Innholdsfortegnelse for August/September 2021 i Zoomer Magazine

I returned to Canada from my sister’s Istanbul funeral with two possessions dear to Donna that our mother thought I should have – her diary and her charm bracelet. I have never read the diary and never will, on principle, as Donna valued her secrets. And after reading “A Charmed Life” (pg. 70), Nathalie Atkinson’s examination of the timeless allure of the charm bracelet, I feel even more regret at misplacing my sister’s in the blur of my peripatetic youth. The heavy bracelet’s multi-layered trinkets were gathered in souks, bazaars and markets in Europe and the Middle East. It made me feel closer to the life she led the few years we lived apart before a 1990 car crash claimed her. Emotion, memory and nostalgia are often unconsidered side-effects…

AT 64, FIRST-TIME author Michelle Good understands the irrelevance of age when it comes to writing a book. “If you have a story that you feel must be told, what difference does it make if you’re 10 or 90?” she said in a recent interview from her home near Kamloops, B.C. Case in point: her 2020 novel Five Little Indians, which won the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction in English and the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. It is a story of intergenerational trauma told through the braided narratives of residential-school survivors Kenny, Lucy, Maisie, Clara and Howie. It couldn’t be more germane, given hundreds of unmarked graves were discovered at former residential-school sites run by the Roman Catholic Church in B.C. and…

SURELY IT’S A daunting task to portray Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul, but if anyone is up to the challenge, it’s Dreamgirls Oscar-winner Jennifer Hudson. It helps to be hand-picked for the new biopic, Respect, by the queen herself, unlike songstress Cynthia Erivo, who starred in National Geographic’s Genius: Aretha. The Franklin family dissed the March TV series because producers refused to consult them. Before her death in 2018, Aretha was deeply involved in Respect to ensure it was authentic, however difficult it must have been to revisit having her first child at 12, two failed marriages and ongoing struggles with obesity, chain-smoking and alcoholism. Penned by Thelma & Louise writer Callie Khouri and Tracey Scott Wilson, who wrote The Americans, Respect is rounded out by famous faces…

PASS THE CONCEALER. For her second act, one-time dance queen Monika Deol has become a cosmetics entrepreneur. And not just that, but – after starting the business in her 50s – she launched the STELLAR Beauty line at Sephora stores across Canada and the U.S. “If we’re going to go for it, we’re going to go for it,” she said in 2017 when I covered the launch, underlining the potential for a makeup brand targeting women of Latinx, African-American, Indigenous, Chinese, Filipino, Middle Eastern and – of course – South and East Indian descent. The idea – to fill a gap in the market by targeting “the skin tones in the middle” – was born during her TV days, when Deol estimates she sat in the makeup chair some…

IF YOU HAD BEEN THE NO. 1 WOMEN’S TENNIS PLAYER IN THE WORLD SIX TIMES; if you had earned 39 Grand Slam titles; if you’d been the first woman on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine (even though the editors chickened out and made you share the cover with a man); if your self-sacrifice had forced tennis organizations to pay women what they pay men; and if you’d played a match so seminal to second-wave feminism that they made a movie about you (2017’s Battle of the Sexes), you might not think the happiest, most fulfilling decade of your life would be your 70s. But it is for Billie Jean King, 77, because that outward success, glittering as it was, wasn’t enough to offset the pain of living a…

MY FRENCH-CANADIAN grand-mère Yvonne worked tirelessly into her 70s as head of housekeeping at the Timmins, Ont., Ramada Inn and probably would have been mortified that, of all the mementos available after she died in 2018, I kept her set of work keys. The last thing my grandmother did before leaving the house at dawn every morning was clip a set of the hotel’s master keys to her belt loop, where they jangled and clanked as she moved. I associate them with her brisk walk. Her work ethic. They remind me of the time I spent as a child in the laundry room in the belly of the hotel, helping to fold scalding-hot towels fresh from the industrial dryer. Much is made of Proust’s tasty madeleines and the primordial…

OF THE ZILLIONS OF PHOTOGRAPHS taken of the Queen, few images capture the emotions of the woman holding up the Crown. Chris Jackson, the royal photographer for Getty Images, chose his best pictures from nearly 20 years spent jockeying for position in press scrums around the world for his book Elizabeth II: A Queen for Our Time. His selections capture the fleeting moments when the Queen’s game face slips, letting us connect to her humanity. The book publishes in September, timed to land just ahead of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, the 70th anniversary of her ascension to the throne in February, 1952. Jackson, who is married to Natasha Archer, the personal assistant to Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, is sometimes offered special access to the Windsors, but remains in awe…

All you need is love At 112, Puerto Rican Emilio Flores Márquez is confirmed as the world’s oldest man, telling Guinness World Records he attributes his longevity to a life full of love and free of anger. What, you’ve never seen a 93-year-old woman dressed as a donkey riding a broomstick? Japanese nonagenarian Kimiko Nishimoto, who took up photography at 72, is an Instagram sensation thanks to her hilarious photos taken in costume. Stroke of fortune After she was temporarily paralyzed on her dominant right side, a New York woman, 63, discovers she’s a gifted left-handed painter. A study in the U.S. journal Aging showed lifestyle and dietary changes in participants aged 50 to 72 reduced their biological age by three years in just eight weeks Which means that, after…

When the invitation came, I was pretty neutral. Of course, I would participate in my high school class Zoom reunion – why not? But I wasn’t interested in putting in any effort. I put off taking a call from Norm, the organizer, though I did answer some of his 27 emails. After all, if these people were important to me, and vice versa, we would have kept in touch. I am not much given to reminiscing or thinking about the past. That’s probably a bit strange, since history has always been my favourite subject. I am bad at keeping in touch with friends after moves, job changes, even tennis injuries. I am good at picking up where we left off, when they come back into my life. Herzliah was a…

ON HER WEDDING DAY, Natasha Koifman got up and made a series of calls. Even on that sunny day in June, she was taking care of business. Then she went to her downtown office to get hair and makeup done for her Zoomer photo shoot. She shuffled between all-black designer outfits – The Row suit with a Rick Owens tank, then on to an Aje top and Frame denim with an Hermès bag – and walked down the street to pose in front of the five-storey Purman Building, where a condo with her name on it will rise above the historic warehouse. “Two hours later, I got married,” she says, with the photo-shoot glam doing double duty. “That’s my life.” The wedding dress was a Zuhair Murad, also black, pulled…

THE DEFENCE never rests, especially when renowned Toronto criminal lawyer Marie Henein is wearing the robes. That holds true outside the courtroom, too, as Henein will publish a memoir called Nothing But the Truth on Sept. 28 that promises to defend her much-maligned profession and underline why she chooses to represent controversial clients like former CBC personality Jian Gomeshi (acquitted of choking and sexual assault), former Ontario attorney general Michael Bryant (charges withdrawn of criminal negligence causing death, and dangerous driving) and former Vice-Admiral Mark Norman (breach of trust charge stayed). “Her most successful cases made her a lightning rod in some circles, confirming her belief that much of the public’s understanding of the justice system is based on popular culture and social media, and decidedly not the rule of…

Imagine having to call someone in the middle of the night to take you to a communal washroom or use a commode by your bed with only a thin curtain for privacy. Not because there isn’t a bathroom connected to your room, but because there isn’t enough room to turn a walker or a wheelchair around in it. Jill Knowlton, a director of the Ontario Long Term Care Association (OLTCA), told Ontario’s Long-Term Care COVID-19 Commission in a Nov., 2020 presentation that some washrooms have a turning radius of less than a metre and a half. “If you get in,” she testified, “you can’t get out.” For Dr. Diana Anderson, design is a parameter of care, as important as other determinants of health, such as where you live and what…

AS 2020 DREW TO A CLOSE and my father, Murray Rubin, was approaching his 90th birthday, he got an email from a U.S. company that ghostwrites memoirs. My parents live in a condo with nice light and space, but the pandemic was raging outside and life was lonely. Perhaps a book about him would help. He was about to express interest when my mother Roda suggested that I, the eldest of his three kids, and a writer who has been dragged into many of his schemes, might be a better option. Given Murray’s constant refrain at family gatherings – in front of his young grandchildren – that he doesn’t want any bullshit, nicey-nice eulogies when he dies, I was the perfect choice. Without overthinking decades of criticism and wrestling…

IN 1968, FOLLOWING THE SOVIET INVASION OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA, Yuri Dojc, then 22, moved to Toronto and embarked on a storied photography career. Now 75, his work has been shown in the National Gallery of Canada and the U.S. Library of Congress, among other cultural institutions around the world. For his 2009 series Last Folio, Dojc returned to his native Slovakia to document the towns and buildings ravaged by the Second World War, as well as the Holocaust survivors who remained; for 2017’s North is Freedom: The Legacy of the Underground Railroad, Dojc photographed descendants of slaves who escaped to Canada ahead of the Civil War. And in this collection from his virtual photo project Buds of Hope, Dojc says he uses flowers to create “a visual parable,” illustrating how “there is beauty…