We took up most of the row in the cinema. Nine pals who remembered when Rock was young, hoping for the biggest kick we ever got…Okay, I’ll stop now with the Bernie Taupin lyrics, except lawdy mama; what happened to the second half?

Rocketman is a great ride. It’s a better ride than the current incarnation of Aladdin, now beating Rocketman at the box office. Don’t you dare come at me for going to see Aladdin either: it has a magic carpet and 🎵 A Whole New World 🎵and that’s enough for me (and my young pals who joined me when I asked, Will you take your Auntie Anne to the movies?)

Rocketman begins with a full list of confessions. Elton John listing all of his addictions and we’re off, watching little Elton Sad Boy become big Elton Star Boy through a trippy set of brilliant musical sequences. At some point, little Elton (known as Reggie then) and Big Elton meet one another in this musical mirage and Little Sad Boy asks Big Star Boy for a hug. Right there, we are in the zeitgeist proper, and nobody can quibble with therapy and all of its attendant hopeful outcomes. Nor can we fault the soft lens on a long friendship: Elton John’s celebrated partnership with lyricist Bernie Taupin is the film’s heart. These two talents worked separately. How they collaborated is one of the film’s more accurate and intriguing threads. The star blessed this film, signing on as executive producer, and his evident pride in that rare showbiz jewel of a union shines brighter than anything else here. Except for the music. Oh yes, the music. We didn’t break into full-out karaoke, although tempted I was at points. This was our early tweendom’s soundtrack, so B-B-Benny me back, baby.

Parts of the film are utterly generic. We have seen these rock narratives before and know of their properties. What makes this one beat are dizzying music sequences with their own aesthetic ( and conveniently muddled timelines- songs are presented to fit the film, not the reality). The guy who punches life into every one of them is Welsh actor Taron Egerton. Here he is, showing off his pipes at a recent Aids Foundation auction.

The twenty-nine-year-old joins actor Jamie Bell, who is also a dancer (remember Billy Elliot?), and Richard Madden as a trio of stellar talent; reason enough to go. Madden is hot hot hot these days as rumours continue that he is the clear favourite to follow Daniel Craig as James Bond. I loved him in the British Bodyguard series, and Game of Thrones fans know him as Rob Stark.

If you’re like me, you might wonder at the sudden end of the film. I promise no spoilers, but there’s a chunk of life history smushed at the film’s conclusion into a few photos and information graphics, all equal in the redemptive narrative possibility to the wild tale preceding it. This musician has raised $450 million for AIDs research, after all. It’s a minor quibble, but this fan wanted to see more of that real-life second chapter’s potency. And for all the whiners dissing jukebox musicals, there is this: music as we know it will never be like this again. It will continue to morph and produce wondrous sounds as it has, but we are now in a time of ephemeral shapeshifting: never has it been harder for artists to reach this kind of international success. The best moment in this film is one of gorgeous levitation. I won’t spoil it for you, but this moment captures the giddiness of hearing magic. I dare you not to smile. Or cry. Eventually, this kind of film and this well-trodden genre will die out, but the music? It lingers on, and we will all sing until we have lost our voices. Look for me this summer, roaring around town, belting out Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters in one never-ending loop.

🎵 And I thank the Lord there’s people out there like you. 🎵

And finding more excuses to wear floppy hats. Wore them then. Still wearing them now, without the spitting gap.

What is your favourite Elton John song?

Scientists must be conducting lab tests on middle-of-the-night phone calls and the human body’s capacity to absorb shock.

Perhaps in a future call, a publisher will be on the other end, telling me my manuscript was clever and the surest one they’ve seen all year. That will erase my theory that all such calls make a mockery of the dark: are they not always bad news?

It was a small voice on the phone in the dim hours:

Mom, I was in an accident. On my bike. I’m at the hospital. I will be okay.

And so to the hospital, we raced, arriving to find no one in her assigned room. At the nursing station, I could hardly get the words out.

My kid, there, in that room. Where is she?

Name?

Kate.

She’s been taken for tests.

What kind of tests? What is happening?

You’ll have to wait to speak to her doctors.

But can’t you tell me anything?

I’m sorry. She’s over 18. I assure you someone will be here soon to talk to you.

No news? I spluttered. For me? But but but but...

Eventually, I learned my eldest daughter had been hit by a car while riding her bike at twilight and had lacerated her liver. She would recover fully (quickly, really) and finish her final year of university the following June. Six weeks following the accident, I published my food memoir, packed my youngest off to McGill and shoved aside the blink-of-an-eye gulp that followed to assist my siblings in moving my parents from my childhood home into a retirement facility.

It was a year like any other as a mother. Thrills and spills.

I didn’t know any of that in the hospital at that moment in a darkened hallway in the early hours of a new summer day, a moment that hung suspended like all the others in my memory mobile, shifting in the wind. Faced with stonewalling from a medical team who have seen the shape of these overnight shifts before, I joined my mothering sisters around the globe, back and forth through time’s tapestry.

Twenty-one years of mothering resulted in a cosmic explosion. From deep within me came a rumble.

Then a roar; a roar so stentorious all the troubled patients in that ER that night thought it was their time to exit as the heavens had finally opened; a roar the filmmaker in me would now direct my imaginary effects crew to have the ground split into fiery chasms; a roar Kate’s father still remembers as he stood there, equally shaken and, unlike me, stoic; a roar that was not Shakespearean—anyone could grasp its supremacy; a roar uniting mothers of the earth to their wildest instincts; a roar fusing all the elation (and lactation) and sensations of a journey with no end. Because there is nothing that will come between me and my babies.

Ever.

Not even you, Nurse, there in front of me merely doing your job. Nurse, who doesn’t flinch when I roar from the depths of my being,

I. AM. HER. MOTHER!!!

That furious roar was not my proudest moment, but it was my purest. It will come again.

These two glories are proof.

Happy Mother’s Day. Thank you, Mom, for your instincts. Mine have never been foolproof, but, for the most part, they’re ready. To back away when necessary, to advance when needed. You gave that to me. Among all your gifts, today, I am thankful for that one the most.

More on mothering:

• We were all children once
• The mother you need
• Lipstick Lessons
• You didn’t burn your bra
• Juggle? I’m the whole circus, baby!

Sunday is Mother’s Day here in Canada.

If you’re a mom, perhaps you will be fȇted. Maybe you will salute all those who mothered you.

Perhaps you’ll cry. To get you started, watch the film Becoming Astrid.

Never before has a film come with a more appropriate spirit and shine for the week. A stunning study of character and acting finesse, this gorgeous film comes via Danish filmmaker Pernille Fischer Christensen —who won the Silver Bear Jury Grand Prix award at the Berlin Film Festival for her first feature film back in 2006. Christensen’s treatment of the Swedish literary icon Astrid Lindgren is my spring pick for your next couch flick.

A childhood without books—that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy.

Astrid Lindgren, 1956

If you missed Pippi Longstocking in your childhood literary travels, it’s okay; you’ll survive….barely. Even if you did miss encountering the strongest girl in the world who lives by her own rules in a house with her monkey pal, Mr. Nilsson, Becoming Astrid is not a film about the back story of that beloved character. It is a film about origin: how a young creative woman in pre-war Sweden becomes an unwed mother and journalist and learns to live independently before her eventual marriage (which is not shown in the film). This film posits that these early years informed Lindgren’s later work—34 chapter books and 41 picture books that sold 165 million books together—and stoked the children’s rights activist she eventually became. The film opens and continues throughout with Astrid, the older woman surrounded by fan mail from children. Lindgren is the fourth most-translated children’s writer after Enid Blyton, Hans Christian Andersen, and the Brothers Grimm.

Don’t you worry about me. I’ll always come out on top.

Pippi Longstocking, by Astrid Lindgren

A stand-out performance by Alba August as a young and bored Astrid Ericcson is fine-tuned by Christensen’s direction. In scene after scene, this astonishing talent is given room to show various emotions as she portrays the young writer outcast from her religious community. Not once does it feel manipulative. This writer shall say it as it is: a female director telling the story of an unconventional and exceptional woman is rare.

That dear readers, is worth a celebration worthy of Mother’s Day.

Yes, I cried. So will you. And smile too. Watch it with your mother.

The green is poking out and doing its usual flirtation. Elsewhere in Toronto, theatre is blooming.

Book it today:

Hand to God at the Coal Mine Theatre. Minuscule but mighty is the space on the Danforth run by Ted Dykstra and Diana Bentley. As Dykstra told our audience last weekend, this is a bare-bones-budget kind of theatre, and yet, what has been on offer since he began five years ago is continued excellence in programming and product. I have yet to see anything that didn’t provoke and prod at the brain space: Hand to God was another home run. This is for you if you like your comedies running dark and demonic. I loved it. So did a lot of others: the show is sold out but added matinee info is here.

Godspell at the George Ignatieff Theatre. Coming just in time for the Summer Solstice, Wavestage surely will tune us up for summer and all the vibrancy that season offers with their production of this hit musical. Godspell was the first primary musical theatre offering from three-time Grammy and Academy Award winner, Stephen Schwartz (Wicked, Pippin, Children of Eden), and chances are strong if you went to summer camp anytime after it hit off-Broadway in 1971, you sang some of that memorable score as did millions around the world when the show toured. When Godspell went on to open on Broadway in 1977, that music won Schwartz a Tony award for best original score. Toronto has a strong connection with Godspell. When it opened here in 1972, it became an instant hit. The cast included Gilda Radner (making her stage debut), Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas and Victor Garber (who would go on to star in the film adaptation), and of course, Andrea Martin. Ticket info here.

I will never forget it. All those people became my best friends. I remember every moment of that play.

-Andrea Martin

Next to Normal at the CAA theatre. This musical won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and three Tony awards and is part of the Off-Mirvish series. Produced by the Musical Stage Company, whose mandate is to offer material that “causes conversations on the car ride home, ” this show will do more to understand mental illness’s impact than any flashy health campaign out there. See it for the best cast on Toronto stages right now, led by Louise Pitre and Ma-Anne Dionisio: both, along with the other cast members, were outstanding on the preview performance I saw. Yes, we stood and cheered. Toronto audiences need to do that more often. These people delivered. Ticket info here

On the horizon: Toronto Fringe Festival will partner with Crow’s Theatre this coming July and bring 16 festival shows to their home in Leslieville. That’s a first. As for Crow’s upcoming season, Ghost Quartet will surely be the hottest ticket next fall. The Canadian premiere of what Crows calls a “surreal chamber musical” comes from Dave Malloy, the composer/lyricist of Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812. I’m in if this new production is as fresh as that one.

Next Sunday’s Game of Thrones episode, known by those who made it as The Long Night, took 11 weeks to shoot, all at night and will be the longest episode in Game of Thrones history. According to Collider, it will also feature the longest continuous battle sequence ever put to film. I will need fortification to watch it, unlike last night, where I nursed my sadness over my favourite hockey team’s playoff loss with a belly full of mini chocolate eggs.

(Read: You’re never too old for egg hunts)

Next week is Greek Easter, where my inlaws and their relations will eat (delicious) lamb. Wine will be my main course if I am going to watch beloved characters fall to the White Walkers.

I loved this past Sunday’s episode of Game of Thrones. It was epic and rare as it came without all the touted violence to come. Epic as Brienne was knighted, and her smile that followed was the best thing on the small screen this week, even if you lined up all the hats in the Easter Parade movie I watch yearly. Epic for Sam and his sword handover…will Sam survive the battle at Winterfell and be the scribe who captures all of this story for future generations? Epic for Arya, who finally got some (nookie). Epic because characters sitting around a fire musing about their death offers chances for scriptwriters to bring powerful poignant pauses to what has always been a horrifying violent series.

And epic because it ended with Florence and The Machine’s Florence Welch singing over the closing credits.

You are all I need to remember

You are all I need to know

Your hands find mine

when all the other maps are muddled

In the dark you light my way

‘twas ever so and ever shall be

Happy Anniversary #62, Mom and Dad.

More reading:

I lived here once

I flew back to Toronto earlier this week after a whirlwind adventure overseas. Part 1 Paris. Part 2 London. All Parts Deliciously Fun. Except for opening my phone upon arrival home to see the news about Notre Dame on fire. Why does the world care? Because we are all tumbling into a digital black hole of platform existence only. Clinging to artifacts and icons helps remind us we were here once. London is full of those reminders.
Here are some of the wonders.

Tube Envy. As a Torontonian stuck with a 1970s transit system, I cannot say I exactly enjoyed zipping about London’s uber-efficient Underground, otherwise known as the Tube —after all, like any busy metropolis, it was often crowded with passengers chomping on full dinners. Then there’s that recent Transport for London study indicating the network’s nasty pollution problem. Many of the Tube lines run far deeper underground than other famed systems in Paris, Berlin or NYC, as I discovered in one of many Dumb Tourist Moves: walking down a very deep winding (and claustrophobic) staircase we later learned was only for emergencies—but that I was impressed as hell is a good snapshot. How can I not be? The sheer breadth of the grid and the efficiency of moving millions of users made me green. This alone is what stalls Toronto from being anything close to world-class.

Old and New Awesomeness. Time travel is authentic in London. Just use the sci-fi bathroom pods at Sketch after your afternoon tea that begins with a boater-festooned waiter offering caviar.

Take the Beefeater tour at the London Tower: our excellent Yeoman Warder told the many UK kids on Easter holiday among our group that no, “this is not a Harry Potter theme park, and this is not a costume. But there will be much talk about death, torture, and execution.” Who needs Fortnite here? Walk the Classic old Westminster Tour (try for a Tuesday, and you’ll get the clever Judy as we did, winner of the London Tourist Board’s prestigious Guide of the Year) and hear about suffragists and not just stuffy history lessons and gossip-did you know the folks at Westminster Abbey practice for the Queen’s funeral every six months? Visit the gorgeous baroque St. Paul’s Cathedral on a site that stretches back to the year 604, and see the first permanent video art installation of any cathedral worldwide. Contemporary artist Bill Viola’s Martyrs, installed in 2014, is as biblical as modern. Stand at the charming entrance of Liberty, founded in 1844, inhale the bevy of blooms, and then venture inside to peruse the famed silk prints and latest designer fashions, all housed in this magnificent Tudor revival building. Even if you don’t walk out with one of their signature purple bags, a walkabout at this store is time travel of the best kind.

Sunday Pub Dinners and Patio Heaters. Okay, my ancestors are all Brits, Scots, and Irishmen, so shoot me if I love nothing better than roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, despite the many other excellent dips into international cuisine. And while drinking outside in the damp gray mist that is often London’s forecast is hardly my cuppa, I couldn’t help being cheered by the crowds outside all the pubs as we walked the many neighbourhoods. The answer? Patio heaters. I need some to extend my Canadian deck’s seasons and bring pub fever home.

Proper Curation. Scratch that…Phenomenal Curation. How often have you been inside a museum or gallery and felt like a moron as you tried to make sense of the context? Why is this piece included? Okay, put down your hands, everyone. London has an endless list of museums and galleries, and there’s no way to see them all, but those I did hold a joint strength: they were curated sensibly. This is most evident in the Tate Modern, which is easily among my favourite excursions on this madcap adventure. As you enter the first room, this is what greets you: “We want your visit to be as enjoyable as possible.” Imagine that. And it continues:

Here are some ideas you can use. You don’t have to like all the art. You might see artworks that make you question what art is. It could help if you look closely and think about:

What is your first reaction to the work? Why does it make you feel or think like that? What is it made of? …Does the size of the work affect your experience of it?

One summer, I took a poetry masters class with the wizard that is Ken Babstock. Among the gems I walked away with was the gap between a writer and reader: your job as a poet was to eliminate it. To extrapolate here, this should be the job of every curator in the world. Why have public spaces devoted to stunning artifacts without making a transparent context for visitors to enjoy them? To quote the chirpy Tube announcers, mind the gap!

The Victoria and Albert Museum. A reason to move to London. Period. No, I didn’t see the new Dior exhibit or the Mary Quant either because the V and A’s permanent collections had me enthralled at Go! Impossible to name a favourite….let’s go with this for now: Queen Victoria’s crown. Yes, I saw the Crown Jewels housed inside the London Tower, and yes, they are spectacular, as is the giant Coronation punch bowl. It’s a bit bigger than my party version. Here at the V & A, this diamond and sapphire coronet was designed by the Queen’s hubby, Prince Albert, and it’s just one of 3000 jewels on display in this remarkable museum of applied and decorative arts and design. I want to go back and see everything. I need to return to eat off the beautiful artful trays in the cafe, this first museum restaurant in the world. We also ventured to the V&A outpost in Bethnal Green, the Childhood Museum, to check out their collection of dollhouses. Again, breathtaking in depth. We’re a bit nutty about dollhouses around here.

Portobello Market. No, Hugh Grant didn’t inspire our visit to Notting Hill, nor did his film character’s description of his favourite part of London miss the mark. Except now, since that popular 1999 rom-com, it is filled with tourists. So is every other aspect of London: try the hordes at Buckingham Palace for the Changing of the Guard. (Yes, go. There’s room for everyone on the palace grounds). Still, roaming about the stalls of the endless stretch of the weekend market was a total kickback in time, lending me a hit of one of all time favourite authors, Charles Dickens, as I tried on fabulously fatuous hats at Sara Tiara and perused crockery at Alice’s. This is playing dress-up and tea party at its best: I bought a hat AND a teapot. It’s not the first time I became a cliché.

Speaking of all things Dickensian, how about Bloomsbury? We walked and walked and walked through many areas of London, yet it was bookish Bloomsbury that grabbed me and whirled me round and round in a heady state. He (Charles Dickens) lived here. She (Virginia Woolf) worked here. Indeed, the literary capital of London is chock a block full of intellectual giants. I put on my fangirl hat at the Dickens Museum, which salutes the great author’s life as a people’s champion as much as it does his writing. And then there are all the green spaces and elegant squares. And the Bloomsbury Publishing House (Harry Potter!), the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and the University College of London, where my oldest student is. Walking about these leafy streets and stunning architecture will make the densest feel like smarty-pants, if only for a magic minute. Don’t forget: I’m still the dolt who lost her 100th umbrella on the Tube.

Dancing at the JuJu’s Jazz Band Ball on Brick Lane. The theatre in London is renowned and plentiful, and yes, we saw a play —All About Eve because the film is a favourite and of course, we had to see the theatrical adaptation—and lined up to meet the star (Gillian Anderson). It is okay to do this if you’re with me because we live on the hill called EXTRA. But the most fun I had in two weeks overseas (and maybe all year!) had to be at the JuJu’s Jazz Band Ball in Shoreditch doing the Lindy Hop (very poorly) with my guy —and also some tipsy Irish dude who thought he was being gallant asking me to dance until I said, come, meet my FAMILY who is here with me. This funky event space has weekly Brazilian and Cuban live music and funk and soul on other nights, but come Saturday, a swing dance revolution is in full swing, and you cannot escape it; total immersion. If you don’t dance, you can watch an endless parade of cuties, some with pin curls, finding one another on the dance floor. London is full of these offbeat hidden clubs, and no one was keener to dig them out than my travel buddies. More on that in a moment.

The Queen’s view out her window at Buckingham.

If you aren’t tired yet reading my list above, think of all the parks in London and then think of me dragging my posse and making them stop as I shrieked about yet another shrub. Hyde Park is lovely. Kensington has Peter Pan, and his spirit is sprinting about the Princess Diana Memorial playground. But it is the gorgeous green in front of Buckingham Palace, where I communed with the ducks and famous pelicans and took mental notes: I need that for my garden, and that…oh, that too… Dreaming is free. That’s a very good thing in London.

Speaking of dreams…

My kids live there as students/ grown adults who no longer need their Mom to pick their outfits. Their time there is temporary. Maybe forever, if one of them has her dreams come true. Time spent with them is my dream come true. I adore these creatures made of wonder, laughter and homemade macaroni casseroles. They know how to capture magic and remind me that being their mother remains my best gig. I am counting the days until our next sensory overload.

First, a wee nap.

(PS Yes, honey, I didn’t forget the Fulham soccer match. A total blast, sure to make everyone’s top ten).

Drop yourself anywhere in Paris and your immediate view is a film set lit avec plaisir for even the weariest heart. Each step forward, backward, and around a fabled corner and still the same miraculous mise en scène. How can we not stop and embrace right there in the middle of the street? Are we not directed to by this very stage? How can we not revisit those leaner frames we inhabited once? We were here decades ago when I ignored parental protests and scampered about these very streets with my Sorbonne student-boyfriend and considered (with great sobriety) never returning home. Paris does that to you.

The pastry shops do that to you. The chocolatiers are no mere extras either but take their proud place centre stage. There are hundreds and hundreds of food artisans in Paris and patience will get you a taste test in the middle of a charming square while your travel companion (crazed wife) drags you from neighbourhood to neighbourhood for sinful samples.

Dining in this city is notorious for a few things: snippy service —I experienced nothing but gracious welcomes, beaucoup wine —who needs water?, and status as a UNESCO world intangible heritage. In 2010, the UN cultural organization singled out French gastronomy worthy of the same kind of protection as historically significant sites or natural wonders. Certainly, the foie gras ravioli I experienced at the historic Le Comptoir de la Gastronomie in Les Halles —’tasting’ is too boring…here we “experience” the food —was worthy of some kind of protection from overeager dining companions. As was the grilled duck and asparagus cooked for us another evening by our host; dear friends whose idea of hospitality was champagne and strawberries as evening starters to set the mood at sparkling; fluffy warm croissants with coffee and melon from their local market waiting for our sleepy morning kitchen entrances. I’m in, merci beaucoup and Ooh La La and that’s all the French I can remember until you pour me another glass.

Paris in spring means Paris and people. All of them wearing les baskets that are not the runners you are wearing right now to walk the dog.

Every kind of tourist is here along with us but the city holds these players with grace. We joined a few in a pastry class as we learned how to fold the dough encased in blocks of butter. Huge blocks of butter. Did I say yet that I love this city?

We mingled among them as we gazed at the Impressionist Masters and wondered how we could go back in time and warn these models in painters’ studios that someday, their bodies would be out of fashion; warn them that’s just one way the world has lost its way.

We walked by them splayed out on lawns with their wine glasses the night we came to see the Eiffel Tower do its hourly dazzle. Paris by night. Yup. It’s all true.

We joined them in the procession into Notre Dame, and formed a hushed collective as we stared up into the glorious soaring space. No one is tacky here: we are all immediately humbled, whatever our belief systems, for this iconic cathedral has always been a living monument, one revitalized by writer Victor Hugo.

The greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation’s effort, than the inspired flash of a man in genius…

Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

That any of it would ever be gone wasn’t even a whisper. That I tried my hardest to ignore the rules about photography but failed when I saw this Joan of Arc statue…well I’m glad I did today as I look at those stunning images of flames and mourn along with the rest of the world as this spectacular mise en scène is blackened with smoke.

Paris, like my hometown, has other smudges. On our first day of many walkabouts —my calves are as tight as my beltlines— we were stopped and searched and not permitted to walk along her most glamorous avenue thanks to recent rioting by the “Yellow Vest” protestors: their outcry continues as it highlights problems France has wrestled with for many years. That their protests involve violence is sure to affect Parisians and tourists alike. Parisians are not tilted by any of it. Today at least, there is solidarity and support over a landmark known around the world.

We flew to Paris en route to London. Along the way, we met up with these two, who are currently students in all things Euro, and proceeded to explore that ancient city for days on end. Check back in this space for my Best of London when I’ve recovered.

PS: Je t’aime, Mark. Je t’aime, Kazumi. Je t’aime Connor (and of course, Buddy!) Forget the boulevards, the Arc, the museums and the Art Fair. Forget the tower. Forget the artisanal wonders. You guys are the best in the city.

The Regent Park Project is a dynamic web series, now set to debut its second season on YouTube next month. This is a must-see for those wanting an authentic glimpse into one of Toronto’s most diverse neighbourhoods, a place less storied than stamped with negative stereotypes. Until now. Have a peek at episode 1.

Sheena Robertson has worked in Toronto’s Regent Park for over 25 years. As a teacher, advocate, and artist-educator, Robertson saw a demand for projects that allowed the creative youth she engaged with daily to not only gain access to the professional film world but also to build strong relationships, and skills to share their own stories. To her, the stories were always there; they just needed a forum. Kick Start Arts, where Robertson is artistic director, jumped in with free acting classes where content began to take shape.

We used a story circle process where we used prompts to generate story ideas, and over time we told stories, and responded to them, pulling out the ones that felt important to us. Using forum theatre approaches, we improvised those stories, honing them, and eventually filmed them, and created scripts by scribing the improvisations. What developed were a series of fictionalized characters, and interactive stories, drawn from the lived experiences of our participants.”

Sheena Robertson, director

Never before have we been exposed to such a flowering of narrative, spinning out of every corner. Consumers are hardly starved for content, even if it is one look-alike series after another. Along comes this unique interactive story with an absolute mandate of authenticity.

Someone said to me that they think our series is ‘like the Degrassi Street series, but real’ – and I understand what they mean, and take that as a compliment. I think we’re super unique in that I don’t see anything out there where the youth participants are so engaged in all elements of the creation; from acting, to writing, to crewing. Our hope is these episodes give people an opportunity to look beyond the negative stereotypes of Regent Park, and see the amazing, smart, articulate, and talented young people I know so well.”

Season One follows an eight-episode arc exploring a community the cast and crew describe as one of “complexity, friendship, love, fear, laughter, and irony.” I encourage you to check it out. Season Two will begin with a launch party Wednesday April 17th in Toronto. See here for details.

Wolfgang Puck is in charge of Oscar sweets this Sunday. I propose this one, a classic combination if there ever was one. This is for the chocolate orange fans. The rest of you can go play with the other kids in the playground. Read More