Movies about sports aren’t usually my first choice but the opportunity of a night out with a couple of girlfriends with a tankful of Diet Coke and bushel of movie popcorn was just too tempting to resist. The movie we went to see is McFarland USA starring Kevin Costner and I particularly liked the fact it is based on a true story set in 1987. …
Boomer’s family deals with parents’ legacy
Plum Johnson, author of They Left Us Everything is a Baby Boomer raised in Oakville, Ontario. In 1952, her British veteran father and southern American mother landed in the village when it was little more than a farming community with a few stores and a tiny population. Her family bought a nineteenth century twenty-three-room lakefront home with eight bedrooms for a few thousand dollars. They were…
Feminist is not a four-letter word
Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay is a current New York Times Bestseller. I was drawn to reading the book because the format appeared to resemble many aspects of my own book, BOOMERBROADcast. The book is a series of personal essays sorted into categories that reflect the author’s opinions on a variety of popular topics, such as, movies and television, books, racism, classism and of course,…
No news is good news
Watching the nightly news on television has become like a bad habit, even an addiction that’s hard to break. I don’t particularly enjoy it; I end up feeling worse afterward, and there seems to be no distinguishable benefit derived from the entire effort. It’s difficult to describe exactly what I do expect but I know instinctively it’s not what we’re currently getting. Every night the…
My chance meeting with Gladys was one of life’s little gifts
She looked like Marie Barone (played by Doris Roberts), Ray Barone’s mother on Everybody Loves Raymond. Sitting next to me at the lunch counter in a fast-food restaurant the other day, she was beautifully turned out with her blonde coiffe and gold hoop earrings. She was wearing a discreet amount of makeup with a touch of blusher and pink lipstick. Her name was Gladys and…
You can’t always judge a magazine by its cover
One of my (many) dirty little secrets is that I’m a subscriber to ELLE Canada magazine. I don’t advertise this as I wouldn’t want anyone to label me as shallow, superficial and materialistic. Subscribing to a seemingly fluff magazine targeted at young, hip fashionistas would certainly lead one to think this is the case, but after reading the March 2015 issue I feel somewhat vindicated….