ears," her family told her, and she was perhaps too young to understand that that was dangerously more than a metaphor in Communist-controlled Hungary. Later, when the...

Inside (a sperm bank).
October 1, 2000... Liquid assets In a cement low-rise at Bloor and Islington, Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" plays softly on CHFI while lab technicians eyeball sperm through microscopes, tracking their movement, their size, their count. Here at ReproMed--Canada's one...

House proud (lawn ornaments).
October 1, 2000... House proud Lawn ornaments are classic kitsch. Whether it's a sleepy-faced, pointy-hatted ceramic gnome, a cluster of plastic daisy pinwheels or a faux waterfall, exterior decor screams camp. Oh, sure, there are classy, upscale Martha-fied...

This issue.
October 1, 2000... A CITY, AS SOMEONE RECENTLY REMINDED ME, IS ONLY AS healthy as its institutions, of which one of the most important is obviously the police. Thus this special issue, in which Sylvia Fraser profiles Chief Julian Fantino (page 100), Jennifer...

Take this job and --.
October 1, 2000... TAKE THIS JOB AND... Funny and awful. For my money, it's a combination of those two things that makes the most satisfying theatre. Writer-performer Chris Earle started funny, as a member of the Second City touring and mainstage companies, and...

Girl trouble.
October 1, 2000... GIRL TROUBLE In her sexually fraught Inversions of "boy pursues girl," Eliza Griffiths paints concupiscent females calling the shots with lipstick-smeared males. A high-school-confidential aura surrounds these nubile protagonists, their ripe...

Cold comfort.
October 1, 2000... COLD COMFORT A sizable critical contingent feels that Stanley Kubrick's films are the work of a clinician--or, worse, a misanthrope. And at first glance, pictures like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop...

Sophisticated lady.
October 1, 2000... SOPHISTICATED LADY Two kinds of female vocalists emerged from the big bands of the 1930s and '40s: jazz singers and girl singers. Jazz singers scatted and improvised (Ella Fitzgerald), soared divalike (Sarah Vaughan) and swung the rhythms...

World we want.
October 1, 2000... There are few things more rare or disarming than an optimistic intellectual. We accept (indeed, expect) stockbrokers to babble about the triumph of capitalism or American presidential hopefuls, to yabber about making the U.S. the best country...

(Mel) Lastman standing: he's been an effective, if immature, megamayor for the past three years. Nothing short of an act of God will prevent him from being a ... megamayor for the next three.
October 1, 2000... He's been an effective, if immature, megamayor for the past three years. Nothing short of an act of God will prevent him from being an effective and immature megamayor for the next three. Time to take stock AN OLD TRUISM OF LOCAL POLITICS...

History in the making: with the CBC's most ambitious project ever ... executive producer Mark Starowicz has put his brilliant journalistic reputation on the line.
October 1, 2000... GEORGE BROWN DIDN'T LIKE THE Catholics, he didn't like the French, and he certainly didn't care who knew it. He was a Torontonian of the 1840s through the 1870s, and prejudice was natural to him--as John Fraser wrote recently in Eminent...

Martin's room ... reassembling Martin Cohnstaedt's beautiful life.
October 1, 2000... JUNE 2000. MARTIN COHNSTAEDT LIES IN A bed at West Park, a continuing-care hospital near Jane and Eglinton, surrounded by photographs and other memorabilia. He holds my right hand in a firm grip, his blue eyes alive as I talk about politics,...

Straight man: Julian Fantino behaves like a lawman out of another era ... understanding the new chief.
October 1, 2000... IT IS MARCH 6, AND JULIAN FANTINO IS BEING SWORN in as eighth chief of the Toronto Police Service in the atrium of the pink-granite College Street headquarters. This is the climax of a string of ceremonials he and retiring chief David Boothby...

Good cops ... here are Metro's finest.
October 1, 2000... 1951 Detective Edmund Tong. Arrests Larry Shirley, kingpin of a band of bank robbers known as the Numbers Gang, after a running gunfight down Yonge Street. A year later, Tong is shot and killed by a member of the Boyd Gang. 1952 Sergeant...

Watchdogs ... Henry Masuka walked into St. Mike's emergency ward to get help for his asthmatic infant son. By midnight, Masuka was dead at the hands of the police. Enter the Special Investigations Unit.
October 1, 2000... ANATOMY OF A BULLET. THREE CENTIMETRES IN LENGTH. THE bottom two-thirds of the cartridge case--that's "case," not "casing"; casings are for sausages--is a shiny brass. The top third is a duncoloured copper. The cartridge does not come to a...

Bad cops.
October 1, 2000... Murder, assault, robbery--police officers aren't immune to humanity's baser instincts. But it's the abuse of power, the breach of our trust, that makes transgressions by the police seem all the more heinous 1973 Constable Merle Smith....

Thick blue line ... police union boss ... Craig Bromell.
October 1, 2000... He blames the media for portraying him as a monster, but the menacing image has served him well. After his first term as police union boss, Craig Bromell is firmly established as the voice of the force, its bulky and forbidding face. Power up...

Artful lodgers: in an Edwardian house tucked amid the oaks and maples of Rosedale, paintings and sculptures take centre stage.
October 1, 2000... In an Erdwardian house tucked amid the oaks and maples of Rosedale, paintings and sculptures take centre stage. The home as a blank canvas IN 1909, U.S. CITY PLANNERS VISITED Toronto and toured a meandering Rosedale street with brick...

Renaissance man: impresario Steven Levy.
October 1, 2000... The man has a Ph.D. in social policy research but his true calling is design. Twenty-six years ago, Steven Levy founded the One of a Kind Craft Show, and in 1998 he launched the Interior Design Show (a venture he runs with his daughter Shauna)....

Hail, Susur: for a while, it seemed our finest chef (remember Lotus?) was gone for good. But after three years of globe-trotting, the talented Mr. Lee is back.
October 1, 2000... For a while, it seemed our finest chef (remember Lotus?) was gone for good. But after three years of globe-trotting, the talented Mr. Lee is back--and his eponymous new restaurant is a triumph THERE IS A SQUADRON OF EARLY-MORNING squash...

Ed's warehouse: January 20, 1966 - September 16, 2000.
October 1, 2000... I remember the night, more than 35 years ago, when Ed and his ever present sidekick, Yale Simpson, were in having dinner at Barberian's. Ed had recently restored and reopened the Royal Alex, which was then in the middle of nowhere. To attract...