Vintage Black Friday & Margaret Atwood

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Thank you to Jill at Gypsy Brocante for coming
up with this fun idea to show off our
Vintage Black goodies with the premiere today,
running every Friday until November 27th.

Love this 40s British Bakelite Telephone
from retrophones.wordpress.com


Gorgeous Black Typewriter key ring
from magnifeco.com


How adorable is this
Schreiner Vintage Black Rhinestone pin
from Kitchy-Kitchy-coo.com

Please visit Jill and
enjoy all of the Vintage Black Friday eye candy.

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Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood evening was a sell-out, and whether people were there because they loved her writing, or because they thought it sounded like a good show, there was no cause for disappointment on either count.



The book launch was a prelude to the 30th anniversary of the International Festival of Authors being held at Harbourfront Centre, October 21 - 21, 2009

To say this was a run of the mill book launch would be completely off base. This was a dramatic and wonderful musical presentation, doubling as a fund raising event for Nature Canada.

The Year of The Flood brings us back to the world Atwood introduced in Oryx and Crake, widely acknowledged as a masterwork of speculative fiction. It’s a world where most of the human race has been killed off by a pandemic; where the few people left scrabble for survival in a dystopian wasteland overrun with freakish genetically engineered animals and patrolled by the company soldiers of CorpSeCorps. Most of all, it’s a world where a homespun religious cult called God’s Gardeners farm rooftops and sing hymns about holy pollination, vegetarianism and the preservation of species.

These hymns were set to music by California composer Orville Stoeber and they marked the beginning of the performance. You heard the singers before you saw them, filing slowly into the centre of the Cathedral. The choir delivered Atwood’s hymns with their gentle melodies and simple harmonies in a straightforward and humble manner befitting God’s Gardeners.

The real stars of the performance were the wonderfully talented and versatile actors who read the parts of main characters Adam One (David Ferry), Toby (Susan Coyne) and Ren (Michelle Monteith) They had a challenging task: the dramatic reading of whole passages fully embodying their character while also filling in as several secondary characters. But they held the whole cathedral transfixed; the narrative spell was never broken. The readings were linked by Atwood’s elegant summaries of the background action, so the audience were able to understand the wider sweep of action in the book.

Still, at evening’s end, when all were invited to stand and join in singing a farewell hymn, several questions remained tantalizingly unanswered. There can’t be many people there last night who won’t be seeking out The Year of The Flood sooner or later.

It was a fantastic evening!!


I am off to cheer my son on during
the 'Terry Fox Run for Cancer Research'

Happy Friday!!

xOxO Hugs, Nerina :)

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