The Tyrannosaurus rex was, like all of Jon’s previous costumes, picked by him alone. He was very clear that he wanted a “realistic” T. rex dinosaur, and not the character Rex from Toy Story (even though he had been bubbling over with delight for weeks over the Toy Story 3 Blu-ray disk he got for his birthday.)
The blue thing is Jon’s hallowe’en candy sack; not part of the costume.
Note that the T. rex‘s legs moved with the wheels—a cunning bit of engineering by Peter, but alas, prone to breakage.
Note the teeny-weeny arms.
And the nasty, yucky teeth. Ewwwww, gingivitis!
Okay, not a great pic of Jon, but a nice front view of the costume!
Jon’s away at camp again this year, and like the past two years we’ve taken off for a short holiday of our own. This time we stayed a bit closer to home (no leaping across the pond like last year) and enjoyed a few days — a very few days — in the Big Apple itself, New York City.
Day 1
We flew down on Porter Airlines, a first for both of us. It’s a very civilized way to fly: The Island Airport is small and cozy, and close by us (no $50 taxi ride to Pearson necessary). The Porter lounge has free snacks, pairs of chairs with nearby reading lamps rather than impersonal banks of seats, and iMacs for anyone to use! Porter even feeds you more during a one-hour flight than WestJet does for a transcontinental flight. The flight attendants’ uniforms are 60s retro, complete with cute pillbox hats.
From Newark Airport in New Jersey we took a 25-minute commuter train right into Pennsylvania Station, near Madison Square Garden. Our hotel? Basic, clean, as reasonable as anything you’re going to get in Manhattan (which really isn’t saying much — ouch!), and a 2-minute walk from Penn Station. A fellow Newark train traveller helped us with the NJ Transit ticket machine. Upon chatting at Penn, it turned out that she is a Canadian working in the Education department at the Museum of Modern Art, and she gave us a free family pass to the museum!
But I already bought the flowers and decorations!
Since we had only a few hours to kill before our first show, we walked south toward Chelsea Market at 15th St. It’s a chi-chi sort of place, filled with very boutiquey shops (with an incredible number of bakeries).
We had to head back north to 27th St., so we walked along one of the newest and most original uses of public space I’ve ever seen: The High Line — a greenspace park that uses an old and disused elevated freight train railway running along the west side of the city.
Lots of plants alongside the concrete paver path, which runs alongside and through the old tracks.
A wonderful assortment of benches ranging from ampitheatre-like tiers (the “stage” area wittily framed with a pane of glass so you can watch the traffic below):
to wooden chaise-longue-like structures, perfect for lounging on:
It’s a brilliant concept, and the design of the park shows real civic imagination that’s all too sorely lacking in our own city.
After descending from the High Line we went to the first of three planned shows, Sleep No More. Originally staged by the imaginative UK troupe Punchdrunk, this show is probably most accurately described as “immersive theatre”. Sleep No More is set in three adjacent warehouses which have been completely made over to resemble an old, Art Deco hotel, complete with worn furnishings and creepy staff. The audience are made to wear venetian-type half-masks to maintain anonymity, and are instructed to never speak.
However, you are encouraged to wander freely throughout the dimly-lit rooms — over 100 rooms over six floors (the installation is huge!) — inspecting anything you wish: open doors, rifle through desk drawers, read the love letters within. The dancer-actors (who mainly gesture and mime; there’s virtually no dialog in the work) enact scenes which may or may not make sense at the time, and audience members can choose whether or not to follow them from room to room. I tried doing this, but it was difficult as the actors moved fast, the rooms were kept very dim and the audience tended to get bottlenecked in the stairwells. The “plot” (such as it is) and characters are a mash-up of Macbeth and film noir, with characters dressed (and sometimes completely undressed) in 1930s clothes. Audience members are not allowed to touch actors, but actors are allowed to grab audience members. No two audience members get the same show, and on comparing notes afterwards, Peter and I found that we saw completely different scenes. The audience, by subtle prodding by the staff “porters”, as well as sheer herd mentality, finally find themselves gathered in the ballroom for the final scene, so the show does have a conclusion. I’m not exactly sure I made sense of it (I had absolutely no clue what was happening to whom much of the time, since I’m not familiar with Macbeth), but it was absolutely creepy and riveting.
Day 2
We did some book shopping before lunch. (The Strand likes to boast that it’s “18 Miles of New, Used and Rare Books!” and I have no reason to doubt them.) Their signs are a hoot:
Peter had met friends Mike and Heidi through Twitter and, delightfully, we were able to meet up for lunch at a local diner. We had a great time and a long lunch.
Unfortunately, we were a little later in getting tickets to our second show than we intended to be. We got to The Daily Show studio around 3 pm. Because TDS tapings are free, to score a seat you go through a convoluted procedure:
1. Luck out in getting your name in online when tickets for a given date become available;
2. Show up EARLY on the day of the show to get a number (the reservation only gives you the right to get a number, but numbers are handed out on a first-come, first-served basis);
3. At 4:45 pm line up in numerical order and (hopefully) get in.
Unfortunately, people who were bumped from previous tapings get VIP tickets that get them seated before any of the numbered ticket holders. That meant our numbers of 165 and 166 were iffy, since the studio only seats about 200 people.
One of the dreaded blue tickets (The first 100 or so people get yellow tickets and are pretty much guaranteed to get in.)
Security was pretty tight, with thorough bag searches and metal detectors, so it took a long time to get in. You killed time standing around, sniffing the manure-scented air. (The studio is right around the corner from the stables for the New York carriage-ride horses.) By the time we made it to the door they announced that there was only one seat left, which was heartbreaking. The family of four ahead of us refused to get split up. Peter shoved me forward, yelling “one here!” and I was in.
I have to admit that it took me quite a while to get over my upset of Peter not getting in as well, so I didn’t enjoy the show as much as I could have. Jon Stewart did a short Q and A with the audience (my favourite question was “What’s your take on the First Amendment issue regarding truck scrotums?”); after that the taping was almost identical in length to the finished show, with only one minor line re-take. Because of the miking, it was harder to hear Stewart than on TV, so I missed quite a few jokes. (The warm-up guy told us that the audience is miked at half-volume, so we were exhorted to bust our guts laughing.)
We passed by the nearby Colbert Report studio, but never actually took a picture of TDS’s building.
Reuniting with Peter after the show, we walked from 52nd St. back to our 27th St. hotel, passing through the Bedlam that is Times Square. It is a truly amazing and fearsome sight, pretty much encapsulating everything the US represents. Pictures don’t really do it justice; it was almost vertigo-inducing, as well as a good approximation of how a person with a dissociative disorder might view the world.
And the sheer awful awesomeness of the three-story M & M World store is stunning. Literally: I felt like I was hit over the head with a candy-coloured sledgehammer.
Day 3
Day 3 was museum day. The Metropolitan Museum is so staggeringly huge that we decided not to go there, figuring that we’d need at least a solid couple of days to even make a creditable stab at it. Instead we crossed Central Park from the subway to the petite Frick Collection, a small museum containing tycoon Henry Frick’s personal collection of many works from the 15th to 19th centuries, including one of our all-time favourites, Holbein’s incredible portrait of Thomas More.
After Frick we used our free pass to the MoMA (saving us $40!) and went to the painting exhibits on the top floor. These mainly consisted of the older modern masters, including iconic works such as Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Monet’s Water Lilies, Dalí’s Persistence of Memory (which is a LOT smaller than I thought it would be), and much Picasso. Great stuff!
Water Lilies is huge!
After dinner we went to the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center to see War Horse, a play originally staged by the Royal Shakespeare Comapny, based on Michael Morpurgo’s children’s book about cavalry horses in World War I.
The Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center; the Beaumont is part of the unobtrusive building behind the trees at the right of the Met.
The play itself is a pretty standard boy-loves-horse drama, but oh, the horses! Huge metal wireframe puppets, the horses are not ultra-realistic, but by the time the three puppeteers per horse work their magic, you’d swear these were real horses. The show’s staging was very effective as well, with projections on a simple screen backdrop suggesting the horrors of war or the passage of time. The accents occasionally wobbled a bit (some of the young American actors need more coaching in British English), but the cast worked very well together.
When we came out of the show the drizzly rain had turned into a torrential downpour (with my umbrella in the hotel room!) We sloshed several blocks to a C line subway station, realizing only when we got there that we could’ve grabbed the #1 line right at Lincoln Center and stayed nice and dry. C’est la vie. The subways are spaghetti-like, efficient and clear of graffiti and garbage (unlike when I visited the city as a teenager). Cheaper than the TTC, too.
Food
New York, of course, is a mecca for foodies, and pretty much every restaurant we ate at had scrumptious food. Before Sleep No More we ate dinner at The Green Table, a lovely restaurant in Chelsea Market featuring sustainable organic/local fare. Pot pies, pasta, lots of fruits and veggies – very fresh, straightforward and delish.
After the Stewart taping we went a block away to a fabulous dinner at Taboon, a middle-eastern/Mediterranean restaurant. Creative, original flavourings, and interesting desserts (mine was vanilla ice-cream with honeyed pistachios and caramel and a sprinkling of crushed halva. Yum.)
Our last dinner was at Whym, another Hell’s Kitchen-area restaurant. It bills itself as having a “modern American” menu, and had quite a melange of dishes of updated comfort food, Tex-Mex with a twist and other influences. My meal of grilled shrimp sitting on a bosc pear and brie quesadilla was supremely tasty. Peter was thrilled with his Warm Chocolate Cake – he found it pretty much matched his ideal of a lava cake!
A Twitter pal suggested we try the People’s Pops at Chelsea Market. These are ice pops made from intruiging combinations of local, sustainably-grown fruit and flavourings. Peter had a yellow plum and tarragon pop and I had a rhubarb and jasmine-flavoured one. If the People’s Pops location on the High Line had been open when we walked on it on our last day we would’ve had more!
I made sure we visited some of NYC’s better espresso shops to see how they compared with our local ones. (Conclusion: the best Toronto cafés can compete with the best New York espresso joints.) We visited two locations of Joe The Art of Coffee, (13th St. & 23rd St.), where we had excellent coffee drinks and a lovely, long chat with one of the baristas, Charrow, who is also an illustrator. We also went to Café Grumpy on 20th St. I had a very good macchiato; Peter’s mocha not quite as satisfactory. But I couldn’t resist buying one of their cups:
And then, too soon we were heading back home.
Niagara Falls from our plane.
About a minute from landing at Toronto Island Airport.
Our visit was really too short to do the city justice – we stuck a lot around the Chelsea/Hell’s Kitchen areas as well as midtown around Museum Mile. We would’ve liked to visit neighbourhoods nearer the southern tip of the island, as well as the east side. But unlike our visits to Québec and Europe, New York was recognizably akin to Toronto — the same busy, “city for working” feeling that T.O. has, albeit on a much larger and more flamboyant scale.
Being a more-or-less committed lefty in a society that seems to be creeping ever towards the right, I’m pretty used to being perpetually disappointed in election aftermaths. (And then if I’m actually happy with the local result I’m usually disappointed by some stupid thing the pol says later on—but that’s a completely different story.) Being also somewhat of a political cynic, I loathe campaigns that seem to consist mainly of cheap shots (the fake Ignatieff photo and other SunTV antics), wedge issues ad nauseum (abortion—c’mon we’ve done that one already, guys; don’t keep regurgitating it) and the other usual election sideshows.
One thing that forever seems to keep popping up, however, is How We Must Fix Medicare, which seems to be code for: How Can We Privatize The Sucker Without Anyone Noticing? The Globe and Mail in particular has been beating the drum about how great hospital partnerships with private consortiums are. I’m not going to get into the pros or cons about this topic, but the photo in one particular article attracted my attention because it was a photo involving an institution that we visit a lot, Bloorview Kids Rehab.
Or, ahem, Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital, as it’s known now, after a Mr. Holland and his company donated a buttload of money to the institution. The whole idea of naming rights in exchange for a pile of money has always really rankled me when it involves an existing institution. SkyDome, a fabulous name—evocative, original, and the result of a province-wide contest—changed into the boring nonentity that is Rogers Centre. Young People’s Theatre became the awkward Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People when Kimsa’s son donated a large sum of money to the theatre company. (The fact that Mrs. Kimsa had no roots in the children’s theatrical community rankled a lot of people at the time. Luckily, thanks to another donation, the name reverts back to the original one next season.) The venerable O’Keefe Centre became the Hummingbird Centre and then after the tech crash changed again to the Sony Centre. It’s head-spinning, sometimes. I’m still resistant to Holland Bloorview, but I suppose name changes aren’t all bad: Bloorview used to be named the Ontario Crippled Children’s Centre.
The Globe‘s photo was complete with a suitably photogenic disabled kid in a wheelchair—another thing that mildly irks me, having had my handsome son be used as a prop for political or promotional photo ops on more than one occasion.
Here are three kids including Jon being posed with two provincial government ministers at his old school. Believe me, the other two kids were very dishy-looking, too!
Ever since Jon was first diagnosed with his medical issues as a baby our family has accessed more than the usual quota of health care. From when he was six months old we have been regular visitors to Sick Kids, in too many departments to name (actually, at least nine: Emergency, Neurology, Orthopedics, Radiology, Physiotherapy, Opthalmology, Surgery, Ambulatory Medicine, Dentistry. I believe the only floor we haven’t visited is the one housing Oncology, and let’s hope we never have to go there), in addition to Bloorview; as well as two different hospitals while visiting Vancouver on separate occasions. In addition to the litany of appointments, he’s also had surgeries under general anesthesia five times now, three of them major ones; if sitting in the OR waiting room that many times doesn’t make us medical system veterans, nothing will!
In our health-system experiences we’ve never had any major complaints about Jon’s medical care (with the possible exception of a misdiagnosed broken femur at Vancouver’s Children’s Hospital, how-the-hell-do-you-miss-that, but again that’s a different story); and personally haven’t had a huge problem with the wait times for procedures. I could do with fewer extra-charge items (a $450 ambulance bill in Vancouver especially comes to mind as a bit excessive); but, overwhelmingly the Canadian medical system has been good to us. Being freelancers with no extra health insurance, we appreciate it more than anyone with “normal” jobs can possibly imagine. No matter what the fear-mongers tell you, it does work.
So go out and vote this Monday. But don’t screw things up!
Today’s story is by someone else for a change! We got a package in the mail from my brother Troy from the Yukon. Upon opening the box we discovered it was a huge bag of dried morel mushrooms! Yum! (Once I figure out different ways to cook them, anyway.) A seriously big bag o’ morels
In his letter Troy recounted a mushrooming story, which was so picturesque I just had to scribble out some (very) quick drawings for it.
I went morel picking last June down the Stewart River for two weeks.
While I missed the big bonanza by a week…
…it was still a fun experience.
There was another mushroom camp just down river from our camp which had three strange guys in it. We were boating by their camp…
…and one young guy was standing on a cliff in buckskins and holding a spear. So we visited them.
There was an older guy who made you wonder what he was escaping from.
A week later we heard a large animal scrabbling along the shore.
My campmates (who were armed to the teeth) all had their guns pointed at the sound…
…and the young guy emerged all scraped up and soaking wet. He had fled the older guy with just the shirt on his back after the older guy had held a knife to the younger guy’s throat.
I’ve recently been introduced1 to a scathingly funny blog called “Smartass Cripple”, by Chicago writer Mike Ervin, a quadriplegic who is, yes, very much a smartass. He is not one to get sanctimonious when writing about disability issues: He’s just as likely to take wickedly nasty potshots at himself and his “fellow cripples” as he is at Oprah, politicians, or the usual satirical targets. Needless to say, his blog is defiantly politically incorrect, occasionally juvenile, as well as filled with f-bombs and other strong language. Reader be warned.
But for all of his potty-mouth, Ervin brings up interesting and humorous takes on disability, unhampered by the need to feature uplifting stories about triumphant handicapped people who’ve succeeded despite adversity (cue the violins). Ervin’s columns often deal with the more offbeat details of disability, like how the length of one’s “independence stick” (a pointer that all the wheelchair kids at his old school used, enabling them to press elevator buttons) denoted how handicapped you are, and thus, how cool you were. This is the kind of snarky attitude that sadly is in short supply among publications/columnists on disability issues.
Ervin’s latest post is a good example (all quotes below are from this post.)
Whenever I go shopping and I see cheap shit made in foreign countries for slave wages, it really pisses me off. Those people are taking our goddam jobs from us! In America, cripples are the ones who are supposed to be making cheap shit for slave wages! It’s a grand tradition!
Ton of cripples still work in sheltered workshops. Whenever I see a wood doorstop I think about all the cripples who work in sheltered workshops because making wood doorstops seems like the kind of job a sheltered workshop would have its cripples do. A cripple cuts a block of wood down the middle kitty-corner and presto, two wood wedges. And then the cripple gets paid something like two cents per wedge.
This made me think (and not kindly) about the high school that Jon might’ve gone to starting this year. The Developmental Delay program at Monarch Park C.I. seemed to consist largely of kids sanding and painting woodwork in a workshop. This might be perfect for some kids, but it is absolutely unsuitable for Jon, being at the same time too challenging (because of his visual difficulties) and not challenging enough (mentally). The fact that they didn’t seem to care much that it took months—months!—for some kids to acclimatize to the place also rather appalled us.
Put me on a doorstop assembly line and I’d be a fuck up too. I’m sure Stephen Hawking couldn’t make a damn doorstop if his life depended on it. Why not take a little time to find out what a person does well and get them a job doing that?
Admittedly, the Monarch Park DD kids were doing other useful and varied jobs around the school as well (delivering periodicals to other classes, selling baked goods), but the overwhelming impression we got from our visit was negative—an indelible vision of all these wheelchair kids crammed into a woodworking sweatshop.
This underscores something I’ve worried about for the last few years, and as Jon gets older the feeling of dread gnaws a bigger and bigger hole at the pit of my stomach: Will Jon ever be able to work? How will he find work? Will his combination of disabilities preclude him from finding anything meaningful to do—most “successful” people with disabilities seem to have disabilities in either motor skills or mental ability, but not both. And throwing visual disabilities into the mix? Oy. Will it be “real” work or a “two cents per wedge” type situation? It’s less that I care about whether or not he can ever financially support himself—I’m resigned to the likelihood that he will not. Rather, will he be able to work at something that he’s reasonably happy with? Something that gives him a reason to get out of the house for a few hours, away from his tiresome parents?
Ervin goes on to tell of a guy with Tourette’s Syndrome suing an ex-employer under the Americans with Disabilities Act because he was fired from his job as a greeter. He lost, because obviously store greeters—disability or no—can’t make rude comments about customers. But Ervin correctly points out:
…[W]ho the hell is the Rhodes Scholar genius who decided to make him a greeter? Why didn’t someone sue that person for being an idiot?
Coincidentally, Jon’s teacher recently suggested that a possible job that Jon might someday be able to do is Wal-Mart greeter. Our reaction was a rather stunned, “huh,”—it was literally something that had never crossed our minds before. And then, “damn—maybe some day we’ll actually have to like Wal-Mart!”
1 Via the always edifying tweets of Roger Ebert, who is truly an indispensable Twitter resource.↩
Ta-daaah, here it is officially: Jon’s Hallowe’en 2011 costume! 
