Election excitement grows, Diamonds glitter at Whistler, and an old jacket leads to some new wealth
Malcolm Parry
Sun
Shaw Communications TV producers Lisa MacFarlane and Bre Hamilton hung coats at the Shaw Tower opening.
Dragon Boys star Edmond Wong hopes the CBC miniseries will have two more episodes.
New father Shane O’Brien is sleeping like the subjects in Brian Burke’s paintings.
JIM SHAW, the Shaw Communications Inc. CEO, opened the Cordova-off-Thurlow Shaw Tower with a genteel party for 600 and appropriate fireworks Wednesday.
Guest oohed at the latter and aahed at the studios in which Michael Eckford and Fiona Forbes host their Urban Rush cable-TV show and Fanny Kiefer interviews guests for her Studio 4 With Fanny Kiefer program.
Those on-camera folk circulated in a crowd that included the tower’s developer, Ian Gillespie, multibillionaire Jimmy Pattison, Liberal senator Larry Campbell and enough lawyers to form a government.
So did Shaw staffer Edmond Wong, who starred in the city-shot feature film The War Between Us and has since played a gang mastermind in the two-part miniseries Dragon Boys with Byron Mann and Hong Konger Lawrence Chu.
With its precedent-setting all-Asian cast, Dragon Boys reportedly impressed CBC-TV brass enough to have its March airing upgraded to September.
The 31-year-old Wong naturally hopes that will result in the shooting of episodes three and four.
Shaw’s behind-the-camera staff weren’t given free-run at Wednesday’s wingding. Allotted to hang guests’ coats were Kiefer’s producer, Bre Hamilton and Urban Rush producer Lisa MacFarlane. You mightn’t see that at a CBC celebration, say.
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JACOB BROUWER, the insurance-adjustment firm head and long-time Conservative party bagman, was even jollier than usual at the Shaw party. The party’s rapid rise in the polls means “a lot of people are now returning my calls, and cheques are coming in every day from people who didn’t send them before,” he said.
Brouwer kibitzed with Shaw director and former Tory deputy prime minister Don Mazankowski. But neither would address rumours that, should the Tories be elected, Mazankowski would be part of a transition team in Ottawa..
Wearing a Grit-red tie, Brouwer skated around the suggestion that a change in government might see him rejoin the CN board. Brian Mulroney appointed him there to replace Liberal David McLean. Jean Chretien later derailed Brouwer and re-installed McLean, who is now chair.
Angus Reid, who sold his polling firm to the global Ipsos organization in 2000, was more overt.
“It’s coming! It’s coming,” he enthused to Mazankowski. “I know a lot of Liberals who say they’re voting Conservative this time.”
Said to be months away from re-entering the polling game, Reid greeted the prospect of a Conservative government with: “Politics is going to get interesting again from an Alberta and B.C. perspective.”
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SPENCE DIAMONDS will be the draw at our town’s Plush club tonight and Garfinkels in Whistler Monday. No, Elmo, it has nothing to do with folk getting engaged. That’s the name of the Toronto DJ who’ll be spinning disks.
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TONY STRACHAN pronounces his name Strawn. Son Alex, the CanWest TV reporter, favours Strah-kan. But that isn’t the item.
Rummaging through drawers recently, Strachan pere found the dust jacket to a 1932 first edition of fellow novelist Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
The book itself had long gone. But — nothing ventured — Strachan listed the jacket on e-bay. A Boston dealer soon paid $4,000 US on behalf of a collector-client who desperately wanted the jacket for the far-less-valuable book he already owned.
“And that will put me into business class,” said Strachan, packing for a vacation in Spain.
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PARRYNOIA: World Gullibility Week is coming. Send $200 and I’ll give you the details.
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LING HONGLING, the Lanzhou University professor, says golf was played in China 1,000 years ago — centuries before Scots claim to have invented it.
Let’s guess the professor’s anthropologist colleagues will soon link Chinese water torture to the even more agonizing bunker variety.
Locally, Gung Haggis Fat Choy organizers worry that claims for golf’s provenance may disturb the ecumenism of their annual Toddish McWong’s Robbie Burns Chinese New Year Dinner. That Jan. 22 banquet — 604-689-0926 — raises funds for the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop, Ricepaper magazine, the Save Kogawa House campaign, and the Gung Haggis Fat Choy dragon boat team.
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SHANE O’ BRIEN and Mark Reddekopp’s Third-off-Burrard Jones Gallery is showing The Grand Hotel series of paintings by Prince Edward Islander Brian Burke. The works portray various characters awake, asleep or even dead in dreary-looking beds.
You’d think O’Brien, who has a three-month-old at home, would feel mocked by the scenes of slumber. Not so. The baby has slept eight-hour stints for two months, he says — ever since nursing mother Kerry received the traditional Irish advice to drink Guinness stout.
The kid sounds like a natural to inherit an art gallery. His name is Tate.
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ERIN and SEAN HEATHER sell plenty of Guinness at their Irish Heather eatery-drinkery in Gastown. And their back-of-the joint Shebeen room always has 100 rare whiskies ready for pouring.
The Hibernian mood will shift to Yorkshire Tuesday, when the Shebeen Club (folk who like literature and libation) celebrate the late Anne Bronte’s birthday with a $25 meal of ham-and-cucumber sandwiches, sherry and talk of “petticoat feminism” to follow.
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GENNARO IORIO, who is executive chef at La Terrazza, will roll out a meal 20 times more costly than the Shebeen spread Feb. 9.
That’s not just for chow, mind. For $500 each, diners will receive a French premier grand cru wine with each course. After clearing their pipes with champagne, they’ll knock back a Chateau Haut-Brion 1996, Lafite Rothschild ’87, Latour ’96, Mouton Rothschild ’95. a Margaux ’97 and a Chateau d’Yquem ’94.
Some may wrap up their evening with a few hoquets — hiccups.
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MATTHEW MALLON, the Vancouver magazine editor, was to have fronted the glossy monthly’s Fork + Glass event at the Vancouver Club Feb. 3. The wingding will be part of the monthly’s second-annual international wine competition.
Mallon won’t get to raise a glass at the do. But he did receive the fork recently — the pitchfork, that is.
Word is writer-publisher-editor Gary Ross will be named Monday to succeed Mallon. Ross’s previous editing gig was at the 118-year-old Saturday Night, which died another of its many deaths Oct. 20.
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© The Vancouver Sun 2006
