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This weekend, a family friend got married and it was a joyous occasion. A very relaxed wedding in the country (the bride and groom are not quite as young as they look) where fun was had by all, despite the poor weather. My friend Jayne pointed out that rain on a wedding day is considered by many to be a sign of good luck, so Jon and Heidi can add that to the list of reasons why they’re gonna make it.

This shot was taken after the ceremony in the foyer of the church, where we all relaxed with cups of coffee, hot chocolate and chai. The wedding party took photos before the ceremony, so they were all free to hang out with their guests before the ceremony.

That’s my brother (right) and his friend and fellow groomsman Josh serenading us during the post-ceremony coffee time.

It was a lovely day, filled with music, delicious food, adorable children, surprise U2 cover bands, French-Canadians and dramatic kisses.

When I saw this trio of ladies sitting on a sofa at the reception, I had to snap a picture. You may know about my fascination with old ladies. I think of my preoccupation with the old lady aesthetic as a preparation for the day in the future when I will wholeheartedly embrace it as my look. (You might argue I already have with all the cardigans and brooches, but.) Anyway, these ladies look great, dressed up in suits and corsages. Plus, the two on the right traveled all the way from Ireland for the wedding! The woman on the right, the groom’s grandmother, came from Ontario, which is also impressive but, let’s face it, not as onerous as a trans-Atlantic journey.

(cross-posted from The Book of Right-On)

Julia Ryckman

Better late than never getting these pics up!

Last summer, local musician/producer Mike Petkau began an ambitious project; for 16 Wednesdays in a row, he gathered groups of three musicians, usually from different generic backgrounds, in a recording studio where they wrote and recorded an all-new track in one night. Into the wee hours of the morning, Petkau stayed up mixing the track so he could release it to the internet the following morning. (My original post on the subject.)

Last month word came out that Killbeat Music would be distributing the limited-run CD printing of the project, which comes in a happily-coloured orange-and-green, individually-numbered cardboard case.

The CD release was held, quite timely-like, in the newly reopened West End Cultural Centre, closed for nearly a year for massive renovations. It was my first time in the new WECC, so allow me to say a few words on the subject — IT IS AWESOME. (Now a few more words.) The biggest achievement of the new design is that when you walk into the new auditorium, located in an all-new building attached on to the old one (the old auditorium now is a lobby/multi-purpose-room/bar/washrooms), it feels the same as the old one. It has the same dark, cozy feel, and while the stage is larger and lower and there’s a (super-cool) catwalk balcony in a u-shape at the back of the room, the same old tables and chairs are arranged in a familiar manner and you still feel like you’re at the West End. That is amazing and hats off to everyone who pulled this massive project off.

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Two good friends are moving into their first houses this month, and for some reason this gave me the urge to bust out the Aida cloth. I can’t remember the last time I did cross-stitch proper, but it comes back quick and the structure adds an element of enjoyment that’s different than free-embroidery.

The quotation is from the Joanna Newsom song “The Sprout and the Bean.”

Last week I participated in yet another rite of wedding season — the bridal shower. A family friend (son of my mom’s good friend, high school friend of my brother, who is in the wedding party) is getting married at the end of the month, and so my mom and I participated in the throwing of a shower for his intended.

I think I can take credit for coming up with the idea that frees us from the seemingly-obligatory and uniformly awful bridal shower games. I just have no interest in any of the following:

1. Making wedding dresses out of toilet paper

2. Playing “What’s Missing from the Tray?” memory games

3. Playing “How Well Do You Know the Bride?” trivia games

4. Anything else called an “icebreaker.”

So here’s what we do. We specify that all guests bring one or two favourite recipes. When they arrive, we have tables set up, laden with patterned paper, stickers, pens and markers, and scissors. Then we get everyone to “scrapbook” their recipe onto a page. I typically lead everyone in this activity, and I stress that it’s a no-pressure kind of thing. You can just glue the recipe card down and stick a sticker on and be done. Or, for those who are comfortable with fancier techniques, you can mat your recipe and draw illustrations or whatever. Basically, these are skills you learned in kindergarten, so just go for it!

At the end of the shower, we gather all the pages and place them in page protectors and put them in a nice binder. The bride goes home with an artifact that’s not only useful (containing many excellent, tried-and-true recipes), but a tangible expression of love.

The other benefit to doing the scrapbooking during the shower is that it truly is a great icebreaker. You give people a project and it gives them something to chat about even if they have nothing else in common but a relationship to the bride or groom.

Another tip for a successful shower, especially one where not everyone knows each other, is to make detailed nametags. This was my mom’s idea — she made simple pin-on nametags that had the individual’s name, their relationship to the bride or groom (“Groom’s grandmother,” “Bride’s friend”) and also put the neighbourhood or town the person hails from. I suppose that might be too dorky for some, but I’m an advocate of name-tagging at these kinds of social events.

I’ll leave you with an adorable shot of the bride (left) and her sisters.

Thanks to the delightful and darling Ruth, a bunch of us headed (slightly) north to Lake Winnipeg for a weekend at the cottage. It was a weekend filled with sun, cool breezes, potato chips, burnt hot dogs, ill-fitting sun hats, bilingual toddlers, Tetra-Pak’d wine, nautical themes, driftwood hunting, blond sand, alarming algae, ant-flies, Scrabble, babies learning to drink from straws for the first time, boobs, chocolate cake, steep inclines, erosion, skipping stones, vintage Fisher Price toys, “Je vais faire un petit do-do,” i.e. naps, threateningly threadbare lawn chairs, sand, neurotic iPod playlists, and of course, the best of friends.

Last night I was at a preview screening Away We Go, the new flick posturing for indie darling of the year. Directed by Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Revolutionary Road, also known as Mr. Kate Winslet), written by Dave Eggers (Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, What Is the What) and Vendela Vida (co-editor of The Believer) and starring John Krasinski (The Office) and Maya Rudolph (Saturday Night Live), it’s obviously got a credit listing to make anyone like me take note.

The premise is that Burt and Verona (Krasinski and Rudolph), an unmarried couple expecting their first child, set out on a fact-finding mission, visiting friends and family across North America, in order to decide where to live after they learn there’s no longer anything keeping them in their current town.

I went in with reasonably high expectations, but not too high. I mean, even with an all-star cast and crew things can still go horribly, horribly wrong and in this case they didn’t. But they didn’t go wonderfully right, either, and the movie left me more than a little cold.

Let’s lay out the raft of pluses first, though. It is beyond awesome to see Maya Rudolph in a role like this, what with her being a) a fantastic performer and b) a woman of colour (for whom decent film roles are even fewer and farther between than those for white women). Away we go also more than passes the Bechdel test, something of a feminist credo that requires any movie to have 1) at least two women in it 2) who talk to each other 3) about something other than a man. With a hugely excellent supporting cast that includes the likes of Allison Janney, Catherine O’Hara, Melanie Lynskey, Carmen Ejogo and Maggie Gyllenhaal that shouldn’t be surprising (though given the current anti-woman climate in Hollywood these days, it still is).

Speaking of Maggie Gyllenhaal, I love it when she plays hippies! She was so perfectly cast as an anarchist baker in Stranger than Fiction (though it did strike me as weird they didn’t write the character as a vegan baker, for added authenticity) and she was equally excellent here as an earth-mama university professor whose fervent belief in the family bed and breastfeeding have turned her into a parody of elitist liberal intellectualism. Or, perhaps, that’s just what the movie does. Burt and Verona’s dinner at her upper-middle-class character home rises to a suitably hilarious conclusion involving a red stroller and a three-year-old exercising his autonomy, but Gyllenhaal’s too essentially likeable for me to understand Burt when he blows up at her character, calling her a “horrible person.” To me that’s a script issue, though. Slightly more successfully executed was Allison Janney’s character, a woman whose unstable personality translates into near abusive treatment of her own tweenage children (with hilarious results, to be sure; but as the first stop on Burt and Verona’s journey, she’s the first parenting cautionary tale).

There are many good jokes and funny moments throughout the movie, and frankly they’re what keep the thing afloat much of the time. For me, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t quite make a connection with Burt and Verona; I wasn’t sure why until I read the New York Times review, where A.O. Scott says, “This movie does not like you.” It doesn’t really like the majority of its supporting characters, and it likes its sometimes-bland, often-self-absorbed main characters too well.

I enjoyed the movie, I really did. But it didn’t let me far enough into its characters inner lives for me to really feel invested in it after the fact.

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