Dinner last night at Pho Asia, way across town, with two spectacular human beings who happen to be closely related to me, and to each other. As I just posted on FB, these two kind and funny human beings, believe it or not, share 100% of their DNA. Many people look like their siblings. My offspring do not — one a six-foot-eight red-blonde with all my mother’s British/Viking genes, and the other five-foot-five, a dark-haired social justice warrior with all my father’s Jewish ones. One of the things I’m happiest about in my life: that these two love and care for each other, a gift that will last beyond my lifetime.
And then they went back to their busy lives, and I to the Black Box Theatre almost next door, to see George F. Walker’s new play Girls Unwanted, directed by him. It’s a tiny theatre and they sat me in the front row so I was nearly on the set, and a fabulously detailed set it was; I wanted to borrow some of the books. I’m glad Walker is still writing, decades after he was one of the kickstarters of Canadian theatre. But I have to say that this play was unremittingly grim, with rage and screaming and not much redemption – though Walker does show us that the one supposedly “normal” character in the play, from a family with a mother and father and a home, is still wounded.
I know the lives of our abandoned or neglected street children are horrendous. And now I’ve seen some of their tragedies played out a foot from me.
Tonight, a movie about Paul McCartney and Wings making an album. There will be music. I suspect it will make me happy.
Listened to Oliver Burkeman’s webinar about productivity — actually, about NOT forcing ourselves into productivity — while doing the Big Switch in my bedroom from summer to winter clothes. I know the minute I do that, we’ll have a spate of hot weather and I’ll have to dig some lightweight stuff out again — in fact, yesterday was hot, and lots of people were downtown wearing shorts. I note the big style thing for young women is extremely short shorts with high boots — very practical. Taking an Uber home, I marvelled with the driver at the crowds on King, Dundas, and College, thousands of people out, dining on the street, strolling, gathering, noise, music, laughter. “It’s Friday night,” he said. “They need to let off steam.” There are places in the city where it looks like no-one is over the age of 35. I don’t know how it works, but sometimes, despite the dunderheads running this province who are doing their best to destroy everything good about this city, it does.
The driver told me he delivers mail from 9 to 5 and drives an Uber from 6 to 12. Immigrants, keeping us all going. He also said he hoped Donald Trump got back in because the world was better off under him. “There were no wars, like now.” Ye gods. Speaking of controversial opinions, as you know, I watch the crabby and sometimes very annoying Bill Maher, and yesterday, he had on one of my favourite people on earth, Yuval Noah Harari. He knows so much and is so articulate, so terrifying in the clarity with which he sees the world — that never before AI, for example, have we humans invented something that’s “an agent, not a tool,” which can make its own decisions and may eventually take over, that needs to be regulated right now.
World, let’s listen to a wise, knowledgeable man for once, shall we?
