Starstruck

I can be very critical of my adopted city but there are also some things about it that I love, and one of them happened last month: TIFF, the Toronto International Film Festival.

King Street, heart of the festival

It happens every September and we always go. Even our very first September, a month after arriving in Canada. Even in the lockdown years, when we attended the festival virtually. It has become close to my heart. Wall-to-wall movies for two weeks. I'm not a massive film buff in ordinary times, but TIFF is not ordinary times.

That first September in Toronto (good grief, 14 years ago...) I went all by myself in the middle of a weekday to see Submarine, whose director of photography, Erik Wilson, was (is) a close friend from when we lived in Brighton. I loved the movie, a sort of coming-of-age story about a young boy in Swansea, Wales, but got a bit tearful from homesickness, seeing both the UK and Erik's name onscreen. I enjoyed the Q&A afterward with the witty director, Richard Ayoade, who had little patience for inane questions. "Why did you decide to film it in Wales?" asked someone who clearly couldn't think of any other way to get his voice heard. "Well," said Mr. Ayoade, "It was a lot easier to make it look Welsh that way." General laughter. That poor film student cringing in the dark. 

TIFF feels like a holiday at home. Nothing is quite the usual. Going to a movie at one o'clock on a Monday afternoon? Of course. Midnight on Tuesday? Yes!  Setting out beach chairs on Bloor Street to queue for rush tickets? Sure! Subjugating my irritation at cars blocking bike lanes? Even that, if it's a limo delivering Antonio Banderas and Pedro Almodovar to a premiere, as happened some years back. I avoided running into them and bit back my remonstrance to their driver. Color me starstruck. It's TIFF!

The toughest part of TIFF is navigating the website to get tickets. This year Simon and I had a TIFF angel (thank you, Yujia!) who did the job for us and even found us tickets to premiere showings. My favourite: Meet the Barbarians, directed by and starring Julie Delpy, about the people of a small Breton village who decide to host a refugee family. They are promised Ukrainians but at the last minute get Syrians. Predictable outcome but in a good way, and funny, with well-rounded characters. (I'm trying not to say 'heartwarming' but unfortunately failing. It is very heartwarming.) Oddly free of religion. In an interview afterward with TIFF director Cameron Bailey, Julie Delpy revealed that the village in the film was one where she visited extended family as a child. 

Snap back: Julie Delpy photographs fans photographing her.
Cameron Bailey, TIFF director, on the right

Those interviews afterward, 'talkbacks' and 'Q & A's, the appearance of actors corralled on the red carpet or free-range on the sidewalk, are part of what makes TIFF so special. Perhaps it's the same for all film festivals, but TIFF is the only one I know. Why would I go to any other? This one has everything (other than the Rocky Mountains and the Côte d'Azur, but let's not quibble). This year, thanks to Yujia-- our TIFF sorcerer-- we spent a lot of time on King Street, the heart of the festival and site of most of the 'red carpet' events. Normally a busy downtown thoroughfare, a stretch of the road is blocked off from traffic for four days to accommodate milling fans and roaming stars. At one point we found our progress halted while Spiderman and his entourage ambled past, and another day we got caught up in a mass of snapping cellphones trying to capture Selena Gomez talking about her new film, Emilia Pérez. My friend Lynda and I tried to squeeze past another crowd madly taking photos. "Who is it?" we asked first one person, then another. Shrugs all around. No one knew; they just stretched arms up and captured what images they could. (Later we found out it was Orlando Bloom and Katy Perry coming out of the premiere for his new movie The Cut.)

Is anybody out there?
(Yes--Orlando Bloom and Katy Perry)

Selena Gomez speaks

 

We saw other movies, too: Hard Truths (well-titled; it is grim) and afterward we heard from its director Mike Leigh and some of the cast members. Mike Leigh is a proper curmudgeon, it turns out, not the gently wise guru I imagined him to be. 

Mike Leigh, curmudgeon

 Mike Leigh and cast of Hard Truths

 

 

At the opposite end of the filmic spectrum we watched Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, a debut feature by Laura Piani. It's adorable and partly set and filmed at Paris's Shakespeare & Company bookstore-- worth seeing for that alone. (In the Q & A Piani said that in order to use the shop they had to do all their filming at night.) Afterward Simon and I hung out in front of the cinema chatting with friends we'd bumped into, and Laura Piani came wandering past. I told her how much we had enjoyed her film and she thanked us and asked our names and where we were from and posed for a selfie with me. Not far behind her came one of the actresses in the film, Elizabeth Crowther, a Londoner, who stood and chatted with us for quite a while, eventually asking about the best route to walk to her hotel. Luckily our friend Anne had a spare map which Liz (as she introduced herself) accepted.  

Laura Piani, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life

Laura and me :) 

  

Liz Crowther, actor in Jane Austen (and a Londoner)
plus our friends Anne and Will

There is something a bit ironic about my growing up in LA yet being thrilled to cavort with film folks here in far-off Toronto. In LA I don't care; Hollywood is an industry and some people work in it and everyone has a story about being an extra or sitting next to a movie star in a restaurant. Maybe because with TIFF, the time span is compressed: just two weeks out of the year. Or maybe it is because the red carpet that Toronto extends seems somehow to embrace the fans as well as the stars and the joy of it takes over the whole city. King Street, the heart of the festival, glitters and shines especially brightly--food trucks and outdoor seating and free jellybeans-- but the glow extends far beyond. Anyway who can resist free jellybeans? Maybe LA should give it a try.

Cast of Millers in Marriage, 
after seeing the completed film for the first time

Willing

I've been talking a lot lately about writing a will. It's one of those topics that used to seem off-limits in polite conversation. Why? Birds don't do it, bees don't do it, not even educated fleas do it, but the rest of us really should. 

Husband and I wrote wills many years ago in England when all we had inheritance-wise was debt, but the kids were small and what we cared deeply about was who would raise them in the tragic event of their being orphaned. Those wills were drenched in tears. 

Since then we've moved to Canada and acquired the odd asset or two to accompany the debt. We've been meaning to write new wills ever since our eldest child turned 18, and he celebrated his 26th birthday this year. In fact all the kids are now above the age of majority so we no longer need to describe in mournful detail where they should live and what schooling they ought to have. How hard could the rest be? Let's get on it, I urged husband. Sometime soon, he said. We engaged in procrastination and denial until we absolutely couldn't any more. Life is precious and precarious. We always knew it was so, but with age, experience, and various hard knocks of our own and of others, we began to believe it. Soon became now.

We already had a lawyer here in Toronto; he had done the legal stuff when we bought our house. We couldn't be sure, however, whether he also advised on wills. It's not a given. A character in my favourite radio soap opera, The Archers, is a solicitor named Usha who is forever telling prospective clients that whatever their problem, it's not her area of the law. Fortunately, our Toronto lawyer proved perfectly willing (sorry) to act for us in this matter. 

He asked to see our previous UK wills. Reasonable. The only thing was that we had no idea where we had put them (those tear-stained pages). Our email accounts from back then have expired or exploded or are otherwise inaccessible to us, so no electronic copies lurked in our inboxes. How to find them? I tried to think where Miss Marple would go to locate documents: perhaps the Prerogative Court of Canterbury or the Public Records Office in Chancery Lane? Would they be filed by date or alphabetized? I imagined riffling past the Magna Carta to reach Leslie Carlin. Surely there was a more modern way.

The lawyer in England ought still to have hold of them, we reasoned. But which lawyer might that be? I remembered the office being near the train station in Brighton, and conducted an online search for it. Too many possibles. Finally I asked the friend who had referred us there all those years ago if she recalled who it was. She hazarded a guess based on our description ("big windows looking onto Queens Road") and I sent off an enquiry by email: "To Whom It May Concern: Do you have our wills?" They replied promptly. Yes they did. Would they send them to us? Yes they would. Did they ask for any identification or have any security or confidentiality measures in place? No they did not. Here you go, have some wills. Maybe they're yours. And they were. Huzzah.

I'd like to say it was smooth sailing from there and that within days we had new documents signed and sealed. But no. We dithered, we dallied. Not until mere days before leaving for Cambridge in March did we get our ducks in a row and our derrières downtown to the lawyer's. And then, at last, it was done. We have written new wills and we know where they are. What a relief.

This Toronto lawyer is savvier than the Brighton one and has advised us in great detail about content and process, including--this time--keeping track of our work (and his). We've shared the existence and the location of the wills and the lawyer's contact info with our kids and our sisters. I may as well share further: he's called Harvey Mandel, 55 Queen St. E., Toronto. (Miss Marple, take note.)  

Go see him. Or go to the guy near the train station in Brighton. Or do it yourself online as our neighbor did. But do it.  

The PSA here endeth. Live long and prosper. Nanoo, nanoo. 

Queue Cambridge

Note: some names have been changed to protect the innocent. (Actually just one name, to protect me.)

Toward the end of May, husband completed his series of Wilde Lectures in Oxford. A big celebration in the big city seemed in order so I booked us tickets to Ronnie Scott's, the iconic Soho jazz venue, followed by dinner at a restaurant in Lexington Street that a friend recommended: Andrew Edmunds. (Now I can recommend it highly myself.) The jazz was melodious, the cocktails jazzy, and the food absolutely excellent. All in all a delightful--and delightfully late--evening. Scraping up pudding crumbs we hustled to the station to catch the last train from London back to Cambridge.

 

Trains however were delayed that night, due to two fatalities on the tracks. The typical disgruntlement of passengers inconvenienced by a signal failure or leaves on the lines did not appear; there were murmurs rather than grumbles. It was sad. Eventually arrived, and we all crammed in. We travelled slowly to let the rail congestion untangle, stopping at one station long enough that people in day-glo jackets handed round bottles of water. In general stiff upper lips prevailed: people in our very full carriage commiserated with one another and made wry jokes rather than moaning. We were all in this together. The old Blitz spirit.

But all that camaraderie and good will evaporated when we finally reached Cambridge, spilled from the train, and dashed for the nearly-barren taxi stand.  The few waiting cars filled and departed and a queue formed. In fact two queues formed rather than one. Separate and distinct. Both grew. 

Queue One eyed Queue Two askance and vice versa. Queue etiquette is sacrosanct. No rules existed about what to do in the case of duplication. A debate began about where exactly the posted "Queue Here" sign pointed. This situation was no joking matter. 

'Why don't we just take it in turns?' suggested a woman around my age in a quiet, sensible tone. She was ignored. A young woman near the front of our queue and an older man in the other one became spokespeople, each arguing the legitimacy of their own interpretation of the "Queue Here" arrow.

"It always starts here," said the young woman.

"The sign says to queue here," said the man, pointing at his feet.

I wandered down to the other side of the station to check whether there was by some miracle a bus at the stop. Nope. I returned to Simon who had remained in the first queue. "No buses," I told him. 

'Excuse me, this is a queue,' someone said. I looked around: a small man with a small beard who was speaking to me.

'Yes, I know, ' I said. 'I'm in it.'

'Well, you have joined it,' he said tartly. 

Simon and I exchanged a puzzled glance. It seemed fairly clear that the two of us were together. Simon said with unwonted annoyance, 'She joined me.' Even he was discomposed by the queue kerfuffle.

'Oh, I do beg your pardon,' said the man, sounding more accusatory than apologetic. He turned slightly away, pulled out his phone, pressed buttons and spoke loudly into it. "This is Donald Duckworth. I want a taxi to Gonville and Caius. Yes, now. Cambridge station." Then he abandoned the queue and marched to the far side of the car park to await his ride. 

Meanwhile a taxi arrived at the 'Queue Here' sign, a seven-seater. A man from Queue Two nabbed it, but then turned round to call out, "Anyone else going to Waterbeach?" Several people shuffled their feet and murmured and then joined him. A return to civility.

A sedan pulled up and this time the young woman who had represented our queue in the earlier debate laid hands on it. "I'm going to the Barton Road," she announced. "Anyone else?" Near enough, we thought, to Clare Hall, and accepted the invitation. The three of us sped through dark and quiet streets, and soon Simon and I found ourselves home in our cosy flat at Clare Hall, tea brewing. 

*****

And that was that, we thought. But no. This is Cambridge! The next day we had lunch in college with husband's old friend Mick Brown, a physicist. Mick, I learned, had once belonged to Gonville and Caius College but left it  many years ago in protest over its refusal to admit women. 

"We had a brief encounter with someone from Gonville and Caius last night," I said, telling the little story about the dueling queues.

"Who was it?" asked Mick. "Who rang for a taxi." I remembered the name the man had given on the phone. 

"Donald Duckworth," I told him.

"Oh-- Don Duckworth!" said Mick. "He's in English. Goes on about Shakespeare, I believe. Quite witty. He of course opposed women." 

Mick told us a bit more about the contretemps at Caius (pronounced "keys"). Stephen Hawking, also famously a member of the college, attended the meeting to cast his own vote-- on the side of equality, of course. The opposition managed to stack votes for their side by recruiting various ancient fellows who had not been seen in college for ages. Everyone noticed. Then, said Mick, "You could hear Hawking's comment, in his very identifiable mechanical voice, 'Ah. The graves are opening." 

The motion to admit women failed, and Mick along with several other members resigned to found Robinson, a lovely college across the street from our own Clare Hall. 

Caius did finally admit women starting in1979-- almost a decade before Magdalene College, which held out until 1988. 

Wilde Times

We are again in Cambridge, at Clare Hall, and so very happy to be here. Our flat is small but perfectly formed, and right next door to last year's. The college feels like a kind of home. A few days after we arrived I ran into a friend in the common room who enquired whether I had enjoyed my vacation. I blinked, uncertain how to respond. Then a friend in Toronto sent an email asking if we were 'back in the UK now'. 

Where is 'back'? What is 'away'? Also, when will it stop raining?

Meanwhile, husband is busy delivering the 2024 Wilde Lectures at Oriel College in 'the other place', as Oxford is (sometimes) known. Last Wednesday he gave the first in a series of four talks he has called 'Religion Refracted and in Motion: On Pilgrimage in Present Times. I accompanied him on the three-train journey from Cambridge to Oxford in order to cheer him on, to see various friends, and to dream among the spires. 

Simon spoke brilliantly, as ever. Three more lectures in the next three weeks. Highly recommended if you're in the neighborhood! (Wednesdays May 8, 15, 22 at 5:15 :) 

At Oriel College

The Newman Oratory in Oriel's chapel

Lecture Number 1

A postscript: his first talk was entitled 'Trivial Religion? From Liminal to Lateral'. I don't know about religion, but it was certainly not trivial to arrange our absence from Toronto, and we owe deep gratitude to the lovely people staying in our house and looking after our pets.

Road Trip with Ma and Pa

Dam, we did it

Most people go to Las Vegas for the gambling and the high life. They go to win money. They go for a lost weekend with a lover or with friends for fun and frolic. 

I went with my mom and dad on a road trip to see art. Specifically, the Rita Deanin Abbey Art Museum.

We set off from LA. I had arrived from Toronto the day before and over dinner we discussed what time was reasonable to get going. My map app told me the journey would take just over four hours. 

"Let's start early," my mother said. 

"What's early?" I asked.

"Nine," she said with decision. 

My mother typically does not get out of bed much before noon; my father shook his head dubiously. We began a weird sort of backward bargaining. 

"How about let's be happy if we leave by noon," I suggested.

"No, we can leave by ten," Mom said.

"Eleven?" I offered. 

My father went upstairs to pack.

Miracles happen. We were all in the car at 10:50 a.m. A good omen.

"Oh no," my mom said as I buckled up.

"What?" 

"I left my coffee inside."

So close. I sighed and undid my seatbelt. "Where is it?"

"Never mind. It's fine. I don't need it." My mother is like this, endlessly self-abnegating. (The opposite of me.) 

"I'll get it," I said. "Just give me the housekey."

"You have it," she said. "It's attached to the car key."

"No, it's not." I demonstrated, waving the keyless fob. "Dad, do you have your key?" 

"No," he said, grimly. Dismay pervaded the atmosphere, less about being totally locked out--several people have spares-- but at the shadow cast by error and the consequent reduction of the goodness of the omen. 

Then came redemption. By sheer chance I had brought along my own key from Toronto and zipped it into a small pocketbook. And again by chance, I had brought this little bag along for the road trip and shoved it in my suitcase. Whew! I burrowed through the boot, found the key, and retrieved the still-hot coffee. We were ready to ride... at exactly eleven o' clock. 

We plowed our way along the Ventura Freeway, the 101 becoming the 134, then climbed out of the LA basin. Snowcapped peaks to the left overlooked our progress past Hesperia and then Victorville, into the desolate terrain of the Mojave desert. My mother, age 92, sighed happily. "I just love traveling by car."

Worth it, the whole trip, for that alone. 

I do love my mom 💖

*****

We stopped in Barstow, the "Hub of the West", for lunch at Roy's Café, on Main Street, a fragment of old Route 66 and the southern Mormon trail. A series of murals commemorate the town's history (caveat: some a tad dicey IMHO). 

The Barstow story

Get your kicks...

...or not

In Las Vegas the GPS pointed us to our hotel just off the Strip though it insisted we get there via the (gated) employee car park. Friendly locals directed us to the guest entrance and soon thereafter, our rooms. Very Vegas views: flashing neon lights in the foreground, desert and mountains beyond, and directly below, a tempting swimming pool. 

But my dad had eyes only for one thing: his mobility scooter. Walking has become painful for him due to a spinal condition so he has been using a rollator (we named her Stella) for the past few months, which helps. My sisters and I have encouraged him to explore scooters but he hesitated. However, he took to this one like a duck to the proverbial. He mastered forward and reverse and hardly ran into anything. (He didn't really come close to that woman with a baby buggy-- honest.) 

After a delicious dinner at a Japanese restaurant my parents wanted to hit the Strip so we set off for a post-prandial tour. ("Here," said my mom as we traversed a casino at the MGM Grand. "Bet on something." She handed me $20. I handed it back, betting that we'd have more fun getting out of the place. Plus, the casinos seem entirely electronic and incompatible with paper money.)  I found myself jogging to keep up as my father disappeared into the middle distance on his electric steed. We strayed further than I intended, and my mother gradually wore down. Las Vegas is, however, set up for hospitality. A kind parking valet at a random nearby hotel called a cab for my mom, while I jog-walked alongside my speed-demon dad back to our own hotel. (Luddite's confession: no ride-hailing apps on my phone.)

Speed demon Dad

The native New Yorker

Quick casino transit

The next night we visited The Sphere, a new installation / venue shaped like--yes--a globe. Inside they display audiovisual magic aka technology with robots and other AI. The staff at The Sphere made the experience magical for us too; I called their accessibility office about two hours before our show to ask whether we would be better off with my dad's walker or (somehow) his scooter. "No worries!" said the friendly young man on the end of the phone. "We'll provide you a wheelchair and an escort!" And they did, a big gray-bearded man, Mark, who it seems attended the high school down the road from me. Mark told us quite a lot about himself (too much, according to my mother), including that his father used to play drums for Bob Hope's band and that as a child, he would tag along. Now by his accounting he's some sort of property mogul, one who apparently likes to serve as a wheelchair escort on the side. I have no idea whether any of it was true but then again, what is truth? He got us to the front of several queues, which is more important than truth. 

My 94-year-old Dad conversed with Lia the robot and proved to be the absolute star of the show. Hilarious and smart. If I could figure out how to add a video to this blog I would show him off but you'll have to take my word. I do love my dad.

Inside the sphere...

It's a sphere

But the main event, the one that drew us to Las Vegas in the first place, was a visit to the Ruth Deanin Abbey Museum, a work of love jointly created by Rita and her husband (now widower) Robert Belliveau.

Rita died in 2021. She was one of my mother's numerous (as in, one of over 35) first cousins in and around Brooklyn in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Like my mother, Rita moved west and settled there: my parents to California, Rita to New Mexico and also to California and eventually to Nevada. She became a multi-media artist and a poet, and for a time the only woman professor of art at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. 

Rita married Edward Abbey, a writer and environmental activist who wrote novels and essays including The Monkey Wrench Gang (about a ragtag band of people determined to destroy the Glen Canyon Dam) and The Brave Cowboy, on which the classic western film Lonely Are the Brave, starring Kirk Douglas, was based  [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Abbey]. Rita and Edward had two sons, Joshua and Aaron, who were my occasional playmates when both my father and theirs were at Stanford University--my father as a graduate student and theirs as a creative-writing fellow. My parents told me that we used to visit the Abbeys when they lived in Half Moon Bay, on the coast between Palo Alto and San Francisco. Once Rita offered to lend my parents one of her paintings to cheer up their dowdy married-student Stanford University apartment. "Which way up does it go?" my father asked her, looking at it.

"Oh, it doesn't matter," Rita said airily. At least, that's what my parents remember Rita saying. I have it on good authority that her saying such a thing was extremely unlikely.

Indeed, some time later when the Abbeys paid a return visit to our family in Stanford Village, Rita spotted her painting in pride of place over the sofa and chastised my father. "You've hung it upside down!" He has told this story a few times now and I still can't work out whether he is joking or she was or if both were in complete earnest, or some combination. Memory is tricky. History is hard.

Rita's painting

Sculpture garden

In the museum in Las Vegas my father told the story again, this time also to my cousin Aaron (the good authority mentioned above), Rita's younger son, who joined us there. Laura Sanders, the amazing director, arranged everything and gave us a personal tour. We all swapped stories about Rita. I shared a childhood memory of Rita after she had divorced Edward and brought her boyfriend to visit us with  in Los Angeles. My family lived then in UCLA's family housing complex on Sawtelle Boulevard. I was about six or seven. Rita and Mirek had gone scuba diving in Santa Monica Bay and returned to our apartment with a bucket of live lobsters. My mother duly boiled a pot of water. Soon I heard her scream; I ran into the kitchen. A lobster had escaped from captivity and had caught her bare toe in its claw. The boyfriend ("that would be Mirek," says Aaron at the museum) pried it off and I accompanied my mother to the bathroom where she applied a bandaid. (As I reread this bit I think they must have been crabs. But my parents insist they were lobsters. Again. Memory. History. Tricky.)

We loved looking at Rita's amazing art and visiting her studio and talking family history. My mother gave names to the sepia-tinted faces in a long-ago group photograph. "That's my mother," she said, pointing out my grandmother as a youngster.

Glowing stained glass 

More about the museum and about Rita's husband Robert Rock Belliveau, who died this year: The Doctor Who Finished His Late Wife's Art Museum.

On our last day my father had to bid farewell to his new best friend, the mobility scooter, and return to the plodding effort of walking with Stella. We detoured on the way home to Hoover Dam, which I had never seen. Lake Mead shone in the brilliant blue sunshine, an actual body of water rather than the sea of solar tiles that had fooled me a few days earlier. The dam is a tremendous and breathtaking construction but I could not help wondering about the view back when the Colorado River flowed through, before the dam amputated its course. Would we build it today? 

Lake Mead 

Oops?

Not the Colorado River...

After a lunch stop at the Dam Cafe we headed west into the sunset, back to Los Angeles. A few days later I returned to Toronto. Next stop, England. "Globetrotter," my cousin Laura called me. I don't feel it. I'm just a gal looking for her homes. 

Lonely Are the Brave