Innholdsfortegnelse for April/May 2023 i Zoomer Magazine

IT WAS A SPECIAL WAY to cap off this year’s International Women’s Day. On March 8, I was invited by Tudor Alexis, the Consul General of France in Toronto, to see jazz singer Molly Johnson named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres – the country’s prestigious cultural honour. Those of you who read our cover profile of Johnson (Dec. 2021/Jan. 2022) know that her singular career has been defined by artistic achievement, as well as the activism and philanthropy remarked on by the French Ambassador to Canada, Michel Miraillet, before he pinned the order’s green, white and silver medal on Johnson’s Hoax Couture suit jacket. It gave it a jaunty pop. I had met its designers, Jim Searle and Chris Tyrell – who have dressed Johnson for…

FOREVER YOUNG SILICON VALLEY ENTREPRENEUR BRYAN JOHNSON LOOKS LIKE A MILLION BUCKS — for his age. Better make that two million, which is the amount the 45-year-old billionaire spends each year on his pursuit of perpetual youth, a dream he’s chasing along with other big-tech anti-aging companies like Calico Labs (Google) and Altos Labs (reportedly backed by Jeff Bezos). Johnson is trying to figure out the formula for staying young – experimenting with vitamins, supplements, diagnostic equipment and workout machines and employing a team of 30 health-care professionals who constantly monitor his vital signs. “Can somebody who’s willing to say yes to an algorithm, like myself, stay the same age biologically?” asks Johnson. The answer is playing out live on bryanjohnson.co. PAINFUL PRANK On April Fool’s Day, the federal carbon…

When Raquel Welch appeared on The Muppet Show, of all places, her honest and playfully subversive performance satirized – and ultimately embraced – her status as a sex symbol. The Fantastic Voyage star, who died Feb. 15 at 82, was struggling to get away from playing scantily clad bombshells. In that November 1978 Muppet episode, Welch tries to change her image, so she dresses like Diane Keaton, rehearses Shakespeare and sings “I Am a Woman” with Miss Piggy, reprising the duet she famously performed alongside Cher a few years earlier. But Welch also plays into the fantasies that Hollywood producers, and adolescent boys always projected onto her. She has a sexy dance number with a giant Muppet spider, a nod to her breakthrough role as a nearly voiceless cavewoman…

It is not the best of times for a coronation, (Charles’s takes place on May 6) with the British economy at a nadir and King Charles III’s subjects feeling the pinch from tax hikes and rising heating bills and food costs. But the House of Windsor is entwined with dynasties that have handed down the Crown for more than 1,000 years, and these trials are piddly compared to the War of the Roses, which burned down the House of Plantagenet, and the subsequent Tudor reign of terror, marked by King Henry VIII’s predilection for beheadings. The modern-day monarchy has always provided cheer and a cultural point of pride to rally around in times of strife, so the House of Windsor – which, in the ’90s, endured the Queen’s annus…

BODY EASY DOES IT In her latest book, The Movement Miracle (published March 14), Miranda Esmonde-White promotes, in equal measure, stretching and strengthening to help take us back to the point, when, she tells me, “we never second-guessed the state of our body in terms of what we can and can’t do.” We don’t need to feel the burn to achieve that end. Rather, says the Montreal-based fitness trainer, who turns 74 in May, a regimen of slow- to medium-paced movements done 25 minutes a day is enough to “rebalance” muscles and joints, and enhance functional mobility – which, she points out, we need for everything from reaching into high and low cupboards to putting on our shoes. A classically trained ballerina (and National Ballet of Canada alum), Esmonde-White has…

It took Eugene Levy a few years to figure out his hair. Like, 70 years. It also took him that long to open himself up to the world. But first, the hair. In the early 1970s, doing improv on stage at The Second City in Toronto, he sported a Roman look, combed forward. Then he grew it out into a frizz ball. Doing SCTV in the early ’80s, his look hewed dangerously close to his recurring character Bobby Bittman, the flop-sweaty nightclub singer with the bouffant hair turban. As Jim’s dad in the American Pie franchise, he wore it close cut, a hair shower cap. For A Mighty Wind’s Mitch Cohen, a depressed folk singer (Levy’s most daring character of the four showbiz sendups he co-wrote with Christopher Guest), he…

WHEN MADONNA TOOK THE STAGE AT THE 2023 Grammy Awards in February to introduce the icon-smashing hit song “Unholy,” the shocker – she is Madonna – wasn’t what she wore or what she said, it was her radically altered face. For millions of fans viewing the spectacle of her metamorphosis on the live broadcast, it was a double shocker, since no social-media filtering was involved. Her face was her face. Living as we do now at the nexus of cosmetic alchemy and the filtered image, perception versus reality is a winless proposition. Sales of plastic surgery and cosmetic procedures reportedly shot up as the pandemic receded. On social media, beauty filters are commonly used by public figures and average Joes. In the era of the photo-editing app Facetune, the number…

AS THE WORLD MOURNED THE QUEEN, I kept thinking of the dogs she’d left behind. My Facebook feed brimmed with cartoons of despondent corgis; one pup, depicted with a tear rolling down its face, went viral. The future of the pack seemed personal to me. I intend to grow old with paw prints on my sheets and a soft muzzle resting on my knee. But the Queen had Prince Andrew to take in her dogs and provide every canine comfort. My son is not keen on dogs. My husband Paul and I were 65, our notion of late middle age, when we rescued our first dog. Then a goofy adolescent of 14 months, Casey shook us out of a rut. We laughed more and worried less. Paul got out of…

UP One more tug of the ear to mark a milestone When Carol Burnett (above) turns 90 on April 26, she’ll be feted with a two-hour TV special that includes legends such as Julie Andrews and Cher. Drexel University researchers in Pennsylvania say an artificial intelligence program much like ChatGPT – which replicates human conversation – may help with early detection of dementia The breakthrough came after the scientists spent hours giggling as ChatGPT wrote their study in the style of Dr. Seuss. A wrinkle in time Research funded by the U.S. National Institute on Aging suggests cutting calories by just 12 per cent (240 from a 2,000-calorie-a-day diet) can delay the effects of aging and boost longevity. From Grandmaster Flash to Queen Latifah, it’s been a rapper’s delight Hip-hop,…

Bittersweet is not a word typically used to describe rock albums. Yet Lustre Parfait – a collaboration between late singer-lyricist Gord Downie (above) and Canuck super-producer and musician Bob Rock (below) is as poignant as it is grandiose. As Rock explains in an interview from L.A., after the pair had cut The Tragically Hip’s We Are the Same in 2009, Downie asked Rock if he had any stray music he could write lyrics for. Rock had plenty, dating back decades, since he’s also a distinguished songwriter. They began collaborating in 2010, grabbing recording time in various locales when packed schedules permitted. There seemed to be no rush; Rock says the sessions were joyful and liberating. Then Downie died in 2017 at age 53. Lustre Parfait (May 5), which Rock…

1 CORONATION YEAR By Jennifer Robson > A struggling London hotelier hopes the Blue Lion’s fortunes will be reversed when Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation procession passes its doorstep in June 1953, but someone wants to hasten its demise in this mystery, wrapped in a romance or two, from the bestselling Canadian author, 53, of The Gown. (April 4) 2 THIS BIRD HAS FLOWN By Susanna Hoffs > A rock ’n’ roll rom-com, from the 64-year-old songwriter and co-founder of American pop band The Bangles, features Jane, a one-hit wonder with writer’s block and stage fright, and Tom, a handsome Oxford professor she meets on a plane to London. Cue a redemptive tale full of secrets and lots of inside baseball about the music industry. (April 4) 3 SNOW ROAD STATION By Elizabeth Hay > The…

Geography could not keep Charlene Boyce, 70, and Peter Cowley, 74, from falling in love. Charlene Boyce: I’m a retired French-immersion teacher living on Georgian Bay in Ontario. I’m long divorced, with two wonderful sons and two charming granddaughters. The older son coerced me into online dating on OurTime. I signed up in early June 2015 and found Peter’s profile that September. Peter Cowley: I’m divorced, too, with one child and grandchildren, and I’d been dating online for eight long years. I was convinced I must be doing something wrong. It was dreadful, actually. CB: My summer online was pretty dreadful too, for the record. PC: I was so frustrated that I wrote, “If you don’t live in the city of Vancouver, don’t get in touch with me.” I…

THERE ARE SOME MEMORIES that surface, unbidden, at the whiff of perfume, a bar of music or, in some cases, a brand. When Hudson’s Bay Company announced it was resurrecting Zellers and adding a website, Zellers.ca, the internet was full of reminiscences about the low-cost department store with the distinctive red-and-white logo, a teddy bear mascot named Zeddy and retro restaurants renowned for their hot chicken sandwiches. The news prompted my life to flash before my eyes in retail vignettes: the Truro, N.S., stores where I shopped for Bonne Bell Lip Smackers as a teen; the Zellers Family Restaurant in Saint John, N.B., where I devoured $1.99 breakfasts in my broke 20s; the Toronto store where I spent a fortune in my 30s on toys, clothes and school supplies for…

WE BEGAN WORRYING about access to fresh food during the pandemic, and now, in 2023, our grocery bills are jaw-dropping, as food prices rise faster than inflation, at an estimated five to seven per cent a year. The obvious answer: Start a kitchen garden. A 2020 study of about 1,000 Canadians by the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University in Halifax found one in five Canadians started growing their own food in 2020, and about half the population is growing at least one kind of fruit or vegetable today. Hard times breed ingenuity, and today’s kitchen gardens harken back to relief gardens planted during the Great Depression and the backyard victory gardens sowed during both world wars. Promoted by the government as a patriotic contribution, there were some 209,000 victory…

The sun may finally be setting on the Wild West era of cryptocurrency trading. That’s if new measures announced in February by the securities watchdogs successfully curtail the notorious under-30 “crypto bros” who thrive in the unregulated environment. Last September, investigators accused Aiden Pleterski, 24, of Whitby, Ont., of using investors’ money to fund his lavish lifestyle, including his fleet of sports cars. This follows the bizarre tale of Belleville, Ont., native Gerald Cotten, who managed to build his Quadriga into Canada’s largest crypto exchange, before dying in unusual circumstances at the age of 30 in 2018 and taking passcodes to access $250 million of virtual money to his grave. But these two were mere juvenile delinquents compared to Sam Bankman-Fried of Stanford, Calif., the 31-year-old whiz kid who…

In an era of online shopping and fast fashion, it’s astonishing how much we mindlessly accumulate over the years, much of which we hardly wear, used to wear or have subjected to enough wear and tear. Unless you’re blessed with vast walk-in closets, sometimes more is just more, and many garments languish in closets and dressers, eating up valuable storage space and making it harder to get dressed, given all you have to riffle through. Let’s get your closets up to speed with wardrobe tweaks, organizing techniques and resale boutiques. ↗ THE PURGE Sort items into four categories: keep, repair, donate or toss. Immediately bag items destined for the trash or donation, getting everything that you’re eliminating out of the way. You can’t do better than the trusty old Salvation…

I could start a delivery service with all the people who have offered to pick up groceries for me, and we could eat well for weeks if I said yes to the homemade meals my friends are keen to provide. So far, I am cooking as much as ever, even though my taste buds are a bit off and the numbness in my fingers is making it challenging, if not a little dangerous. But I have to admit the last hour-plus grocery shopping trip left me frustrated, frazzled and fatigued. My friends and family are falling over themselves to figure out how to help me get through my latest treatment for stomach cancer. I am equally anxious to maintain my regular routine. I’m talking about mundane tasks like grocery shopping…

WHENEVER I’M ASKED why I wanted to make a movie about ink, I draw a blank. Even now that The Colour of Ink is a tangible thing – its theatrical release in six Canadian cities was launched (in Toronto) March 23, seven years after I began shooting it – the fact that it exists still baffles me. True, I’ve made my career working with ink, as a young reporter scribbling notes and hammering the carbon ribbon of a typewriter in a Montreal newsroom, and then graduating from newsprint to magazines, where the ink didn’t come off in your hands. But like most writers, I never gave the stuff a second thought. The words were all that mattered. Ironically, it was the digital revolution that led me back to ink. One…

CANADIANS ARE EMERGING FROM the pandemic to find their health system is a hot mess. Six million adults didn’t have a family doctor in August 2022, according to an Angus Reid Institute study. Short-staffed hospitals are temporarily shutting emergency and intensive-care units across the country. Wait times for everything from medical procedures to long-term care have soared. Even before COVID-19 struck, there were chronic problems, but nearly three years of pandemic mayhem have pushed medicare to the brink of collapse, according to Canadian Medical Association president Dr. Alika Lafontaine. “We’ve been saying for a while that we’re concerned about collapse. And in some places, collapse has already happened,” he told CBC News in September. “If you can’t access services, that literally does mean collapse.” Anyone waiting for government help…