artist Damhnait Doyle

February 22, 2011By Lauren Mulcahy

Concert Photos: ByLauren Mulcahy

It started out as a quiet Tuesday evening at The Media Club in Vancouver B.C. however it didn’t last for long. First on tonight’s bill was acoustic, folk artist Jonas Shandel.  Shandel is a Vancouver local and best known for his work in Canadian band, Headwater. But now after releasing a 7 track self titled EP in 2009, Shandel is branching out on his own.

Shandels set started out a bit on the calm side, playing to a crowd no bigger than thirty. But despite how unnerving it may seem, he made the most out of it. Shandels songs The Difter and All Good Things are the kind that makes you long for warm summer days and carefree afternoons. He relates to the crowd by drawing inspiration from everyday life, especially Facebook creeping as he mentioned. Listening to them in an intimate setting couldn’t have been better.

Afterwards, headlining band of the evening, The Heartbroken took the stage. Damhnait Doyle, Peter Fusco, Stuart Cameron and Blake Manning who make up this Ontario band describe themselves as “Whether they’re on guitar, piano, mandolin, drums, banjo, bass or monosynth, it doesn’t matter who’s playing what, they are lungs to heart and heart to blood” And after seeing their set, I wholeheartedly agree.

The Heartbroken’s name alone can essentially sum up the power and emotion behind their songs. With songs about troubling past relationships that come off as raw and real, they’re songs that are extremely relatable and each song is it’s own a story that keeps you wanting to listen to from beginning to end.

When front woman Dahmnait Doyle rang out her first two notes, the strength in her voice alone brought life into the crowd.  Their first song, Tonight Tonight, was a stunning opener that gave the crowd a feel for the style of the band; however it set the bar high for what songs were to come later that night. The Heartbroken’s set list only got better as it went on, emotional ballad, Save Yourself, a song about toxic relationships and abuse, held such strong lyrics it brought a wave of silence across the crowd, even bringing one audience member to tears. The Heartbroken continued to play tracks off their album, titled Tonight, Tonight for the rest of the evening.

The Heartbroken are an extremely talented Canadian band that you need to be on the lookout for. Although their Canadian tour is now wrapping up, I am certain they will be back.

Source:  http://www.rockstarweekly.com/the-heartbrroken-bring-power-and-emotion-to-vancouver.html

AN UPDATE on Damhnait Doyle!

Join Damhnait Doyle along with Brooke Miller and Brampton native and multi-time Juno Award nominee Dean McTaggart for the Rose Theatre Songwriter’s Circle. Their unique blend of character and musicality promise to make the night one to remember!  More information can be found at : http://www.brampton.ca/sites/Rose-Theatre/en/Events-And-Tickets/Pages/ShowDetails.aspx?ShowID=245&ShowDate=04/07/2011

Songwriter’s Circle : The Rose Theatre in Brampton, ON – April 7, 2011

The Heartbroken

Damhnait Doyle has been hard at work with her new band The Heartbroken (Peter Fusco, Stuart Cameron, Blake Manning ) which has been touring all over Canada in support of their album “Tonight, Tonight”. If you haven’t’ had a chance to check out this wonderful “bandage for bleeding hearts and souls around the world”, then head on over to http://www.theheartbroken.com where you can hear tracks from the album , join them on facebook and read all about them.

Opening up the night was Toronto-based country band The Heartbroken, who released their debut album, Tonight Tonight, earlier this year. The Heartbroken is comprised of Damhnait Doyle (vocals, guitar), Blake Manning (drums, vocals), Stuart Cameron (guitar), and Peter Fusco (bass). They started off their set to a relatively sparse crowd, but by the end of the their set it was packed. Doyle is so charming and has a serious set of chops, particularly impressive when she’s completely belting it out. It was a solid set of feel good country and as the crowd started to grow, the audience got more and more into the set.

A cute moment was when Doyle revealed that Fusco had missed a couple of the tour dates with The Grapes of Wrath because he just had a baby (or rather, the mother of his child had the baby). This resulted in Doyle attempting to guilt the audience into buying their merch so Fusco could put diapers on said baby. So here’s a note to all of you: if you like ‘em, buy their merch.

Source:  http://buyingshotsforbands.com/2010/11/21/a-reunited-grapes-of-wrath-packs-the-horseshoe-tavern/

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The always awesome Damhnait Doyle NL jumps into the hot seat to play INsights IN 10.  A rapid fire* 10 questions designed to learn all we need to know about the person being asked....sort of.

We’ve got a full interview on the way with Ms. Doyle but in the meantime hopefully this will tide you over. SABS

Damhnait Doyle INsights IN 10*RE: rapid fire – it should be noted - this is the longest round of INsights IN 10 ever recorded – but then again when it’s Damhnait Doyle more is more...so we’re good with that!

And to top it all off...

Our  crack research team has discovered  that while this may be the 2nd edition of INsights IN 10 where someone was wearing a classic style hat...it is actually the 4th edition in which someone is wearing something on their head (For the record Bruce Guthro wore a cap and Dean Brody wore a cowboy hat) I stand corrected.sbCaptives - Film

FYI - This is Damhnait's favourite movie! Courtesy: Miramax Films

For all things Damhnait Doyle – visit www.dav-net.com

Source:  http://seaandbescene.com/2010/10/damhnait-doyle-insights-in-10/

On June 14th, Sarah Slean returned to Canada AM in promotion of Rwanda Rises Up! Sarah and Damhnait Doyle performed the song written by Sarah, Not for Sale. The album is currently availble on iTunes. 

To view video in full HD, visit YouTube. There is a sync issue with the first half of the video.

This is the first video uploaded by littleslean.  The video is not searchable on YouTube but can be found through here and as posted to social media networks by Song for Africa.

SOURCE: http://littleslean.blogspot.com/2010/06/sarah-slean-damhnait-doyles-not-for.html

URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9ybGGUkXas&feature=player_embedded

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The Rwanda: Rises Up! album will be released on June 22, 2010. Artists such as Damhnait Doyle, Steve Bays of Hot Hot Heat, Tim Edwards of Crash Parallel, Classified and more have come together to record this fantastic album. More information is available at Song For Africa

SOURCE: http://www.songforafrica.com

Song For Africa's second feature documentary is in the final stages and everyone is excited to show our supporters how far we've come! With a line-up of artists featuring Tim Edwards of Crash Parallel, Sarah Slean, Steve Bays from Vancouverites Hot Hot Heat, and chanteuse Damhnait Doyle, Rwanda: Rises Up! raises the bar and shows Canadians how even after the horrific events of the Rwandan genocide, these people come together and rise up. Rwanda is a changed nation, and these resilient people are proud of who they are and what they are doing - come share the experience on Citytv Saturday June 12th 2010 at 8:00 PM local time.

SOURCE:  www.songforafrica.com/sfaprojects.php

I truly believe the universe gives you what you need, when you need it. I also believe that everything happens for a reason, which makes me pretty popular with friends who are looking for a positive outlook on a situation and more than a little irritating to those who prefer to marinate in the negative. So this weekend when I received an email saying this would in fact be the last week of my column for The Telegram, I immediately saw the good side. Truth is there have been so many instances over the years, whether I was traveling in Africa, Afghanistan, or rural Newfoundland where the sheer stress of trying to find an internet connection to meet my deadline nearly killed me.  Or the days I had to steal away from a writing or studio session to try and finish my column, only to stare at the computer screen, worrying that I used up all my words for song lyrics. Depending on what was going on in the world and in my life, I have spent as much time trying to edit  down wild, novel length thoughts into a 400 word piece, as  I have racking my brains trying to come up with something, anything at all that could possibly be mildly interesting to you all. Something that hopefully, I hadn't already written about! I truly have felt a huge responsibility to those of you who faithfully read my column every week and stopped to ask me if I got my sister's wedding dress home safely, or if Willie Nelson really is that nice, I simply haven't wanted to let you down. I will continue to write blogs on my website dav-net.com, but I will do them without a deadline, with less commas (if that's even possible!) and hopefully with a lot less stress.  I remember how excited I was when I was first asked to write for The Evening Telegram and how proud I felt to be a part of its rich history in our province, a pride I will carry with me forever. I am also grateful to this column for giving me the opportunity to have you all in my life, but am even more grateful to you all for choosing me to be a part of yours every week and for that I thank you.

I have been in a bit of a tizzy the last few weeks finishing and polishing up songs before my band goes into the studio next week - mostly because I thought they were pretty perfect before we went in there digging around the dirt. Writing a song is a bit like buying a new coat, putting it on and knowing it was made for you. It's warm, it goes with everything, you feel like a warrior when you put it on and are more than a little sad when you have to take it off. You admire it as it hangs on its hook and wish you'd found it sooner, because it's the one thing you can put on, that makes you happy. Then out of the blue, you get invited out for the evening, you show up and everyone is dressed to the nines,  in suits, dresses and high heels, and there you stand in your winter jacket. Only it doesn't seem as warm or as beautiful as it did the day before, in fact you can't help but feel a little embarrassed by it, because all those times you loved it so much and never wanted to take it off, meant you wore it to the dinner table and inadvertently dunked your sleeve into your bowl of pea soup, which has dried into a pronounced crust. It also had a little tear peeking out from under the pocket where you hitched it on the fence when you went ice skating and because you never noticed it before, it has turned into a massive tear from armpit to waist and to top it off, it smells a little like a fire pit ( which was your single favorite smell until someone walked by and turned up their nose).  So you take your jacket off, walk around the party and forget about it, you may even in fact admire someone else's coat and ask where they bought it and wonder if they have any in your size. You have a great time, stay out too late, grab your jacket and put it under your arm planning on putting it on once you grab a cab, only to walk out into the street and find a blizzard waiting for you. The high heeled women with their flimsy wrap eyes your winter jacket like it's the hope diamond, they've been waiting for over an hour in the snow and there are no cabs for miles. So you pick up your jacket, give it a little hug and say you’re sorry, put it on and wave goodbye. You are going to walk home in the blizzard, because you can.

In the long days since a massive earthquake devastated the country of Haiti, the onslaught of video, stories and pictures of the aftermath have proven to be sickeningly sad. Yet somehow today, something affected me more than anything else I've seen, an image of police shooting at " Looters" in Port Au Prince. I guarantee you, if I lost my family right before my eyes, managed to climb, or get pulled out of a rubble of concrete, had to spend the following week looking up at the sky, praying for the circling planes to land and bring medical supplies to those with festering wounds in the streets, orphanages and nursing homes, where people who don't believe that help will ever arrive and hope for death to take them soon, I would break a window or two. If I had not eaten for over a week and the only drop of water I put to my lips was riddled with parasites, disease and filth and made me sick instantly, I would grab a stale loaf of bread I could not pay for ( because I lost everything single thing I ever had in the quake), from the store where I broke the window.  If journalists were the only foreigners I saw, because the UN was too afraid to come to my neighborhood, claiming it's too dangerous and my child lay dying in my arms, I would eat the glass from the broken window, if I thought it would help. Now, the same people that are impressionable enough to listen to and believe in Pat Robertson (who last week addressed the American people and said the Haitian people were getting their just desserts after making a pact with the devil centuries ago), have another dirty weapon in their arsenal when questioning why their government is helping a " lawless" country, instead of lowering taxes. Why some of the aid money isn't to buy out the stores filled with food, soap, diapers, and toilet paper and to hire security to distribute it, instead of trying to keep them away, is beyond me. The Haitian people are not " thieves" , they are desperate, starving and thirsty. More importantly they are sons, fathers, daughters, mothers, sisters and brothers and they are doing whatever they can to survive, and survival should never be considered a crime.

Tonight is a big night for the Doyles, a big night for the Private Investigating industry in Canada and a big night for Newfoundland. I have lived my whole life with people getting in my face and asking me " your name is what?" or " How do you say that for God's sake? Damanit, Damanah, Damnbrat?"  and when they do attempt to spell it, a swear word is jammed in the middle, or at the very least a ph.  So outside of the island and even though it too has been mispronounced, I have clung on to my last name as some sort of personal ID,  like a life preserver. I should at this point disclose that after twenty years of pronouncing my name " Davnet" , I learned from a friend of my mothers that my first name is actually pronounced "Downith" and that in Ireland, " Damhnait"  is the patron saint of mentally ill people. Doyle, however is a name that means a lot of things, it means family, good times, occasional brushes with the law and a bucket load of love. So I am proud to see it plastered over every single bus shelter, billboard, television station and website in this country and I for one cannot wait until tonight to tune into " Republic Of Doyle" on CBC. To see the culmination of months and months of hard work by the best film crews and actors in the country and to know it's as pure, true and 100 % Newfoundland as Purity biscuits, is spectacular. By this point it's safe to say that after seeing him get punched in the face eight million times in the trailer for ROD that everybody knows who Allan Hawco is, but besides for being the creator and lead actor of the show, he is someone who gets the impossible done. Like anybody who has ever met him, I know that the only thing that has ever truly mattered to him is family, friends and of course Newfoundland and to see someone go after their dreams and slam-dunk it, is inspiring beyond belief. I am buttering up the popcorn, cracking a beer, sitting down on the couch and turning on the TV and I can't wait to watch with you all.

We are very excited and honoured to announce that the Newfoundland Herald has published a Special Edition on Newfoundlanders Of The Decade that features Damhnait Doyle.  In it, they include a review of Damhnait’s accomplishments from 2000 to 2009. You can find out more about this edition on their website at http://www.nfherald.com/ .  Congratulations Dav!

I don't have any idea where all the time has gone this Christmas. I do however know exactly where the food has gone and that would be on a direct flight to my stomach. There are so many things like Mount Scio dressing and peas pudding that I  can't seem to put down at this time of year and that's even before I  take the first bite of the addiction forming substance known as casserole, which has just the right combination of vegetable and fat to glue an artery permanently shut. I guess that's why they are known as special occasion dishes, because even though a green bean or broccoli casserole "sounds" healthy, anyone who has ever made one or witnessed it's creation knows it's pure sin on a dish and I for one love it more than winning a brand new car in a lotto draw. I have also loved being able to sleep in so late, so late that I actually found myself having to lie about it on a couple of occasions to my  friends who happen to have kids. I felt like telling them the truth of how much sleep I was getting would be like a slap in the face, especially after they would tell me how happy they were that their child slept until six (in the morning! ). I have loved every minute of catching up with my family and friends ( except for the lying about the sleeping), so much so I even loved losing at Cranium, loved almost getting blown off the side of Fort Amherst by a rogue gust of wind and I loved having to walk halfway home from downtown in high heeled boots at three in the morning because we could not get a cab. In fact I have loved every Christmas this decade and am completely shocked that it's going to be 2010, It seems like only yesterday we were all gathered for the millennium celebrations in St John's harbour. So here's to a new year, to peace, joy, love and hope and maybe if we are really lucky a guilt free recipe for green bean casserole.

There is something about traveling during the holidays that launches a pure panic in me. Any other time of the year the stress threshold of flying is manageable, but get close to Christmas and all of a sudden walking into the airport feels like waltzing into the eye of a storm. I have been in a self inflicted tailspin all day, trying to cram everything I said I was going to do over the last three months into just a few hours and it turns out I wasn't the only one. Driving to the airport I had to count to ten over and over again,  reminding myself to breathe, as I silently but deafeningly repeated "It really doesn't matter that I forgot my winter boots, cell phone charger and the present for my secret Santa because I am running late, will probably miss my plane and have to turn around and head back home anyway. I can grab the stuff I forgot just as soon as I rebook my flight. " At which point all my previous and incredibly scarring experiences of rebooking flights to Newfoundland after Christmas snowstorms came flooding back as did the realization that changing my flight would be as difficult as skating up Signal Hill in the rain. We may be known as the nicest people in the world but Newfoundlanders flying home for Christmas thinking they might be stranded is another story entirely. Not for love nor money would a Newfoundlander ever give up their spot on a flight home, sure the mother from "Home Alone" might be begging for someone to give them her seat so she could get home to her stranded eight year old son about to be set upon by robbers. She could offer her house, her car, her jewellery but I guarantee you she wouldn't have any takers. So with a very real terror, we drove a lot faster and screamed up to the gate, where miraculously there was no one in front of me in line. Not only that, the bags I thought were overweight were under, I got an isle seat on a full plane, and because my flight was delayed an hour I even had time to go to Swiss Chalet ( talk about a Christmas memory).  If I didn't believe in Santa Claus before, I do now, so, so happy to be home.

I am pretty sure that when you are unable to sleep at night and lay awake staring at the ceiling because you feel so awful about something you saw on TV, that you should probably stop watching the offending show. Last night I sat down to watch the season finale of Dexter, the only thing I have watched with any regularity all year and for someone with such a huge aversion to all things blood and guts, a commercial free hour devoted to the lives of a serial killer and his family has  a very strange and strong appeal. So at the end of the show when something extremely traumatic happened to  Dexter (I don't want to spoil it just in case you haven't seen it and after this article you still have some kind of sick desire to) I went into a slight state of shock, as if it had happened to me. After my initial reaction of not being able to breath, my first question was “Am I desensitized or overly sensitized by the media and TV, that I can feel such a kinship with a serial killer?". My automatic justification of these hyper empathetic feelings was “Yes he is a serial killer, but he only kills other serial killers!",  so I guess the answer is both. In my humble opinion and in no way excusing his philandering ways (of which I am uncomfortable knowing to be truthful) but that in essence is Tiger Wood's big PR problem. Tiger's entire life and business to this point has been moulded around him being perfect, being the best at everything, without failings or faults. Even as a child he was groomed to be a machine, a veritable golf factory. We humans know that all machines have glitches and people for the most part are greater after learning from our mistakes and in Tiger's case the lights shone as bright as the sun until all the power went out in an instant and the generator exploded. In so many grown up child star's behaviour you see sad little kids searching for boundaries,  craving discipline, and by the thirteen women (that we know about) that he choose to confide in ,Tiger Woods wanted to be caught. Everyone knows how hard it is to keep your partner happy and couple that with marriage! Imagine adding the stress of an affair, where you have to keep an extra whole being happy, the lies, the double lives, the expectations. Then imagine  a life where you have thirteen women demanding your time, your attention and not to mention your physical stamina. Honestly, the man is truly lucky to be alive.

Anybody who knows me in the slightest shouldn't be surprised that the thing that affected me the most about Rwanda (besides of course for the traveler's sickness which lasted twelve days and borrowed five pounds) was the children. The choruses of kids running and shouting "Muzungu, Muzungo"  ( white person) as we drove down the two lane highway or walked along the red dirt roads was at times deafening. To some of these children in the more remote villages we were the first white people they had ever laid eyes on and they stared at us as if we were in fact aliens. When the initial shock wore off they would practice their english on us, always leading strong with " My name is..." and becoming shy by the time it came to say their actual names, they held our hands, sang for us and listened to us sing in our strange sounding language with wide eyed excitement. The last day when we were filming in the church where a significant part of the genocide occurred I struggled to keep composure, a few of us wandered outside to sit and grab a breath of fresh air and within minutes a  group of about twenty kids gathered and circled us. I remember sitting there thinking " If only I could speak Kinyarwanda then I could ask just for a hug, because after what I saw today, I  really could use one". At that point I really didn't care if I looked like a crazy, alien lady,  I just opened up my arms and smiled and waited. First a little teeny tiny girl in a faded red dress stepped forward and though tentative at first she cuddled right into me when I squeezed her, then as if on cue the whole front row jumped on line and a few came in for seconds and thirds. I spent the next twenty minutes hugging these kids, deliriously happy and oblivious to the sorrow I had felt so heavily just half an hour before. Without a doubt that moment was the highlight of my trip, even though as I got up to go back inside I was unable to shut my eyes to the visual reminders of the beast inside mankind, I had something with me infinitely more powerful, the endless gift of children's love and innocence.

This is about my fifth attempt to finish this column, there are so many things I want to write about Rwanda that I've been somewhat paralyzed. There are amazing things that jump out like their no plastic bags policy and when I say no, I don't mean you are forced to buy them at the grocery store, I mean it's illegal to enter the country with them. I could talk about the villages of people that though besieged by poverty and eat only one meal a day have managed to save enough money to create their own credit union where they lend money to group members to purchase things like  goats or  charcoal so they can start and own their own businesses, or the country wide program called Umuganda, where every single person is required to do community labour one day a month. Then there is the group of thirty or so kids either living with or orphaned by AIDS  who wrote and performed songs about HIV for us  and the Rwandan artists that came into the studio for our Song For Africa record. But as I sit on a low pew in Nyarubuye church I can't think of anything else besides for the wood, bricks, straw and stations of the cross that envelope us like nighttime as we film a video for Amazing Grace. Looking down at the floor I wonder  how many people laid here in wait for rescue, after being told the Red Cross was coming to save them, only to be laid in a trap in the church. I look up through the straw roof wondering if they felt relief from the heat when the rain came as more and more of their countrymen sought refuge from the genocide and joined them. The one thing I do know is that they had no idea that in just a few days thirty five thousand people would be murdered on this very spot, which is about the size of the first floor of Atlantic Place as police as militiamen surrounded the perimeter. This morning as we toured the memorial we walked alongside walls lined with cases of skulls and bones of unidentified human remains that are still being discovered some fifteen years later and thought about how I would feel if that was my family in there. Our guide said that as a child he was one of the very few who had escaped, though his family did not and when we asked how he dealt with having to talk about it every day he answered that he simply didn't have a choice.  I have always known how lucky I am to love and be loved but after today, it seems even more achingly clear than ever.

There aren't any words to describe the beauty of Rwanda, pictures don't begin to do it justice and songs and stories are a pale version of the truth. I am sitting in a rented house in Kigali looking out over rolling hills of such a deep intense green that St Patrick's Day would flush with envy, and sparkling with flowers as neon as Times Square. I am not a morning person but I have found myself awake everyday at five, partly not wanting to miss a waking thing and also because my anti-malaria drug filled dreams have been so intense I shock myself awake. The first day we got here we visited the genocide memorial which pays tribute to the over 800,000 people who were killed in just 100 days fifteen years ago. We had an incredible guide --who like every living person here was a survivor of the tragedy, whether they themselves were tortured, raped, made to watch their mothers, fathers, children be killed in front of them, or they or their family members were the ones who did the killing. We walked through the memorial seeing a clear picture of a peaceful people living side by side until the colonialists came in and did the old divide and conquer. They assigned ethnicities where previously there were none, designed a class system and pitted them against each other so they could  create a need for leadership and claim it as their role, only to rape the country of its resources and strip it of its harmony. I kept it together through graphic pictures of bodies piled up on the road hacked to death with machetes, heart-wrenching video testimonials by survivors and tales of churches filled with people burned to the ground, but I lost it when I came to the children. I came across a plaque for a little four year old boy with his cute little picture and a caption underneath which said his name, his favourite food-chips and egg, his favourite sport-football and his last words-" Mommy where do I run to?" and I just about doubled over in pain. You walk down the street here and you would never for a second believe it's the same place, the joy and sense of hope is so profound you can actually see the dust trail of them rising above the ashes.  Every single person I have met has been exceptionally kind, graceful and proud, the type of person we all strive to be.  They will not let this define them, they have crossed over the bridge of blame, so much so that known killers live side by side with the families of those they have murdered.  They have recognized the path that led them to that horrible point and are refusing to ever let it happen again. They are keeping their own council and they have voted for peace and forgiveness and I am in awe.

I am sitting on the plane heading to Rwanda and I can't tell you how oddly relaxed I feel. Usually I am beyond apprehensive as I set out for somewhere new, especially when it means I have to be on a plane, clutching the armrests for twenty-four hours, but I can't wait to get to Africa where things are raw and real, without the candy coated veneer that rots your teeth and makes you fat. I am counting down the minutes until I can get away from media coverage of this new pandemic called “Going Rogue". Everywhere you turn there she is, the creature you thought was gone for good is back. Hell you even bought a cat to make sure she wouldn't come back, but no, she has been re fortifying herself, scheming, mapping out the cheese and securing a behind the baseboard hiding area. I am sure I will forget all about her by the time I am on the ground (I am praying for it in between Hail Marys), but right now all I want is to be very very far away from Sarah Palin and her book that is bound to sell millions of copies and grace coffee tables from here to George Bush's ranch in Texas. I also want to move far away from the woman who checked my bag at security at Pearson airport in Toronto, whose hairstyle funnily enough resembles Sarah’s ( hmm cousins maybe). Sometimes it takes every fiber in your being to smile and nod while you are on the receiving end of someone else's apparently very, very bad day and this lady used up all my fibers. She yelled at me for touching my bag, told her supervisor she told me not to (which seeing as how she never spoke to me at, was impossible), gave me the cut eye and threw me under the bus in order to show off to her boss in front of fifteen people in line behind me, but instead of telling her what I thought, I bite my tongue and smiled. Now I am being rewarded with something infinitely more valuable, both emotionally and spiritually than saying my peace, I have been granted an aisle seat. Strangely enough, the man sitting right across from me looks exactly like John McCain.

 

In the same way that I promised myself to never again write about my cat ( omitting her at this moment is not difficult since she just made mincemeat out of my arm with her teeth and claws), I swore that when I hit send on my column last week I would also be done with talking about the flu. Thing is I didn't actually do anything of interest all week but lie in bed hoping that the next time I crawled out from under the covers I would feel miraculously healed. It sounds so whiny with all the pain and suffering in the world to complain about something most people experience a couple of times a year, but a week indoors with nothing but the TV to keep you company does not a happy bedfellow make. Between watching the terrible events in Fort Hood on the news where so many brave souls lost their lives, to a standoff in an Orlando office building where a regular workday turned into a horror film, it seemed as if I was safest curled up in my bed. Then, just as I started to feel a little better I stumbled across an urgent health warning online stating the most dangerous signs of  H1N1 complications were shortness of breath and pressure in the chest area and that anyone with these symptoms should go to the doctor immediately. These of course were the only real symptoms I had left and up until that moment  I had absolutely dismissed the possibility of my having the H1N1 and only kept myself "quarantined" as a social precaution.  That night I dreamed I was drowning and woke up coughing and struggling for my breath, the tension in my chest was like a bowling ball in a goldfish bowl swishing around trying to be alone, my cough became more and more pronounced and rattled like the mini roller coaster in the parking lot of the Avalon Mall. After a second night of nightmares I agreed to go to the walk in clinic.  I had to kick up a bit of a stink because even though the clinic wasn't closing for another hour there was a line of people, finally they said I was to be the last person. As my husband and I sat there and watched every second person leaving with a mask and a pair of glassy eyes I almost ran away when they called my name, knowing full well my fate. I will spare you the details but after checking me out the doctor fell short of calling me an idiot for wasting her time and for the first time in my life a look of disdain was music to my ears. Now at least if I catch H1N1 I'll know exactly where I got it, the waiting room at the doctor's office.

I am not sure what to say, think or do, this H1N1 flu has got everyone in a tizzy.  With pamphlets delivered to our front doors it seems daily, instructing us to sneeze into our sleeves, wash our hands and pretty much not to touch, look at or think about anyone or anything that someone else has encountered, the government has pulled out all the stops insuring the majority of people will be scared enough to take the vaccine ( which has many critics). Now as paranoia mounts after the death of three otherwise healthy kids in Canada, people are lining up to get themselves vaccinated,  only there is a flaw in the plan, there is not nearly enough vaccine. Somehow though, there is more than enough fear to go around and in some communities, more than enough body bags, while those who pay for private clinics are immunized before pregnant women waiting in the rain with their toddlers. Canada is a place known for its compassion and friendliness, so no matter where you are you get "a bless you" when you sneeze, whether you are in a silent yoga class or in the middle of an armed robbery. These days however people are so spooked if they hear a sneeze  they turn on their heels wordlessly and run away from the offender. I know this because it happened to me in the grocery store on the weekend shopping for chamomile tea. I hadn't been sick in a few years due to a daily measure of vitamins B12, D and C, coupled with a philosophy of mind over matter I begrudgingly picked up from an old friend, that is until last week when I felt the tell tale symptoms of a cold/flu enter my body and proceed to take over as supreme ruler. At first of course I wondered if I had H1N1 and looked online to diagnose myself, always the wrong move. Not only did I have The Spanish, Swine and  Avian Flu, I had the symptoms of at least twelve other very serious illness' . In the middle of hyperventilating I remembered something a wise friend said to me ,"don't borrow trouble"  and I calmed down, was able to enjoy lounging in bed, letting myself get better instead of getting more sick with worry. That and I practiced saying " Bless you", it seems people are going to need it.

 

Ok, i am pretty sure this all has to stop now, this whole world of fame chasing and moral debasing. It's like approaching Niagara Falls in a barrel and grabbing anyone within arms reach and pulling them right over the edge with you. The other day I ran into a friend on the street who with a very concerned look on his face asked if I knew what had happened to Balloon Boy. I was at a  complete loss and was honestly hoping that Donnie Dunphy had a new video out about  having some sort of a time with a balloon, but I was the only one laughing.  In the three hours since I'd left my house and last checked the papers, the entire world had been monsooned by this poor little boy in the balloon. Believed to be accidentally untethered and headed for the stars, helicopters with cameras hovered around the runaway balloon and the masses watched as if it was OJ in a white Bronco.  Ground crews scoured the land searching for fallout, hoping that the unthinkable was just that and that the boy didn't slip out and fall to the earth to a very  certain and sad ending. By now everybody knows the boy was hiding in the attic the whole time, not because he was afraid he was going to get in trouble for untying the thing but because his parents wanted him to do it, they wanted the publicity to get them their own reality show.  Now the news says the parents are going to be charged and as an aside that it is unlikely because of their age the children will be. Are you kidding me? This is a clear cut case of child abuse if I have ever seen one, that poor kid, so stressed out from having to lie and then accidentally telling the truth was so overcome by emotion that he threw up on TV, not once but several times. These parents are so desperate for fame they went on Wife Swap, twice and then when the fame rush died down they pimped their kids out like a Letterman Stupid Pet Tricks segment and we bought in, hook, line and sinker. I just hope the next time a child is in trouble we won't go all " the boy who cried wolf" and simply not care, because the truth is that boy may not have been in that balloon but he is in more danger in that house than if he was.

 

Just passed Elizabethtown, Kentucky after twelve hours of driving, one hour of eating Mexican food and another hour stopped at Customs convincing them our band wasn't going to be making any money in the States( we aren't- check our bank statements, that's why we are called "The Heartbroken"). At last we have seen a sign for our final destination of Nashville, standing there on the side of the road beckoning like a palm tree in the desert.  I feel like a little kid, it could be because I packed a lunch for the car so everybody could have little sandwiches, fruit and cookies (something I have never done in my life) but more likely it's because my band mates and I are playing a new iPhone video game called Scramble and we might as well be twelve years old sitting in the back seat being bribed with a stuffed Smurf to be good or at least be quiet. If it was anything of any importance I would never say this out loud, let alone put it in writing but I am blowing them out of the water. I've won every single game since Ohio and it is absolutely infuriating them. Every game is going to be the last but each time after the score is announced and they see I've won, they bark  in harmony " One more game, let's just play one more game" . I am a little scared now, not of losing, but of them ganging up on the "know it all sister", of them stealing my dolls or ratting on me to the folks for stealing gum.  It's funny what type of regression happens when you are cramped into a tight space for so long,  now we are a family of three brothers and their sister who's about to be told she's too young to play with them ( ok, ok that's a stretch I know but a girl can dream can't she?). I figure I've got to cut loose here, find something to distract them so I can move the target on my back and while I am figuring out how to do this, I lose. A straight up, no excuses, drop the ball fail but I feel like at least they’ll cut me some slack. Instead, the accusations they heap on me for not trying and accusing me of throwing the game is worse than when I was on a winning streak. So I've got nothing to lose but to roll up my sleeves and win, only the glowing lights of Nashville will save me or should I say save them.   Music City here we come.

I am sitting in my hotel room in Ottawa overlooking the Rideau Canal, trying to breathe, reason and well, breathe again for a million reasons. In a month I head  to Rwanda with a group of artists and a record producer to make an album with local Rwandan Musicians  for " Song For Africa" as well as set up and teach them how to use a recording studio and film a documentary about it. Even more pressing on my mind is that tomorrow I head up to Parliament Hill to interview Canadian Senator General Romeo Dallaire about his insights into Rwanda, its people and its children and I am more than a little intimidated. In 1994 Dallaire was offered the UN command post for its Peacekeeping mission in Rwanda, he accepted and ending up flying into a whirling dervish of  simmering racial tensions that was set up by Colonialists and funded by the French. Despite Dallaire's pleas for more troops and requests for permission to raid the massive store of weapons that pointed to a very well planned mass slaughter, the powerful countries of the world decided that Dallaire's mission should remain a peacekeeping one and ordered him to forget about the cache of weapons for fear of upsetting the balance. This inaction by the UN directly led to the Rwandan genocide of 1994 that killed at least 800 000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. It is easy in the western world to turn a blind eye when you hear words like Hutu and Tutsi, almost as if it is something from a book, but if you substitute the words Catholic  and Protestant and imagine losing 800 000 souls on the island of Newfoundand in 100 days, anyone in their right mind wouldn't believe for a minute that the world wouldn't intervene to save us. But alone with a small band of soldiers Dallaire  stood and tried  with all his might to do everything  he could to change the tides of civil war.  From my understanding, the years after he returned from Rwanda were mired in deep guilt and regret about every step he took and didn't take and how the mission failed despite his greatest efforts, weighed down by “what ifs” and “I should have”. My question is, how do you tell a man that will never believe himself a hero that  for the thousands of lives he did save and for the lives of their children's children, that he is in fact a hero? I guess I'll find out tomorrow.

 

October 13, 2009 - The Great Canadian Song Quest

 

You can go to http://www.cbc.ca/radio2/songquest/ for more information and to register your vote. Voters have from today until Friday, Oct. 23, at 12 a.m. ET, to choose from a shortlist of the most popular places from each province and territory, and the artists they'd like to see create the song for those locations. Once voting closes, the final 13 artists have four weeks to compose and record an original song, inspired by the most popular Canadian location from their province or territory.

Just announced today is the fabulous CBC Radio 2 Great Canadian Song Quest! Canadians from all over the country have the opportunity to select their favorite place and their favorite singer-songwriter to write about it. We are happy to announce that Damhnait Doyle is one of the five artists/contestants representing Newfoundland !

They say you learn something new every day even if you are not trying,  knowledge has a way of seeping in. With me it means that I am the holder of useless information, tidbits, facts that I half read or heard and ultimately retain. I am usually the only person at the party who knows the what,  the who, the when or the  where of something completely insignificant but that sits infuriatingly on the tip of everybody else’s  tongue without any hope of jumping off. Why my memory doesn’t come through for me when I need to remember song lyrics or names of people I actually know, I have no idea, but I figured if my brain needs to work in that capacity I might as well be trying to absorb something I care about, so I decided to take a sewing class. Now I don’t have any grand designs about making my own clothes and I certainly have no desire to go walking around looking like one of the kids from ” The Sound Of Music” but I do have an awesome collection of vintage (aka cheap as dirt) dresses that would be perfect if only there was a nip here , a tuck there. I stopped shopping for them a few years back because I realized they were just sitting in my closet taunting me with their rips and tears,  because the thought of gathering them up and bringing them somewhere to get pinned and trimmed overwhelmed me. I am a straight up, iron my clothes in the dryer kinda girl, so they dangled there like  dinosaur bones.

I was apprehensive about my first class, about meeting new people, about trying not get my hands caught under the needle and a little nervous that I might get bored during the two hour class. What I should have been worried about was the whiplash I got from spinning my head around to watch the teacher demonstrate, then to see how in the world that demonstration applied to my machine and then to scramble to jot down notes filled with words like serger and selvage that I had never heard in my life let alone tried to spell.  So here I sit trying to make out the list of things  I need for my class tonight but my writing looks like a four year old hit up a box of Fruit Loops and went through a box of pens and attempted a sugar fuelled therapy/ art project. For the life of me, I can’t cull the list from my memory  from just last week yet I still  know every word from the movie Pretty Woman . . . one of life’s  sad and twisted little ironies, that I really wish would right itself.

Is it just me or is it terribly morbid to want to watch a movie based on the rehearsals for Michael Jackson’s last tour when he was strung out and listless, a shadow of his former self? Who would want to remembered for the very last days of their life when in fact they were actually half dead? Especially someone who so carefully cultivated and obsessed over their physical image even though it wasn’t in keeping with society’s’ version of beautiful. Let’s put it this way, if anyone taped the band rehearsal we had today I would hunt them down and burn it before I kicked the bucket. Airing footage of rehearsals is like inviting people over for dinner, marinating chicken and peeling potatoes and putting it on the table before ever putting it in the oven, uncooked, raw and salmonella worthy. The previews for the movie are as unavoidable as clips of Kanye West interrupting, insulting and humiliating a seventeen year old girl( Taylor Swift), then apologizing, crying and finally admitting  that he was wrong about something for once. When Kanye and Jay Leno  sat down to talk on Jay’s first night back to prime time in a new time slot, it was like watching a grade five therapy session, a la Dr Phil (which I am sure Dave Letterman loved with a capital L), he was publicly chastised while this is one of the best things to ever happen to Taylor Swift’s career. It was almost like Beyonce pulled a Dirty Dancing and said “Nobody puts Baby in a corner” and Taylor instantly became as beloved as ” Baby” herself.  Sadly today while celebrities were twittering, blogging and revealing too much in interviews, the original ” Johnny Castle” Patrick Swayze lost his battle with pancreatic cancer, a battle he fought with enough dignity and pride for all of the Kanye’s in the world. So, if you want to be truly touched and entertained by a life lived with beauty, turn off the TV and go see the Beothuck Street Players version of “Tuesday’s With Morrie” at the St John’s Arts and Culture Center September 16th to the 19th, your mind and heart will thank you.

Is it just me or is it terribly morbid to want to watch a movie based on the rehearsals for Michael Jackson's last tour when he was strung out and listless, a shadow of his former self? Who would want to remembered for the very last days of their life when in fact they were actually half dead? Especially someone who so carefully cultivated and obsessed over their physical image even though it wasn't in keeping with society's' version of beautiful. Let's put it this way, if anyone taped the band rehearsal we had today I would hunt them down and burn it before I kicked the bucket. Airing footage of rehearsals is like inviting people over for dinner, marinating chicken and peeling potatoes and putting it on the table before ever putting it in the oven, uncooked, raw and salmonella worthy. The previews for the movie are as unavoidable as clips of Kanye West interrupting, insulting and humiliating a seventeen year old girl( Taylor Swift), then apologizing, crying and finally admitting  that he was wrong about something for once. When Kanye and Jay Leno  sat down to talk on Jay's first night back to prime time in a new time slot, it was like watching a grade five therapy session, a la Dr Phil (which I am sure Dave Letterman loved with a capital L), he was publicly chastised while this is one of the best things to ever happen to Taylor Swift's career. It was almost like Beyonce pulled a Dirty Dancing and said "Nobody puts Baby in a corner" and Taylor instantly became as beloved as " Baby" herself.  Sadly today while celebrities were twittering, blogging and revealing too much in interviews, the original " Johnny Castle" Patrick Swayze lost his battle with pancreatic cancer, a battle he fought with enough dignity and pride for all of the Kanye's in the world. So, if you want to be truly touched and entertained by a life lived with beauty, turn off the TV and go see the Beothuck Street Players version of "Tuesday's With Morrie" at the St John's Arts and Culture Center September 16th to the 19th, your mind and heart will thank you.

Like everyone else and their dog in this world, I am trying to tighten the pursestrings and trim the fat. Generally speaking I already do a pretty good job of trimming and tightening with Winners as my bloodsport  and the euphoria of seeing how much I save during a sale feels like I've won the Lotto. Not to mention following the musician's motto( motto being a fancy way of saying absolutely no choice) of living like the Amish,  but when you dig down there is always something you have a weird emotional attachment to that's robbing you blind. I am by nature a bit of a procrastinator and when I moved house two years ago I decided that instead of disconnecting my internet completely I would continue to pay a minimum charge and hold on to my ten year old email address until I had a chance to notify everyone on my list. Most people would get this done within the first month while loathing every minute of paying for absolutely nothing, but not me, I did it up until last week. Two whole years I spent an inordinate amount of dough on a simple email address that is free through google and hotmail. For this amount of money I could have paid a schoolteachers' salary in Africa for a year, bought 144 frozen pizzas or paid for a trip to Cuba to rescue me from the depths of a Canadian winter. It's not like I didn't have anything else to spend this money on, quite the opposite( please see musician's motto above) I just couldn't bring myself to switch companies, I was sucked in, kind of like a bad relationship where they tell you " You'll never find someone who loves you as much as I do". Then quite by accident( I swear it just happened!) I discovered bundling, one of the most beautiful things to come out of a competitive marketplace since two for the price of one laser eye surgery. After extensive research I realized that not only was I wasting money on the internet, I was bleeding money on my home phone and cable and that if I went with just one service provider I could literally save two hundred dollars a month.  It was then I knew that not only could another company love me better, they would give me reruns of Dallas every night and tell me how lucky they were to have me, not the other way around.

It seems pretty much everything is forgivable in show business today, you can steal fur coats from photo shoots, assault paparazzi outside hotels, and  if you feel like it and if  you have them on hand, you can  even throw baked beans at them. You can leave your wife for your best friend's daughter, star in sex tapes that you pay to have " stolen " from your house so your new movie can break box office bank,  or you can  overdose on the forth of July, go to Rehab and be the spokesperson for Mother's Against Drunk Driving and not feel anything more than a week's worth of heat on the internet, while behind closed doors people pat you on the back, buy you drinks and say " wow, your career is really taking off". I assume that's what singer Chris Brown had in mind when he pulled his car over on a side street in LA and proceeded to beat R and B  princess  Rihanna to a bloody pulp back in February  after a Clive Davis pre Grammy party where they had been photographed smiling and cuddling, from zero to sixty without repercussions, or so he thought. The first couple of days after they were "no shows" to the Grammy Awards where they were both scheduled to perform, "certain individuals" leaked to the press how there had been a fight, that  Rihanna got jealous and Chris had no choice but to put her in her place, that he had been provoked, with the underlying score that she deserved it. The next few days those anonymous people on the internet  that had decided  she got exactly what she deserved were confronted with a leaked police photo of a battered and bruised Rihanna so swollen and battered there was no more doubt she was the victim and Chris Brown was the bad guy. So what did Chris Brown do? Well, he went jet skiing at Puff Daddy's house. laughing it up for the photographers like he didn't have a care in the world, not exactly what a person should do especially after they have repeated the cycle of violence ( Chris has stated repeatedly he and his mother suffered abuse at the hands of his step father).  I know the man is not an actor, but today after seeing the online public apology he just released (five months  way too late), I couldn't help but wish he was more of one, because  maybe then other young men wouldn't think it's ok to hit their girlfriends and that the worst thing that could happen is they are forced to go Jet skiing with Puff Daddy or P Diddy or whatever his name is. Maybe then they'd know the repercussions are far worse than reading a ghost written apology off cue cards, its having to look at yourself in the mirror.

Walking on the beach in Northern Bay Sands today with my nephews, the was sun so hot we burned our feet on the sand. As fast  as we could we ran straight in the water and parked them in the big freezer I call the Atlantic and even through the numb legs and chattering teeth I couldn't help but feel how lucky we all are. How lucky we are to have this coastline as our playground, that our children can run free into the water without a care in the world, playing with other kids, mixing sand and water and making sand castles and that the only thing we need worry about is the weather. On the drive home, blasting the radio with the windows down I felt like I was blindsided by  a moose or been punched in the stomach . The windshield in front of me looked like a TV screen and all I could see was an image that was played and replayed all last week of a beautiful young boy, eloquent beyond his years, with tears running down his face explaining that he was sad because he and other day campers were ejected from a swimming club pool because they were black. I once had a late night debate with a man who tried to tell me racism is more prevalent in France then in the States, sadly I knew then he was wrong and am even sadder now that there is even more evidence that I was right. To think that in Philadelphia in  2009, even after the onslaught of massive negative public reaction, the managers of The Valley Swim Club remained steadfast and continued to refuse to allow these children to return and swim because it would change the "complexion" of the club ( their $1900 which had been paid in full was returned) and said it was all a misunderstanding, is simply staggering. Children, innocent little children just like our kids,  grandkids or the ones we hope to bring into this world, just like the ones we love more than anyone else, that we know are perfect in every way ( even when they eat sand covered cheesies) to be so wounded because of ignorance and intolerance is heartbreaking and to think my big worry is squeezing my nephews too hard, makes me count mine and their blessings.

I was half way thru writing this week's column when I took a brain break and decided to surf the channels a little.  I stumbled upon a TV show with British chef Jamie Oliver,  whom every woman  loves because he knows how to cook, adores his wife and kids, swears like the world is ending and has some of the worst hair on the small screen and couldn't care less (all very important qualities in a man in my opinion)  and I felt like I had no choice but to scrap what I'd written and start again because I was so gutted. In the last few years Jamie has pretty much single handedly taken on the food industry in Britain, first off in the schools where- like in Canada-kids eat unrecognizable food that you couldn't assign to an actual food group if you were paid, eating Mcdonald's hand over fist, which in turn, turns them into adults who eat only one vegetable the " french fries". Anyone who knows me is well aware that I am obsessed with food and that I think about it, talk about it, cook it, eat it and dream about it when I really should be doing other things like working and when I decide to eat something that I know I shouldn't , I enjoy it more than anyone has ever enjoyed anything, complete with sighs, " oh my God's" and all. Thing is everyone in the world has some kind of family history of heart disease, Cancer or Diabetes and you can't help but have that in the back of your mind until it slowly but surely  as we get older, squeezes up to the forefront  and you are so convinced that every little ache and pain is  "something  bad"  you've rewritten your will five times in as many years with the header  "Show me a person that doesn't think about dying and I'll show you are person who isn't really living". Fifty years ago people ate whole foods and now most of what we as a society are eating is made in a lab and so filled with preservatives, it'd last  a hundred years in the desert, not exactly colon cleansing stuff. So when you think you are eating the right things for your arteries and making the right decisions for you and your family and the rug gets pulled out from under you by people like Kelloggs who are trying to pass off Special K like it's the modern woman's guide to slimming your waistline, when like so many companies it has, in fact, silently doubled its sugar count in the last twenty years, you can't help but feel angry. If I am going to eat five times the recommended daily intake of sugar and salt I want to enjoy it to the fullest, not waste it on so called healthy cereals and yogurt, I want nachos, I want a donut, I want ice cream with chocolate chips and I wanna know it's bad for me before I read the label, so at least I can enjoy it.

Why is it the things that are begging to be lost  end up hanging around forever and the things you really need are taken out from under your nose? A couple of weeks ago my  bike got stolen outside of the studio in broad daylight, totaling three bikes I've lost to the universe in the last six years, a newbie I just got  at the end of last summer, which I only got to take out for a spin about twenty times. It was goading at me from the porch all winter whispering " don't mind the snow and the slush, put on some boots and let's go, you g g g g g girl". After consulting the ever suspect weather report I finally dug it out from under the layers of cobwebs, dust  and wanderlust  that had been keeping it warm during a  brutal winter and felt beyond free to be flying through the streets, getting where I needed to be on time, 100 calories lighter and all for free and then it went and got stolen. So earlier today I set out to buy a new bike and even though there are nicer, fancier and more comfortable bikes, all I wanted was my old one back, so much so that last weekend I went scouring the second hand bike shops in hope that I could find my "liberated" bike and buy it back. I knew that bike, she was my friend, and although it seems too soon to start a new relationship, I need a bike. It's the opposite of my phone, which I have had for six years, (which, kind of like dog years, means my phone is about 89 years old), I've dropped it so many times, it's the earth's next wonder. The camera doesn't work, I have to jiggle the plug for about ten mins to get it charging, the volume is stuck on stun, which means when anyone who isn't a super quiet talker feels like I am at a Metallica concert and it tells time alternately ten minutes too fast or too slow. I figure on average, I either talk on it, text on it or just pull it out to check the battery charge  an average of two hours and 13 mins a day ,which means  for six years means I have used my phone for six thousand, three hundred, fourteen and a half hours. People with their fancy iphones and blackberrys look at me like I am toting around a relic form the museum but I Love this phone I know it's inner workings( or not workings) inside out and I am so afraid to start all over again. So as I take my new bike with it's comfy seat, deep purple frame and rain guards for a whip around the block and let the wind blanket my face I realize it might be time to leave my phone outside the studio with a sign that says " please take" and if it's still there in the morning, it's meant to be mine, if not, I'm getting a new purple one for sure...

Sunday  I woke up and decided it was so nice out I had to stay in bed..  First off, so I could try and forget about all the weekends I've been shut inside because of terrible weather and all I wanted to do was go out and secondly, to shake off the exhausting combo of two stagette parties in one weekend. I just wanted to lie there with no phones or doorbells ringing, nowhere to be, nothing to do, no emails to return  and just stare at the ceiling fan and smile. In some circles I could reach and call it meditating but we all know it's really called being a lazy bum and truth be told there aren't many things I'd rather do. At around noon I  heard my cat meow, which is a rare occurrence as her preferred method of getting our attention is to hide out under the dining room table and jump out and attack us as we pass by unsuspectingly. So when I heard her coming down the hall I tensed up in fear something was wrong with her as the last time I heard her meow she had both paws stuck in her collar. I  did realize she had to be hungry as she's used to being fed in the morning, but when she popped into our room with a fork in her mouth and jumped up on the bed, I almost passed out, I immediately thought dear Lord, my cat is a genius.  After about five minutes of basking in the glow of my feline's superior intelligence, I realized that not only is my cat not a genius, there is a seventy percent chance I am an idiot. It is a good thing to figure  this out now before I have kids, before I am the annoying parent who waxes on about how their child actually ran before they walked and quoted Neruda before learning the alphabet. Let's  also not forget the parent who stands in the kitchen drinking a glass of crisp white wine as they say how their child's teacher went on and on about what an exceptional sharer their kid is as said child rips the head off of  their cousin's Tickle Me Elmo Doll in the next room. Thank God I have a cat to save me from that fate and it doesn't hurt she's the smartest cat I've ever met.... 

Everyone's stress carries the same weight, there is no barometer, no set landmark of events or feelings that says someone deserves to be more stressed out than someone else .  It doesn't matter if you are a surgeon saving lives or going to school to study the art of making marzipan candies,  when the blood courses through your veins  with stress it seems like the world is hanging by your toenails. Today as I sit at the kitchen table and feel a cool breeze running through the front door I might as well be on a Carolina homestead with nothing to do all day but make lemonade and till the soil for the green peas, and it feels amazing.  It's a pretty marked contrast from how I felt last week when I literally thought I'd tear my own hair out from frantically trying to learn guitar and mandolin for ten tunes I've never played or sang before. Sounds easy enough for a musician, but I am the person at the kitchen party who is dying for a song circle but doesn't know any songs to play, I simply don't retain any chords  or lyrics,  absolutely nothing. Even when I write a song , it leaps from my fingers, out of my mouth  and onto the page and unless I rehearse it , it's pretty much gone from my memory ( as are people's names, even my best friends I'll be like, hmmm is your name Betsy?- I don't know any Betsy's), anyway you get the drift-I  have a bad, bad memory.  It's one thing if I bungle a tune at three in the morning in someone's kitchen, quite another to butcher Leonard Cohen's  "Hallelujah" which is like a religion to some people, as is the Hip's " Courage". So as the time drew closer for my band " The Heartbroken" to play the Luminato festival's  Great Canadian Tune in Toronto's Yonge and Dundas Square in front of seven or eight thousand people, I became very, very afraid. Trying to avert a lynching by overzealous Blue Rodeo fans I practiced everyday for weeks, some days getting everything spot on note for note and other days making Sarah Harmer sound like Bachman Turner Overdrive. So when Saturday came and I looked up during the last tune and there were 1600 people in the summer sunshine playing along on guitar to Neil Young's "Helpless " with me, I thought I had died and gone to heaven, a heaven where I know how to play all the songs.

I admit I was one of the ten million people who watched the season premiere of TLC' s reality show Jon and Kate + 8 last week after a media firestorm of who cheated on whom. I would go into an explanation of who these people are and what they are famous for doing except that if you have successfully avoided them  on the cover of every magazine in the grocery store, headlines in every paper and the lead off joke on the late night talk show circuit  for over a month now, you probably aren't reading this article. Most likely you are living under a rock  counting chicken scratches in the sand or living in Thailand  evading the tax authorities because it is simply impossible to get away from these people, Jon and Kate ( let's not forget the real star here- her HAIR) are everywhere.  I would occasionally  watch the show when the sextuplets were babies and learning how to walk and talk and it appeared  to be a really human look at child rearing, yes it was  definitely voyeuristic but it seemed like the parents really did have the best interests of the children at heart. It was also very obvious that the parents didn't care how they came off as the cameras documented the beautiful and ugly sides of  having eight kids under five ( can I say stomach flu people?) and they were just their unaffected everyday selves.  Now it's like watching a cat fight with the big bully ( Kate) crying trying to gain sympathy with her fake tan, french manicure and bodyguard in an attempt to throw her long suffering husband under the bus of public opinion. What I don't understand is why didn't they pull the plug on the show  when their family started to disintegrate?  They didn't have to continue, they could have said let's stop, we have enough money, the world doesn't need to see this.  Instead, their kids will be confronted with the images of their parents fighting on TV and the internet for the rest of their lives. They should just start stockpiling the money away for the therapy  their eight kids are going to need when they figure out what happened to them.  I guess it will be a benefit that instead of explaining their issues in therapy sessions they can just bring in season highlights and point out where things started to go wrong, like when Mom got a tummy tuck and Dad got a hair transplant and they clearly started caring more about themselves than the + eight.

Ah the monday of a long weekend is always the best and the monday of May 24 takes the cake. No matter the weather and no matter that it's not even close to the actual 24th,summer is on it's way and on this special occasion Monday can do no wrong. I just finished watching Oliver Stone's biopic W about George W Bush and it got me to thinking about how important downtime is and how impossible it must be to relax and unwind when you have the future of the world riding on your shoulder. Maybe if GW Bush was able to truly relax and watch  sports on TV without worrying about war or say something more tangible like choking on a pretzel things would have worked out differently, but somehow I think not. Even when your job isn't nearly as stressful as that- two days on the weekend almost gets you to the point of relaxation and then bam straight back to reality, just when mowing the lawn seems like a peak of productivity that only elite relaxers reach. By day three someone could try to burgle your house with you in it and you'd just sort of wave to the kitchen cupboard and say " The valuables" are hidden in a tin, top shelf, right at the back as you lie on the couch re-reading " The Dirt" by Motely Crue. Then graciously the following week is just four days, you feel like you could work harder, longer and with renewed vigor and by the time the next weekend comes you're not as fatigued and you actually get things done around the house that have been sitting on a list for years. In fact I think I would subscribe to almost all aspects of European/Mediteranian life, the naps, siestas, the huge lunches, the glass of anti oxidizing red wine every day, everything that is except for the compulsion European men have of wearing Speedos on the beach and by the pool. Even with the wine and naps, I am not sure the trade off would be worth it, some things are just better left to the imagination.

Edit this entry.

Occasionally when I am out and about I'll write down an idea for a song or a column on a scrap of paper, napkin or on the back of a receipt, and now I  know it works much better for songs than for columns. I just cleared out my purse from the weekend and was about to toss out a crumpled up napkin until I saw a hint of ink and tried my best to straighten it out. At first I couldn't make out my own writing, which is not unusual, but the fact  that it took  me a second to figure out what language it was in, is.  Whenever I am in a foreign speaking country, I always try to pick up a few phrases as a sign of politeness, but rarely make it past  " hello, my name is damhnait, it rhymes with nothing, so it's not your fault" and " very nice to meet you, you are the most incredible person living on the earth wearing red shoes" . I find a little effort is always appreciated and even though I always say I am going to go home and learn Japanese, Italian or Urdu I never do, but every once in a while a random phrase pops out- like on the napkin. Somehow I managed to write in Italian / French- " The bathrooms of Casinos are made of marble, the bells sing so sweetly and it smells like pizza- column idea!", but  clearly what I should have written was " Why have I dragged my mother to a casino in Niagara Falls? Why are we still here at three thirty in the morning when the only other people that are here are unmoving, hunched over the same slot machine they've been feeding for twenty four hours? Just because the only two other times I have gambled, I have won- a lot (considering what I put in) doesn't mean I will win again , so go home out of it. They are milking you and probably only let you win before so they could have you hooked for life.". I think that's what I meant because shortly after I wrote my Italian/ french poem I cashed in all my tickets, tried to figure out how much I actually lost ( I believe it was under a hundred, but  one never "really" knows) , went back to the hotel and said "never again". Though sadly I am starting to suspect  they do have me hooked because it just took me over ten minutes to type the phrase " never again" and just a few seconds to write  "Hey did you happen to hear the one about the bank tellers in Alberta?".

I have spent the last few weeks in the studio with my band " The Heartbroken" writing, playing guitar, singing and since my last column (and probably a big reason why there wasn't one last week), playing a lot of Sudoku. I was never a gaming person, never enjoyed Monopoly, never liked playing the odds, or for that matter, never liked anything more challenging than Super Mario Brothers, but there is something about this game that defies anti- addiction. Two weeks ago when I first tried it, I was absolutely terrible and as a result it has now consumed me like a really bad fever because-  unlike a lot of games including "swinging bells" - Sudoku is something one can actually  get better at with practice. Therefore, it is hard to tell at this point if the $175  I won at Casino Nova Scotia last week  ( for those of you who are wondering, I only put twenty down and played for fifteen minutes) while playing the Blackjack table for the very first time was luck or skill, though I am edging towards luck as I defied the other players who were screaming " Don't Hit, Don't Hit".  I hit and got  twenty-one five times out of seven. Recording an album can be as thrilling and emotionally captivating  as gambling, it can bring you up, and then throw you down if something in the mix doesn't work.   And unless you are producing, engineering and playing all the instruments yourself, it can be incredibly tedious and just a tad boring. Thankfully, as I sit on the couch and beam my ears to the speaker, as we layer each song with textures and colors, I have something to look at besides the wall, Sudoku allows me to listen to the music without overanalyzing it. I wish I could say that Sudoku was the end of my gaming obsession but, in fact, it appears to be just the beginning.  If I was a twenty year old movie star living in Hollywood, I would check myself into rehab based  entirely on  Pete's ( The Heartbroken) Iphone game "Flightplan" .  Ah,  the intensity of trying  to land planes on a three inch video screen makes me convulse more than  eight scoops of chocolate ice cream as I try to beat my own high score( eat your heart out Stu).  There is no doubt I need help, so thankful my Mom is coming for a visit, will send her Lindsay Lohan's way when she's through cleaning up my act.

There is a fundraiser on E-Bay from May 11 to May 17, 2009 of a Mixed Media Collage by Damhnait Doyle and Serena Ryder. Please take a moment to visit the site!

LINK: http://myworld.ebay.ca/songforafrica

Article: 8"x6"x2.5" mixed media collage in a wooden shadow-box, ready to hang.

Created by the lovely and creative Damhanit Doyle and Serena Ryder, this charming 8"x6"x2" mixed media piece encompasses elements from both land and sea. On the inside of the box is an underwater painting of a fish with gold details and on the exterior is a little person tightrope walking along a dandelion to the sound of a trumpet player. The piece is signed and comes with a Certificate of Authenticity. All proceeds from the sale of this item will go directly to the Song for Africa Scholarship Fund. To find out more about Song for Africa please visit www.songforafrica.com

Stay in touch by visiting http://www.dav-net.com and following Damhnait on her weekly columns!

When I woke up Saturday morning I had a feeling something was off kilter, I immediately checked my phone and saw that I'd missed calls by almost every member of my family and I started to feel a little woozy. Unless it's your birthday or someone's had a baby, a cluster of calls pretty much means something is wrong, so I held my breath as I listened to the messages and hoped for the best. It turned out my little nephew Finlay fell and broke his leg, which is bad enough but apparently the break was so bad, he has to stay in traction in the hospital for three weeks. Initially the thought of that three year old ball of energy and life strapped to a bed for three weeks made me want to cry, but then the positive outlook overdrive kicked in and I got to thinking about how a lot of really creative people had a time when they were hospitalized as children including Joni Mitchell who had polio as I child. I will start by saying that yes I know polio is way different then breaking a limb but the point is a lot of musicians and writers say their time in hospital or quarantine in their bedrooms was a time of spirited imagination where they emerged as artists for the first time- most likely because they were talking to someone imaginary, but at least it's a silver lining. Maybe little Fin can take this time and learn Sudoko, a reasonable thought considering I used to see kids doing it all the time which lead me to believe I too could conquer it. I found myself in an extended period of self torture this morning sitting in my neighborhood coffee bar because I thought I'd try Sudoko to pass a few minutes and all I learned is that I am in fact an idiot. There was a time when I tutored math, where I was responsible for someone else's learning curve and here I sit exhausted after a two hour battle with a puzzle I almost killed myself to complete. Apparently the scoring goes something like this -under 13 minutes, genius, 13-17 , scholar , 17-21, smart, 21-25- not bad, 25+ keep practicing, I think two hours plus means I should go back to grade one-yikes. Maybe there's some room in that hospital bed for auntie cause I've got some learning to do.

Usually rainy days and Mondays get me down but now that I have a cat it seems like a great excuse to stay in, light some incense, make some tea and cuddle with her on the couch. The same couch that we searched for, deliberated on and finally bought after a year of searching just before christmas and now looks like it was in a fight with a shredding machine. I opted for the Organic orange smelling animal scratching deterrent at  the Pet store instead of the industrial strength so it wouldn't bother her, turns out it didn't bother her enough and now it seems I've resigned myself to her furniture scratching, everywhere shedding and bare leg attacking behavior. According to my friends I am in for it when I have kids, if I can give into my cat so easily ( she is now lying next to me on my bed, a pretty big no no, hopefully my husband won't read this) I will be steamrolled by little humans who know exactly where your heartstrings are and exactly how to play them, but for now I am "that"  lady.  The lady who lives for her cat, who should probably pluck her eyebrows a little and wears pearls around the house singing Broadway show tunes. In fact with the exception of the pearls( which I save to go to the grocery store) I sound a lot  like  Susan Boyle, Susan Boyle without the fourteen million hits on youtube and paparazzi staking out her house of course. I resisted watching her sing " I Dreamed a Dream " from Britain's Got Talent because frankly I am usually touched by things no one else is touched by and rarely cry when everyone else is crying, case in point bawling at my wedding and laughing during eulogies at pretty much every funeral I've been at, so when I'd received fifteen emails from people saying they had cried and cried after watching it I finally  broke down. I cried alright but not because she was so incredible, but because it was amazingly sad to see a room full of people go from being so mean and quite rude to someone they didn't know because of how she looked, to doing a complete about face when she turned out to be good. After an hour or so I went back to youtube and fast forwarded the parts where the audience members  and judges rolled their eyes when she walked onstage and skipped right to where she closed her eyes and started singing, half way through I realized I was crying for the right reasons and it felt great.

Canada has got the whole world talking. It's sent shock waves through Europe, Russia, and America, pretty much any place that has shown "Sling Blade",  " Bad Santa " or God forbid " The Astronaut Farmer". I am not sure if it was after he let Angelina Jolie  go or his appearance on Canadian radio last week,  but it seems to be universally accepted that Billy Bob Thornton is a deluded, arrogant and self centered egomaniac.  What people can't get over is just how polite Canadians really are. By this point everybody who has seen "the grape lady" on Youtube  ( if you haven't already, type in those keywords now -- blame your teachers. parents everybody you can for making you such a bad person that you can't help but laugh at someone's misfortune, because it is so, so , so funny) has seen Billy Bob's appearance on CBC's Q with Jian Ghomeshi and is overwhelmed by the spectacle of Jian's restraint when faced with such an open dartboard. Anywhere else, the interviewer would have been name calling and below the belt hitting, blood vial taunting and Angelina dangling, but Jian played it cool and kept it out of the schoolyard when Billy Bob kept grabbing the ball and running back outside like it was recess. But I guess in a way I understand it, when I won my Oscar I refused to talk about it and would, in fact, kick anybody who dared mention it to me and when my parents put it on the mantel I threw it out the window.  We are still not speaking. Seriously the man is such an incredible actor that he could have peeled back the alien mask for at least a  minute and "acted" like he was a human being and no one would have been the wiser. Instead he refused to sing and made his already humiliated band play without him. Evidently not only does Canada not have gravy to warm him up but after a very chilly reception at Massey Hall last Thursday night, Billy Bob's band was beset by the flu and they cancelled the rest of their Canadian dates with Willie Nelson. Thankfully they will be all better by the time the tour heads back into the States. Looks like it did turn into a schoolyard fight and Billy Bob ran home crying to mommy.

I am not sure about this weather,  the cold biting through  my gloves and up  the sleeves of my jacket, settling in my lungs and making a marked exit out into the air. This is April, not December, haven't we had enough? Apparently not, Canadians are paying for their niceness and passiveness with bad weather, It's like someone up there is trying to shake us out of complacency and I can confirm that any complacency I had is long gone, I've got an edge that only the cold can bring. Today I ran into  a gentleman who was in absolute horror about  the new Afghani law that legalizes rape within a marriage, I couldn't help but half scream" don't you see this is a good thing?" and he looked at me as if I had eighteen heads. Figuring I had spent the last decade trying to promote polygamy or something,  it took him a while to really hear  what I was saying. I tried my best to explain that when I saw the headlines on the news i actually did a little "oh thank you Lord dance",  finally someone had the gall to put into writing the silent code that courts there have ruled by for centuries, with (as harsh as it may sound) women's rights being about on par with livestock, because at least now people know. Harsher still are the statistics,  the average woman's life expectancy  in Afghanistan is 44 years old, 87 percent are illiterate and denied an education, one in every three women suffers abuse and more often than not that abuse comes at the hands of their husbands, husbands they never chose in the first place as 70 to 80 percent of marriages are forced. Funny to think that the very law that was devised to keep women in their place is the one that has  ignited the world into  putting women's rights on the front burner. Like most things, it is what is left unsaid, unwritten and undefined that is truly the most dangerous , hopefully this law will be the tipping point that begins to give women in Afghanistan the equality they deserve.

Last week after I read about the Pope's impending trip to Africa and his views on condoms, I resolved to stop reading the news.  I almost had to go to the hospital I was so infuriated, the Pope saying condoms are not an answer in the fight  against AIDS in  Africa is the most backwards, archaic and dangerous thing I've ever heard. I understand doctrine, I understand traditional thinking, I understand everything except reckless abandon, to be so irresponsible as to promote a way of thinking that could lose millions of lives I do not understand at all. Right now in Africa, half the battle is getting people to get tested for HIV, the other half is getting people to understand how to prevent it. The most prohibitive and all encompassing part of the disease is the social stigma, the trickle down effect of corrupt governments that have misinformed the population about how AIDS is spread in order to feed  their own personal gain has affected how families and communities view each other.  The most common chain of events is a male traveller sleeps with a prostitute, comes home to his unsuspecting wife, infects her, who in turn infects most children born after,  and all of this in a society where men having several wives is the absolute norm.   Inevitably, the father dies untreated and untested and the wife -- who doesn't have any idea he even had AIDS- -  finds herself alone and falling ill. Even though now the global community has provided enough medicine to extend people's lives, most refuse to get help, or even tested, because they will most likely be thrown out of their village.  If the children are lucky, they still have a grandmother alive to take care of them after their mother dies. I wish I could say this is a sweeping generalization but, sadly it is not.  Wide spread condom use would actually stop this disease in its tracks. Any group that doesn't actively promote condom use in Africa not only doesn't help the problem- it makes it much, much worse. I initially didn't extend my  news ban to TV and then  I stumbled upon Fox News'  take on the Canadian Military and realized I need to sign out of the world for a while, because if that's what people think I don't want to know.

There is no correct way to begin, nothing to cushion the blow of the events, nothing anyone can say to make it easier for the families and the friends of the people on that helicopter last week, you just have to "be". Certainly there is no handbook to tell you how to show someone how sorry you are for their pain,  but if there was, Newfoundlanders and Labradorians would have written it.  This tragedy which would have torn apart communities anywhere else has served to strengthen them, where people would have turned on others looking for someone to blame, these families have instead lent  their hearts and opened their arms. Like everyone else I remember the night the Ocean Ranger went down as if it was yesterday, what I was wearing, what I was eating when the phone rang, with someone saying turn on the news. The sudden loss of life, of people's fathers, brothers and sons taken in a flash which felt  so unreal to me at six years old now seems all too real. I am sure we will all feel the same way about last Thursday twenty-seven years from now, how we gasped and cried when we heard the news, how we stuck to our TV's and computers waiting for any news and holding out hope, till  sadly there was none. How we learned bit by bit of the far reaching net these men and women cast in their lives to affect each and every one of us, whether it was a dear friend's uncle or another's nephew, cousin and friend or by tributes on facebook. My husband has been trying to get me to stop reading about the details of the accident online before bed because it's too upsetting and up until this point he was right, except now it's three in the morning and I just read they are finally all home. Along with survivor Robert Decker, seventeen souls have been recovered from the hands of the ocean, a gift it rarely gives, now hopefully their loved ones  can have some sort of closure. There are no answers as to why something like this happens, but the families and friends of the people on that flight have shown the world how to handle it with grace and dignity when it does and my heart and prayers are with them all.

It's hard to get anything done in the current  economic, social and emotional climate mostly because not having money can be completely paralyzing. It seems everyone in the streets and on TV is being pushed around on a gurney, but hey, at least the person pushing it has a job. People ask me all the time how musicians are affected by the current recession and I say well, CD sales are tanking, ticket sales are down and expenses are up but to be honest we are unfazed because the music industry has been in a recession for about ten years, "starving artist chic" I like to call it. Even though sometimes they're hard to find there are enormous advantages to being broke because you are forced to get rid of the material things that are only weighing you down, things that you never really wanted in the first place , you were just trying to keep up with your neighbours.  For instance, 508 channels will not help you find something interesting to watch, a pair of rabbit ears will save you fifteen hundred dollars a year. You can liberate a thousand dollars a year by not getting your hair highlighted, which will be an added bonus to your friends who will secretly rejoice because now they don't have to bite their tongues when you ask how it looks and all they really want to do is scream " Wild African gazelle, you look like a gazelle- put the color down". Remember the world before cell phones? I loved that world, I miss that world, let alone a blackberryless world, I have beautiful dreams about that place. The money you would save would be secondary, the peace of mind of not being plugged into a universe of other people's whims at every second, priceless. We are minutes away from being a society so obsessed with technology that soon we will have a chip in our ears that knows who we want to call and when and we won't have to touch a button.  Twenty years ago that would have been a plot for a scary sci fi movie and now we are willingly moments away. Maybe the little things will mean something again, like tea and molasses  buns, conversation and face to face communication, cause those are the only things I'd be willing to pay for and thankfully they don't cost a thing (thanks for the buns Nan).

As much as I can, I try to avoid watching anything on TV  that has a plane crash in it, crazy tumors that grow overnight and blind you, and super unlikely places where germs fester and conspire to kill every cell in your body -- because I just don't need to add any fuel to the fire that is my imagination. So in the past whenever anyone brought up how incredible the airplane crash survival show " Lost" is I just tried to tune them out, but after a certain point I couldn't stand my own cowardice anymore so I decided to cover my eyes during the plane crash part and give it a try. The entire first episode I sat curled up in a  ball, with my eyes sewn shut  and my fingers stuffed in my ears but I could still hear the thunderous tear that rips apart their plane. With some pretty believable heart palpitations already in  motion, I threw my hands up on the air and forced myself to watch it, episode after episode with a million  flash backs to the plane and how it appeared to each passenger. After the fourth episode or so these scenes stopped terrifying me, they just helped put all the pieces of the puzzle together and curiosity won out over fear. Then I got on my first flight since watching twenty four episodes back to back and the fear and the palpitations were back in full force and all I could think was "getting on this plane was a very, very bad idea".  I studied the face of every single passenger to assess if they would be a good ally if stranded on a desert island or if they would turn into a drug addicted, gun toting food thief. Every bump and tumble I braced the armrest for impact, sweating and breathing like I was in labour while everyone else around me laughed at  the beyond ridiculous movie about Chihuahuas  on TV. When the cart stopped in the aisle right beside me to give out drinks, I cursed under my breath like a mad woman going" you're blocking my path to the emergency exit" .  I remembered in the show they were heading to LA and so was I.  Why in the world was everyone else so calm? When we finally landed safe and unscathed, I gave myself a talking to in the mirror of the airport bathroom and resolved to stop being such a grade  A idiot. This worked until a few days later when I boarded a flight to Nashville -- just after seeing the plane crash in Buffalo on the news, driving by a car wreck on the freeway to the airport where the car blew up as I passed it, and realizing it was Friday the thirteenth. If I was that random guy who had to sit next to me on that flight I would have made it my mission to make sure that crazy lady (aka me) never watched "Lost" again.   Good thing he doesn't know I am packing my bags to get on a flight so I can go home and watch the rest of season two, it's just that good.

As much as I can, I try to avoid watching anything on TV  that has a plane crash in it, crazy tumors that grow overnight and blind you, and super unlikely places where germs fester and conspire to kill every cell in your body -- because I just don't need to add any fuel to the fire that is my imagination. So in the past whenever anyone brought up how incredible the airplane crash survival show " Lost" is I just tried to tune them out, but after a certain point I couldn't stand my own cowardice anymore so I decided to cover my eyes during the plane crash part and give it a try. The entire first episode I sat curled up in a  ball, with my eyes sewn shut  and my fingers stuffed in my ears but I could still hear the thunderous tear that rips apart their plane. With some pretty believable heart palpitations already in  motion, I threw my hands up on the air and forced myself to watch it, episode after episode with a million  flash backs to the plane and how it appeared to each passenger. After the fourth episode or so these scenes stopped terrifying me, they just helped put all the pieces of the puzzle together and curiosity won out over fear. Then I got on my first flight since watching twenty four episodes back to back and the fear and the palpitations were back in full force and all I could think was "getting on this plane was a very, very bad idea".  I studied the face of every single passenger to assess if they would be a good ally if stranded on a desert island or if they would turn into a drug addicted, gun toting food thief. Every bump and tumble I braced the armrest for impact, sweating and breathing like I was in labour while everyone else around me laughed at  the beyond ridiculous movie about Chihuahuas  on TV. When the cart stopped in the aisle right beside me to give out drinks, I cursed under my breath like a mad woman going" you're blocking my path to the emergency exit" .  I remembered in the show they were heading to LA and so was I.  Why in the world was everyone else so calm? When we finally landed safe and unscathed, I gave myself a talking to in the mirror of the airport bathroom and resolved to stop being such a grade  A idiot. This worked until a few days later when I boarded a flight to Nashville -- just after seeing the plane crash in Buffalo on the news, driving by a car wreck on the freeway to the airport where the car blew up as I passed it, and realizing it was Friday the thirteenth. If I was that random guy who had to sit next to me on that flight I would have made it my mission to make sure that crazy lady (aka me) never watched "Lost" again.   Good thing he doesn't know I am packing my bags to get on a flight so I can go home and watch the rest of season two, it's just that good.

I feel like I have been off the ice, big time. After being an artist for more than half my life, I came to a point where performing felt like going to the moon for the weekend. It seemed like a completely foreign thing to do and I was afraid it would feel like that forever. The last few years have seen me writing and learning behind the scenes more and I enjoyed it more than I ever could have imagined. To be honest, the thought of walking out on stage by myself scared me more than it did when I was nine (and ten, eleven and twelve, thirteen , etc) and was woefully underprepared for the Kiwanis music festival despite my incredible singing teachers. Then I realized I was just lonely, it's just no fun being a solo artist, I wanted to be in a band, so one night sitting around the kitchen table myself and three good friends decided to join forces. Thankfully the getting to know you process was already complete as Stu, Blake and Pete played with Shaye for years and we had remained the best of friends since ( fans might remember them as " Sweetass"). We wrote our first song before Christmas and immediately jumped into the fire and booked our first gig. It's kinda like putting on a really warm and comfortable coat, that goes with everything you own- sometimes it just works. When asked to describe our sound we like to say " Imagine Bowie and Johnny Cash walk into Willie Nelson's bar and Linda Ronstadt tries to pick a fight with them", with some four part harmony thrown in for good measure. I just walked in the door after a seven hour rehearsal, my fingers and neck are sore from playing guitar and I couldn't be happier, " The Heartbroken" ( the name of our band) has its first gig Friday night in Corner Brook and I am jittery with excitement and fear. The good thing is that Jian Ghomeshi and I are co hosting the ECMA awards show and I am just as nervous about that so I am hoping the two will cancel each other out and I can relax and enjoy both. After that I head out with David Myles to play the Arts and Culture centers in Labrador and across the island, to sing some new songs and some you know quite well, so come on out it would be great to see you.

As much as I can, I try to avoid watching anything on TV that has a plane crash in it, crazy tumors that grow overnight and blind you, and super unlikely places where germs fester and conspire to kill every cell in your body -- because I just don't need to add any fuel to the fire that is my imagination. So in the past whenever anyone brought up how incredible the airplane crash survival show " Lost" is I just tried to tune them out, but after a certain point I couldn't stand my own cowardice anymore so I decided to cover my eyes during the plane crash part and give it a try. The entire first episode I sat curled up in a ball, with my eyes sewn shut and my fingers stuffed in my ears but I could still hear the thunderous tear that rips apart their plane. With some pretty believable heart palpitations already in motion, I threw my hands up on the air and forced myself to watch it, episode after episode with a million flash backs to the plane and how it appeared to each passenger. After the fourth episode or so these scenes stopped terrifying me, they just helped put all the pieces of the puzzle together and curiosity won out over fear. Then I got on my first flight since watching twenty four episodes back to back and the fear and the palpitations were back in full force and all I could think was "getting on this plane was a very, very bad idea". I studied the face of every single passenger to assess if they would be a good ally if stranded on a desert island or if they would turn into a drug addicted, gun toting food thief. Every bump and tumble I braced the armrest for impact, sweating and breathing like I was in labour while everyone else around me laughed at the beyond ridiculous movie about Chihuahuas on TV. When the cart stopped in the aisle right beside me to give out drinks, I cursed under my breath like a mad woman going" you're blocking my path to the emergency exit" . I remembered in the show they were heading to LA and so was I. Why in the world was everyone else so calm? When we finally landed safe and unscathed, I gave myself a talking to in the mirror of the airport bathroom and resolved to stop being such a grade A idiot. This worked until a few days later when I boarded a flight to Nashville -- just after seeing the plane crash in Buffalo on the news, driving by a car wreck on the freeway to the airport where the car blew up as I passed it, and realizing it was Friday the thirteenth. If I was that random guy who had to sit next to me on that flight I would have made it my mission to make sure that crazy lady (aka me) never watched "Lost" again. Good thing he doesn't know I am packing my bags to get on a flight so I can go home and watch the rest of season two, it's just that good.

People say you are either a dog person or a cat person, but for most of my life I fit into another category entirely. I have to admit I was neither. This began the day a little black and white kitten came into our lives when I was about six or seven years old and like any other kid of that age I was beyond excited to welcome a new fuzzy, furry addition to the family. We named her Higgins after the moustached butler on Magnum PI  and the first few hours played out like the end of a Sunday afternoon Disney Movie with everybody smiling and laughing. My sister instantly bonded with the cat in the way two hockey players bond, rough and tumble, she would pull a string around in a circle circumnavigating the living room, hall and kitchen, winding the cat into a frenzy , the cat loved every second of it . Just like you can't describe why certain people do or don't get  along, Higgins didn't like me from the start, she would lay and wait for me to walk out of the bedroom  in the morning and she would pounce just as I passed the hall table, clinging onto my little legs with her claws and biting, chewing and scratching as I screamed in terror and pain. To this day I sleep on my stomach with all of my limbs tucked in tight under the covers because there is nothing quite like the sensation of walking up and an animal (domesticated or not) is gnawing on your arms like  beef jerky. Every day for twelve years I woke up bracing myself for the next cat attack and needless to say this gave me a somewhat irrational fear of animals.  As an adult there was no way on earth I ever considered getting a pet. Yet somehow today I find myself making baby talk to a two year old calico cat  that has the biggest amber eyes I've ever seen and she's in my house, or should I say, her house.  My husband loves cats and really wanted one, so I figured I would go check out a shelter when he was away and that way he wouldn't be disappointed when we left empty handed - the last thing I expected was to fall in love at first sight. It was the strangest sensation, we just found each other, she'd been there for a year and a half, the longest of any of them and my guess is she had given up on going anywhere else. I am not sure what her life was like before but it was obvious she was scared too. To the shock of the workers she came out of her cage and right up to me and that was it, she was mine and I was hers. On our drive home the snow stopped, the sun came out, ,the ice began to melt and my big black heart got a lot more colorful.

First I investigated whether I had an attack of seasonal affective disorder, then I checked to make sure I had taken all my vitamins, then I skipped to the end of my book just to make sure my subconscious wasn't telling me my favourite character was going to die unexpectedly( he doesn't ,but now I know too much to read the middle of it), because the last few days I have found myself reaching up to my eyes to find a little unexpected moisture.. For instance, last night I started watching the concert for Barack Obama and before I knew it I was weeping, this was not the official long awaited inauguration, but an odd parade of celebrities, with bad audio and weird song/artist combinations that left me scratching my head for the most part, so the last thing I was expecting was to be wiping my eyes but when Pete Seeger walked out with his banjo and his stripped off kilter hat to sing " This land is your land" the waterworks came. To be alive and a witness to one of the most historic things to ever happen in America is simply overwhelming, yet like anything good, I generally work with  the rule of "don't believe it till you see it" and I guess these last few months since the election I forgot to emotionally prepare myself for the beauty of this day. So to launch a counterattack on the wellspring I had no choice but to jump on the internet to watch some of the amazing montages of Bush's most profoundly idiotic gaffs and misunderestimations to try and laugh. For the first minute I admit I laughed so hard I almost choked, then I started to bite my fingernails and pull at my hair , to know this isn't a spoof on Saturday Night Live but  a real person with a wife and daughters  and a mother and father, made me feel a bit sorry for him - something I never thought I'd feel after his invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. It's kinda like finding out the bully at school  who is making your life miserable is just repeating the things that happen to him at home, it doesn't excuse the behaviour but at least it explains it a little.  Bush was a puppet, dancing on a stage, not knowing until the last act that he wasn't the hero at all, he was in fact the fall guy for men way smarter than himself. Hopefully, now the world will start to right itself and we can get back to a time when pretzels weren't considered deadly weapons.

Some days are golden. You open your eyes and it's just like any other assault of grey skies where you could just as easily fall off a sidewalk into slush, accidentally eat the leftovers in the back of the fridge before realizing they've gone bad, really bad or you could lose your job after buying a state of the art pasta making machine you will never use and never be able to resell. So when a day takes prozac sheen all on its own, it's a complete shocker. Monday is generally not when these lofty good days happen, but then that said, an ok day for a Friday is like the second coming of Borat when it happens on a  Monday, so whether or not today was actually amazing I am not sure, but I enjoyed it with every fibre of my being. Over the past few weeks I've been making  a mental note of the things that have been cluttering up my mind like a pack rat's attic, things I have been putting off for way too long like that pile of clothes on my spare bed, dry cleaning, hemming six pairs of pants that I've resorted to  wearing like Lil Wayne, banking, bookkeeping and replacing mascara( do you have any idea how much bacteria is in a tube?). To be honest if I'd have scratched just two things off that list I'd have been happy, instead I got everything done. There wasn't one line up, I sailed to the counter time and again, I got a parking spot directly out front everywhere I went, everybody said please and thanks and I got 25$ off my bill at Shoppers, which nearly sent me over the edge with giddiness. Reading this back, it doesn't sound very exciting, in fact it was so boring I almost erased it, but I must stand up for my day, it was simply one of the best I have ever had. I can start again, it's like a rebirth, having a clean slate, I can be anybody I want to be today, hell I am even up to date with my taxes...now it's time to make a really, really big mess and I can't wait.

People have a right to their opinions, we all do, but the strange thing about the internet is that where in real life we observe some kind of moral code of kindness and an unwillingness to intentionally hurt someone's feeling, the blanket of anonymousness gives people cart blanche to be downright nasty. A couple of months ago someone alerted me to some comments posted about a column I had written and by the look on his face I could tell it wasn't good. I couldn't remember anything I had said that was particularly controversial, so I really had no idea what column he was talking about. As he started to prattle on about how wrong ( crazy,  perhaps insane) someone thought I was, I put my hand up in the air and said "don't tell me, I do not want to know". Maybe ten years ago I would have wanted to know what someone else thought of me and my opinions and I would have tried to bend to their will, to be the person they wanted me to be, but, as I can attest by throwing my back out last week just by walking up the stairs while talking on the phone, I am too old to care. There is so much peace that comes with this, it should be a mandatory course taught in high school called " Forget trying to get everyone to like you, cause it'll never happen- Be your own person 101". I am thinking about this because I was just on the Telegram website reading the news when I stumbled upon the video for Colleen Power's  song" New Townie Man" which is a hilarious take on a  girl from around the bay going out with a guy from town. I was crying from laughing as I inadvertently scrolled down to the comments section, I read the first few that said they thought it was really funny and cute, then it got to the angry ones, which I must admit stopped me in my tracks. I poured myself another cup of tea, took a deep breath and let out a half scream " Don't people know she is joking?". Colleen is from around the bay, she is an intelligent woman with a long life ahead of her filled with visiting her family around the bay and most likely with her townie man in tow. The fact of the matter is if she really felt anything but love for the place she came from  and the people who live there, the last thing she would do is write a song about it , do a video for it and put it up on youtube. They say laughter is the best medicine and I'd rather be laughing at myself then someone else, so I am going to watch the video again, cause I see myself in every one of those characters and man is it ever wicked funny.

New years resolutions used to start January 1st, then somewhere along the way the starting line shifted to the second, without anyone noticing it got switched to the Monday after the first  weekend of January, until it was considered a bit obsessive if you started depriving yourself anywhere before the fifth. So after a weekend of last ditch fun I woke up today with the will and intention to not eat chips, to think positively and get motivated to go to the gym. In the end I spent about an hour hunting around the house searching for a bag of chips even though I would have settled for a single one, the next hour I sat thinking negatively about wanting, needing to eat chips and the hour after that  I wondered why I didn't I have the foresight to hide a bag somewhere. As the sun dipped down below the skyline I spent another hour digging for my gym bag under the rubble of clothes I had yet to unpack from Christmas and when I finally found it I had no choice but to go to the gym. They say the hardest part is getting there, but if that was the case people would step out of their cars, walk to the front door, put one foot inside and turn right around again feeling lighter, healthier, with rosy cheeks and a toned heart. Instead the gym was packed to the gills, I felt like the last clown to squeeze into a VW. I made my way through the crowd, past  the machines and apparatuses that usually stand like a row of lonely statues but were instead being pummeled by people who hadn't been to the gym in eight months as the toxins in their sweat literally ate away the treadmills enamel. I reached in my purse for my IPod ( ah the perfect invention for trying to chisel away  boredom in the gym, anything to take away from the fact that you aren't really doing anything, you're not skiing down a hill, slapping a puck in the net, not even a ball over the net, you're just running in place staring at the walls) and cursed as I remembered it lying rather precariously under that pile of clothes.  I attempted to do a ridiculous outer thigh/butt/lower earlobe exercise as I waited for a cardio machine  and couldn't help overhearing the man next to me complaining loudly to the attendant that people were only allowed to do 30 minutes,  that there should be signs, that he'd been waiting for five full minutes, his enthusiasm indicated he worked out come hell or high water 365 days a year and he wasn't impressed by the crop of resolution exercisers. He stood behind people one by one, monitoring their screens ( a big no no) , snuck up behind them and tapped them on the back and yelled, "you're over your time, you're over your time, I've been waiting!". I've got to say I have never seen a group of people go from looking so miserable to looking like a crop of world class athletes who lived for the elliptical machine, they glided as if they were sipping Guinness. I plan to go back the same time tomorrow, I can think of nothing as motivating as that guy trying to kick me off, I'd stay on for hours and hey I might even enjoy it.

There is a joy to Christmas that can really only come from children, the surprise and excitement on their faces as if the world is one big present for them to unwrap, so when there are no kids around you really really miss them like a bunch of limbs gone astray. My sweet little nephews were at home in England this Christmas and we were all suffering form a low grade depression about it, like a bunch of heartsick teenagers we would turn and look to each other and say " remember last year when the boys.." did this , that and every other thing. I am sure I almost cried fifteen times I missed them so much. Of course it is easy to forget about the diaper changing, the fighting over legos, the runny noses and when they won't go to you when you are dying for a hug because quite frankly what kinda kid would want to spend that much time being hugged instead of playing with their new star wars toy ( pronounced staaah woes- for added effect), but like anything in life you just get on with it. Then about six o'clock  Christmas night I heard a beep coming from my computer, I had a new message and it was from my brother, I crossed my fingers hoping he had sent some pictures of the boys and a video link appeared. I clicked the full screen option and all of a sudden it was like we were all together, opening presents, dancing around the kitchen with the boys  dressed up as santa, rudolf and a little christmas penguin. There was no fourth wall at all, well maybe a little like groundhog day as we pressed repeat over and over again, until the next video arrived and the next after that. Getting to see the new missing tooth and new versions of twinkle twinkle was the only gift we could ever hope for. We sat down to eat a feast, cleared our plates, did some dishes and sat down on the sofa in the clean living room. This was a different vista for Christmas, there were no toys lurking on stairs, no cookies ground into the carpet, no video games that needed triple A batteries and all we had were nine volt, no chocolate covered hands over your new sweater, simply no mess. We decided to look at it as if the glass was half full, it was almost like the kids were here except we didn't have to clean up after them. That said, next year if given the choice we'd just go ahead and knock the glass over, especially if it was a sippy cup!

A very bad thing has happened to me and I did it to myself willingly and no I didn't get a tattoo of Martha Stewart on my face, I joined Facebook. Argh why why why, why did I do this? I am addicted, enthralled, attracted yet horrified and repulsed. I feel it seeking out of my pores like a bad drug or listeria infected lunch meat, I want to get out  now but I've already taken the first hit and I am lying on the floor shaking and dying for more. I have work to do, places I need to be and shoveling that needs to be done before the rain freezes the snow and turns the driveway into a skating rink,  but I am not moving. In my head I keep repeating to myself "I think I'm sick, I shouldn't go outside now in case it gets worse". Truth is it's not a lie because I do indeed feel sick really I can't leave my computer , it won't let me go, I have officially been hit by facebook. Cut to two "fun filled" hours later where I have been hovering my finger  one centimeter above the delete your account button and then withdrawing it to my side as I recited aloud the reasons I joined in the first place. I was sucked in so I could see pictures of my family and friends kids, for the past year I have wondered where the usual email train of pictures were and the answer was always Facebook and I felt like I was missing out. Yet when I would hear stories about super personal info people would post on their page in seven minute increments I was spooked to the core and vowed I would never do it. Remembering this led me to put on my hat, mitts, boots and my new winter coat to head out and shovel. The sun was shining, it was warm and the snow though laden with water felt light as a feather, my mother and I remarked at how cautious drivers were about not spraying us with snow, slowing down just before the driveway. I decided that I would leave Facebook when I got in, it was quite simply keeping me from the joys in life. Then I looked up as a minivan sped towards a puddle of melting snow and covered me from head to toe, in my ears, my hair and in my eyes. "That's it" I screamed  at the sky, I'm going in to check my Facebook.

I was taught if you don't have anything good to say then don't say anything at all. So the last eight years I've had to try with all my might to bite my tongue as I read the paper and watched the news, and today I finally have something good to say. George Bush can bob and weave like the best of them! He out ducks the heavyweight champion of the world without a hint of fear and grins like a chestshire cat while doing it. This weekend  at a press conference in Iraq, an Iraqi reporter took the shoes off of his feet and hurled them one after another at the president hoping to give him the ultimate insult by hitting him with the souls of his shoes. His aim was on target, but his target surprised everyone by getting out of the way for once. If only this had been his template for how to behave in office, instead he spent the last eight years perched at the top of a water tank, handing out balls to the rest of the world daring them to bring him down , so needless to say he spent his two terms in office soaking wet. With all this excitement going on who would have ever thought that Canadian politics would pull ahead of the pack on the world stage in terms of sheer entertainment value in these last few weeks. You would think news segments talking about a proposed coup would be focused on Bolivia or Chile not in Canada of all places. Seriously though you wouldn't get away with writing it, no one would believe a story filled with grainy tapes,  backdoor meetings (secretly taped) and the shutting down of government by the Queen's representative, not to mention that J LO dress missus wore to Bernier's swearing in. All in all Canada has turned from W5 to The Dynasty with few less wigs and way more suspense.

To paint a portrait of a person you must use as many colours as the person lived. So many people live in black and white and so few with the vibrancy of a rainbow and my aunt was one of the lucky colourful ones. You name it, she did it.  She wrote and directed plays, taught school, flipped houses and back in the day made the best Kraft pizzas in the world. Maybe it was growing up the only girl with seven brothers, you learn to fend for yourself early on, nothing could stop Mary Ellen when she put her mind to something.

When she was diagnosed with cancer last year she made a decision that she would live, that she would fight it with all that she had, that this would be a blip on the radar of her life and asked us to all to accept this doctrine and I completely believed her. Even after enduring relentless battles with Chemo and trips to and from the hospital  there was no stopping her from coming to my wedding this summer. I emailed her the week before to say  maybe she should reconsider and  save her strength for her fight, but she was having none of it, she got on that plane and made it to the ceremony when all the signs in the world were saying she'd never make it. She looked, of course, completely different, frail, hair shorn, in a wheelchair but that was only for the first minute, then you could see nothing  but the funny, loving, fighter who looked no different than she did a year ago. I am so blessed to have a wonderful, loving family and she was right at the heart of it, if anybody needed anything Mary Ellen would do it, she wore out the path from Avondale to St John's driving everyone around. Not only was she the best sister and aunt, she was the best daughter a mother could ever have and she adored her mother. I remember having fake fights with her about Nan when I was growing up, I'd say " but she's MY grandmother"  and she'd say " I win cause she's MY mother!". Even though Mary Ellen passed away last Friday she won the biggest battle so many lose, she loved and was so loved in return. I believe she is up there smiling, her time here was much too short but she did things while she was here that most people can only dream about.

Everywhere I look, everything I read, every conversation I overhear on the street is about the recession and how scared everyone is to spend money, yet obviously the DOW or TSX hasn't tried to go to a mall. I understand the rationale of a line up a mile long for the gas station when a hurricane is coming, or a grocery store raid for canned goods and water when a meteor is heading towards earth but I was left scratching my head on Saturday as I drove around looking for a parking spot at the mall for close to an hour. I was anticipating a ghost town with tumbleweeds rolling past store fronts, boarded up windows and skeletons of explorers, instead I drove right into a super size game of bumper cars where the objective was to come as close to each other as you could without touching, fighting for the perfect spot you'd swear on the bible in court you saw first. Just where in the world were all these people going? Surely not to the mall! Maybe they were giving out free turkeys or even just the gizzards; they way things are going these days that might be the only meat you'd see for days. Or else The Gap was doing an exchange for old clothes, honestly I was stumped and more than a little excited, maybe there's a sale I thought! Like panning for gold during the rush I ran to the scene of the fervour and set about planning my good fortune, shedding any niceties and formalities I barrelled in the front door like a pioneer who's just seen America, I was ready to conquer. Surveying the scene I saw something I'd never thought I'd see again, people, everywhere, jammed to the rafters, holding onto bags, bags of things that had been purchased in stores, things people had actually paid for (credit cards included). No one seemed upset or scared that they were risking their kids university fund on their overwhelming desire to buy something now, they seemed carefree, resilient and somewhat jubilant. I think it's the first time I'd seen people look like this in a couple of months and frankly I wanted some of it. I felt I had no choice but to walk into a store and do the same thing myself- I bought something I absolutely did not need and that was way over priced. I just hope the parking lot is not as crowded when I go back to return it tomorrow.

 

 

Congratulations to Damhnait Doyle on her recent two nominations for the 2009 East Coast Music Awards!  Damhnait has been nominated for ECMA 2009 FACTOR Recording of the Year and ECMA 2009 Pop Recording of the Year.  The Awards show for the ECMA's will be held in Corner Brook Newfoundland on March 1, 2009.  For more information about the ECMA's, you can go to their official website at http://www.ecma.ca/ .

It's funny how fast the bulldog can turn into the underdog. The creature you once feared so much you raced across the street to avoid its gaze, that you wore thick, quilted clothing with a bite free steel underlay to stop its teeth and avoided meat products so they wouldn't smell blood now appears as a whimpering, defeated, sad hound dog. This week on TV, allowed for the first time to talk to news agencies at her own will, poor ole Sarah Palin looked disheveled, humbled and shocked that she and her running mate John McCain didn't win the race to the White House. She, in her rediscovered consignment clothes, (don't  they have a Winners up there in Alaska?) and growing out dye job with no freebie in sight, felt obliged to defend herself against allegations that she is ignorant about government policy, fruit fly research and world geography. Not the least of which was a very underwhelming effort to convince viewers that she did know that Africa is indeed a country and not a continent, oops sorry about that I mean a continent, not a country.  With the dumbing down of society it is inevitable a little stupidity is going to rub off on us all, if even for a moment, still I thought McCain's concession speech was beautiful and gracious. If he had been half as sincere on the campaign trail and half as funny as he was on SNL I think he would have fared much better and for that I am so glad he wasn't. It's kind of like being in a relationship and knowing you have no choice but to break up with the guy, everything is all wrong, you can't stop talking about how he takes you for granted, mistreats you and has no compassion, then you dump him and all of a sudden he's a different person altogether and for a second you think maybe you shouldn't have broken up with him. Until of course you remember the time he left you stranded in Florida with no money, no passport and no hotel. Suddenly  your heart skips a beat because in an hour you've got a date with the new guy in town who has a great education, a way with words, is nice to your mother and genuinely seems to care not only  about what you feel and think but everybody  in the world . I was always told when you met "The One" you'd just know and I never dared believe them until now.

Very few people are able to look at themselves objectively. When we pass a mirror our eyes tend to jump to the thing that makes us different from everyone else and our minds flood with a strong desire to change that thing -- whether it's through weird diets, embarrassing exercises or, heaven forbid, a scalpel. Chances are that "different" thing is actually what is most beautiful. When Jennifer Grey from "Dirty Dancing" went and trimmed off most of her nose she ended up being completely unrecognizable, like she was a different person altogether.

She thought her nose was too big, but it was the nose that the world fell in love with and when it was gone her acting roles dried up. Same goes for Kenny Rogers, whom I have renamed, "poor ole Kenny ", if anyone has caught him recently on late night TV, you just might get whiplash from glaring aghast  at the print on the bottom that says his name and the unrecognizable creature on the screen. Most things are better left alone. Of course, there are the days when you just want to change everything and in the grand scheme of things, I am happy I have a low pain tolerance and don't have the funds to act on whims of chin/calf/butt implants. The first time I realized my teeth were a little "unique" I had taken a bite of an apple and saw that the imprint left on the peel looked a bit more like barbed wire then a semi circle, I went to the mirror and examined them from every angle, getting more and more horrified with every look. In my day the last thing in the world a junior high student wanted was big metal braces, so I decided to embrace my teeth as they were and since that point they have been a proud badge of honour for me. Then last week I went to a new dentist for a check up and cleaning and happened to mention in passing my ongoing painful jaw issues, he examined me and immediately said I needed braces.  He then told me my two front teeth were forcing my lower bite back into the jaw joint and that was the cause of my sometimes agonizing pain. He went on to explain all about the new fuss free clear braces and how, in the end, my teeth would look like a movie star's. I told him I'd think about it but as soon as I walked out I knew I was going to have to live with the pain, I can't change my teeth, they're my best feature.

Wow, I just received a truly unexpected perk of marriage, something so exhilarating I might not get over it and no it has nothing to do with having the garbage taken out and the toilets cleaned. If anyone asks I am going to say my husband was attacked by a swarm of bees ( this of course is farfetched and that's the point, I don't want to jinx him) and temporarily lost the ability to move his arms and use his fingers and I was given the task of filling in his ballot for the American election. In truth the absentee ballot arrived by mail and I stood looking at it for more than an hour before he came home and the headlights in the driveway snapped me out of my stupor. I had a childlike need to see it for myself, the grade of paper, the size of the names, oh just to hold it in my hands. All the memories of the Detroit news flooding the airwaves of St John's growing up, making me believe Newfoundland was north of Florida, west of New York and pretty much the center of the universe although conversely it turned me into a twelve year old that never dared to venture up the street to the store in broad day light because I truly thought I'd get kidnapped and traded for drugs. The countless American elections, devastating and exhilarating that we could only helplessly observe and now the  ballot was  in my hands. I believe in people's rights to keep their vote secret but if someone has to ask who I'd vote for, they are probably reading this column for the first time and certainly couldn't hear me screaming "why" like a Nancy Kerrigan imitator after the Canadian Election a few weeks ago. I believe my husband felt a little pity for me and after watching me cradle the form he quietly  asked " hey, do you want to fill in the circle?" . My answer was a lightning fast "I do", as definite as the day we married but without the hysterical laughter/crying. I took out my writing implement like it was a quick draw at high noon, like it was the fight I'd been waiting for my whole life, the wait is going to be excruciating, but at least I'm not afraid to walk to the store anymore.

I think I have died and gone to heaven, mixing my work with the most guilty of guilty pleasures. I am not proud but I have been known to indulge in some reality TV watching. You know the kind of show where you scramble to change the channel when someone walks in the room because you don't want them to think less of you as a human because you are watching  Brett Michaels hold a contest for a new girlfriend on "Rock Of Love".  The trick is to have something like  PBS or The History Channel programmed in so as soon as you hear footsteps walking down the hall you just flick over  (don't for a
second pretend you've never done it). So when I got a  call to be a guest on a reality show featuring eight women from across the country  who've had their hearts ripped out and stomped on and are ready for a comeback, I simply couldn't resist. 

So today I am in London, Ontario where the ladies  are sequestered for a couple of months as they  work their butts off and expand their comfort zones  in order to restore self esteem, get in shape, eliminate negativity  and get their mojo back. Their challenge is to write a torch song laying bare all the hurt and betrayal and that is where I come in. If you sat down and really listened to the lyrics of the songs on the radio and in your record collection you'd see most of them are about love and the really good  ones are about loss of love, there is nothing like the raw material of a broken heart to fuel a million songs. I can't tell you how many times in my life I have sat down  wretched with heartache only to be able to see through my tears and say, damn this would make a good song. If you are a writer there is a silver lining to just about any situation and just like anybody who can talk can sing, I believe everybody can write.  It may not win a Grammy, but it's way better than keeping toxins inside.

Watching these women conquer their fears ,writing their stories and getting up on stage to share them with the world reinforced my belief that pain is one of the best gifts you can ever get.  There's just no limit to where it can take you if you treat it with respect.

Craziness in the world, with markets crashing, Palin winking, people cozied up to the TV screen with  magnifying glasses checking  out  to see if Biden had Botox, Harper trying to slide back in as Canada's leader while counting on the fact we are all too preoccupied with the American election to make him accountable. There are few things that we can take solace in, retail therapy is out, playing the stock market is out, flipping a house for fun is out and checking your bank statements on line, decidedly no fun. Anything that costs more then 99 cents is ridiculously extravagant and just  like the sales of candy went up during the great depression and ice cream went through the roof after 911,  today we are all looking for cheap and satisfying thrills and we need look no further then music. For the past decade musicians and writers have been decrying the fact that no one gets paid for their work because people download it from the internet and for the first time a silver lining has appeared to catch the rain and save people from their thirsts. Until laws change it seems that music is free and it just might be the only thing in North America that is, so I say bake it in the oven and put some ice cream on top. I, for one, feel like I have a brand new car, except instead of a Volkswagen I have the entire Beatles catalogue.

Always game to try something different and switch things up about six months ago a friend asked me to perform a couple of concerts singing  Beatles songs, excited to play with a big band I said yes. The only drawback was that I really wasn't a fan of the Beatles and  in fact on a certain vacation I might have sworn and "lightly" banged the door when " Good Day Sunshine" was played at a high decibel early in the morning. I simply just didn't get "It", so I set about learning the songs somewhat begrudgingly. The strangest things started to happen, I  caught myself singing the song that had enraged me with its cheeriness a year earlier, I spent hours pouring over  old concert footage on youtube and  I enjoyed every second I spent at Roy Thompson Hall the other night singing their songs. Sometimes coming late to the party means all the food is gone and your friends are getting ready to leave, it's a gamble, but sometimes it means  you've arrived just when the party is getting started.  With music everybody wins.

The best thing about Thanksgiving is going to someone else's house, bringing wine and broccoli casserole  and sitting back and enjoying the onslaught of Turkey, dressing and peas pudding. This traditional meal looks like the most simple and straight-ahead affair but it is the most difficult meal to coordinate and even  the most seasoned cook balances the beam as all pots boil right at the brink of spilling over the top at all times. The timing has to be dead on or else everyone is drunk from too much wine while with their heads pressed up against the stove window waiting for the turkey to change from pink to brown, while all the other dishes freeze, whither and wilt, until  you realize you did the math all wrong and it's going to take another three hours till the bird is done. That is why even though I like to cook this meal myself, I truly love to go out for it.  The fun is only beginning because no matter how late you get home Sunday night, holiday Monday is always the most sinful of days, a complete paid for free pass.

Nothing is open so you can't do anything even if you want to and I know I am not alone when I say I never want to. It is seven thirty  at night and I am still in my pyjamas and robe and I have no plans to get out of them till tomorrow morning. The sun shone all day in through the window and from weather channel I could tell it was at 22 degrees but I curled up with a hot water bottle and pretended it was freezing outside, it made not going outside not feel quite so blasphemous. I've got to say  it hasn't been all enjoyable, I, like many Canadians have occupied my brain with praying and hoping  we use this election to change the course of  not just our country but the world.  I guess you could say I am resting before the most important thing I've done in years, vote. I can't  quite believe how fast and furious this Canadian election came upon us, we never got a chance to catch our breath and I guess that was the idea.  I just hope that when you read this on Wednesday I won't be in a ditch somewhere fighting melting glaciers, while I try to tell passers by on the street that once upon a time Canada was a place of exceptional culture and tolerance because our government will be doing that for us.

Just walked in the door from the Avalon Mall after watching a movie with my mom and a little pop into Winners which no  trip to the mall would be complete without. It's like walking into your own private retail video game, you don't know when someone is going to yank your treasure out from under your nose or when you are going to strike pay dirt in the form of a very inexpensive pair of shoes and whether you win or lose you just end up playing over and over again. I suppose it is better than sitting in front of a video lotto machine, but some months when I check my credit card bill I am not entirely sure. Knowing I had to come home and write my column, I dropped the green knit sweater I had been debating buying as the part of my brain that said it made me look pregnant won out and set to leave the store empty handed. As it is when you go to the mall ( and that is why you should never go there without washing your hair, wearing undereye concealer and changing out of your pajama bottoms) I ran into eight hundred people I knew, one of whom told me she reads my column-that  I sometimes make her laugh out loud and  she can tell if I'm in a good mood or a bad mood. Driving home not necessarily in a bad mood but not in a great one either I started freaking out that I had to get in a good mood or else people would be able to tell, I watched "The Office", searched for non existent sugar in the cupboards and youtubed laughing babies, but I had no choice but to start writing my column in a bad mood. What I should have done was start off talking about how I just flew home for a surprise retirement gathering for my Dad and that he was so shocked when I walked in the door that he gasped, covered his mouth and took a step back. Then I should have followed it by writing about all the people I've met across the world who have told me about how my Father has changed the course of their lives through his help, care and generosity as a teacher whether in High School or in University. Then I should have said that  no matter what he was doing work wise, play wise and writing wise my sister, brother and I always felt like we were the most important things in his life . . . now I am in a really, really good mood.

I feel like they are toying with our emotions. Raising prices, adding astronomical fuel surcharges, making you pay for a second bag while eyeing up your first like it's holding one kilogram too many and that at any moment you will be forced to put just one of your favourite shoes in a pile with other lonely looking single shoes, who turn their heels to you in shame because they were simply "too heavy to fly economy". As a consumer you get used  to it, you realize that's the way it is now in this new world where oil and gas are reminisced about like horse drawn carriages and the golden days of  outhouses. Then you stumble across an ad directing you to an airline website where there's a big banner at the top saying no more fuel surcharges. Then you go to another website to investigate the competition and they say the same thing, oh and the extra bag- that's for free too! I don't understand it, we'd just gotten used to it, hadn't we? It's like reducing the GST  by 1 percent,  it doesn't make any real impact on our day to day lives, we can't be thankful because no one has even realized it's been lowered and when you add it all up it's a huge lack of funds the government can't give to Cancer research or Daycare or heaven forbid arts programs. Like anything in life there has got to be a catch so as I set about checking for my flight home at Christmas I realized unless you want to fly to  Antigua the third Monday of every second month, but only on those months that have 31 days in it at 4:36 in the morning, they have buried that surcharge in the fare along with the equivalent of three or four extra bags.

As much as I miss the whole paper ticket, expert travel agent scenario, I love getting on the internet and checking out flights. It's a bit like gambling, playing the tables, just holding out for the right hand. Sadly there is that point of no return and for me that day is today when the prices only go higher and higher, when you've lingered an hour too long waiting for a seat sale, salivating for healthy competition between airlines that won't come for Christmas this year, no matter how much you ask  Santa.

Chances are I'll be stuck in the middle seat, apparently Santa doesn't like giving out coal anymore.

Since John McCain announced he'd chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate I have heard the rallying cries of feminists ringing in my ears, thumping on my chest and burning my bra. First I encountered a faint whiff of smoke followed by the unmistakable smell of burning flesh- those little wolves dressed in sheep's clothing snuck up behind me and burned my bra when it was still on me. I am either extremely lucky with the company I keep or completely ignorant because I don't know a single woman who is stunned enough to think that anything in this life is free, so McCain picking Palin as a running mate because he thought he could trick female voters into thinking they'd be voting for the betterment of womankind was both insulting and transparent. We don't want a woman in the White House for the sake of having a woman there; we want a human being who will look out for the best interests of mankind and not to off handedly overturn Roe vs. Wade.

Instead McCain delivered a gun toting, global warming denying, book banning, power bloated excuse for a politician who would have been run out of town had she tried to run for Mayor of St John's.  I know my words are harsh, but the outcome is honestly terrifying, it's as if a giant asteroid (in female form) is heading straight towards earth and the astronaut hired to destroy it (also female) sits passively and says "you know what, it's the first female asteroid, I'm just gonna let it go and see what happens, besides she looks great, like she's lost some weight, maybe she's trying Jenny!". Sarah Palin is no Hilary Clinton, not by a long shot, it's like margarine instead of butter, sweetener instead of raw sugar and diet cola instead of well, anything else at all, designed to give you a great surge of energy and then kill you within the year. Not to mention the hair, oh my lord the hair, the bun and the bangs like a ceramic rooster on top of her shoulders, the pet parrot of Mrs Roper from "Three's Company". I had to cover one eye just to look at her until she showed up on TV with a polished blowout which urged me to call every American I know to make sure they go out there and vote, vote, vote and I'll pay everyone's long distance bill to do the same.

people do it. somewhere in the world there are people who go on vacation one day, realize that life is too short, they sell their houses, quit their jobs, learn another language, sell ice cream for a living, eat as much as they sell, they do what it seems only half crazy characters do in the movies. Even though I haven't met any of these people myself, for more then a few moments I have given serious thought to being one of them. I am on the eve of the end of my honeymoon, the vacation to end all vacations really, just as long as the expectations aren't to high. In the insanity that was planning my wedding , this trip was like a candle burning in the wind in a hurricane with no tail in sight, I saw it as a mirage I just wasn't going to give in to or long after, so when it came and I opened my eyes and I was in Belize it was a like being thrown off the deep end into a huge pool filled with fruity drinks, fresh grilled lobster, sun for days and  a nice little raft to float on.I have a few favorite expressions from this trip, one of them is " blended please" in reference to my margarita preference and the other is " there is no way anyone I know is going to believe I am doing this". I am known for being a little delicate at times, a big old baby who'd rather lie on the beach then go in it heaven forbid so when my friends and family see pictures of me swimming with sharks they are going to think I've been holed up on a computer photoshopping for two weeks.Truth is I don't even recognize myself in pictures where I am riding a half mad horse in the jungle up  mountainsides and  over rivers, or hiking through the rainforest to get to a series of caves that you swim, scale and climb a mile and a half back into the mountain in order to reach an elaborate Mayan burial ground where offerings of food were made to the Gods and humans sacrificed. I still have trouble believing I put on a mask and set of flippers and jumped feet first into the ocean and snorkeled with stingrays, snakes, manatees ( again some sharks) , swam in tandem with turtles  and had to cover my goggles to shield my eyes from the blistering neon shades of the fish. It wasn't until yesterday in the depths of  monkey inhabited jungle as I watched my husband eat  termites and turn to me and say" Hey they taste like carrots" that I thought to myself " Yep it's time to go home" and I think I'll be steering clear of carrots when I do.

You just never know what the universe has in store for you. As our kids are going  back to school this week and we mourn the end of summer, I'm starting a brand new chapter in my life.

About 6 months ago I started mulling over what else I was meant to do on this planet. I've always loved entertaining (I am a Newfoundlander after all) but I wanted to try something new. So, I put it out there, just like all those books say. Envision the things you want in your life and they will come to you. A couple of weeks later, I got a call.   "Kim this may seem out of the blue, but would you ever consider co-hosting a morning radio show?" I have always believed in signs and as a good friend of mine says, in order to take advantage of an opportunity you have to first recognize it. I got it. If that call had come a few weeks earlier, I might not have been open to it. 

I have dabbled in tv and radio as long as I've been singing and I've always felt at home doing it. 20 years ago I was co-host of Q-93am with Brian O'Connell. I loved it! It was there that I would scare people by standing up on desks and singing Patsy Cline for anyone that would listen, (and not).  In a way my career as a singer started there. But now I'm headed back to radio as one of the new co-hosts on the new EZ Rock morning show in Toronto (http://www.ezrock.com/). It's a big deal. And as my husband never fails to remind me, "you realize that Toronto is the 4th largest market in North America" Good God, I'm scared! I love the people I'm working with, and I know I'm going to love the job. And I figure, Seamus and Rick have tv covered  for now so we must start our domination of  radio! I will always make music, and I know Dav and I will make music together again, but for now I'm going to focus on something a little different.

So even with the getting up at 3:30 in the morning, and the feeling of being constantly jet lagged, I realize I've been given an amazing opportunity. I just thank God I was open to it when it came along.

Last Friday night, a giant sigh of despair was heard far and wide.......Damhnait Doyle was no longer a single woman!  In a small schoolhouse in Toronto, she married a charming gentleman from New Jersey, and I was the proud Maid of Honor.

My friend Damhnait is quite the catch. From afar she seems like a beautiful, down-to-earth musician, journalist, comedian and fiercely proud Newfoundlander. And as someone who has known her like a sister for 10 years, I can tell you she is all that and more.  Dav and I met because we were Newfoundlanders living in Toronto, but it was music that brought us together as best friends. (Just like it first brought her and her husband together, it was music again that lit up the whole room at her wedding.)

There are so many moments that will stay with me from that night; Dav walking down the aisle like she had just stepped out of a movie from 1955, looking like a classic movie star, Sophia, Ava, Grace; the ceremony so honest, and funny, and Dav giggling when the minister asked her "for richer for poorer", (the whole room cracked up at that one);  her mother Loretto reading a beautiful Irish poem; the grace by Father Nick; the jam of all jams, with Dav and I being the first people to jump onstage with Tom Cochrane to sing "Life is a Highway" (Dav was now barefoot in her wedding dress and beaming from ear to ear).  But I guess the memory that will stay with me the longest, is Dav's father Clar giving one of  the most amazing speeches I have ever heard at a wedding. It was eloquent, funny, emotional, and wise, everything a speech should be from a father to his daughter on her wedding day. Tears and laughter flowed.  Life is about moments like this.  And it hit me that night, that the next time I ask myself  "What's it all about?" I'll know the answer.  Life is about moments, and if we can just figure out how to connect the dots between them, it would all make a lot more sense.

Right now I'm with my husband's family in Kelowna, watching my 3 year old son Sammy jump all over his Grandpa. I think I've just connected another dot.

Okay, I think I have stumbled upon the answer for all of life's woes, "Unbeatable Banzuke". After a long day of a mind numbing combination of painting my house, answering emails and planning my wedding ( only numb because I was pulling my hair out), I scarfed down some food and settled into the couch to watch anything to take my mind off what I really should be doing. Flicking flicking flicking, you know how it goes until your thumb gets tired. I hadn't even warmed up the hand holding my remote when I heard a familiar tone I thought was the musical intro for  "The Iron Chef", always an awesome hour (unless the secret ingredient is liver) until I realized this was another sort of Japanese game show all together. Basically the competition is a  hand walking obstacle course  that most people would have a hard time trudging through on their feet, down two steps, up four, over a ridge and up a ramp all trying to keep their body from falling over. I think this is what that government does when they try to figure out which arts funding program to cut next. They all gather in the office for the department of heritage, with one of the rooms outfitted in a crazy obstacle course ( paid for by us tax payers for sure) they tuck in their starch collared shirts, take off their shoes, where pennies fall out, they roll up their sleeves and wait for the three , two, one countdown. As the course rolls by other members of government call out things like "David Cronenburg's  Crash",  " Avi Lewis and Al Jezeera", " Juno- you know that movie about that little hussy  who gets pregnant", kind of like a physiological game of paper, scissors, rock. Whichever prompt and the funding program behind it that ends up bringing the player tumbling to the ground is the arts program that's cut. Just last week the Conservative government cancelled a $4.7 million program that helped artists work outside the country, effectively eliminating all touring acts outside of Canada with the exception of Celine Dion- who can afford to do that all by herself. So when Sweden or Germany thinks about Canadian culture  they won't be able to picture our celebrated dance troupes, journalists and musicians, they will picture Celine double thumping herself in the chest while singing the theme from the Titanic, if only she'd fall down drunk or get arrested, finally Canada would get the press it deserves.

I was at my Stagette party the other night cutting into a cake which had been tattooed with my grade eight St Paul's school picture with my curled and spiky bangs  and a caption saying " I'm getting married!" when someone said " oh my god did you hear about what happened to.?". I knew by the look on their face it was something horrific so I cut them off at the pass before they could say anything else,  I said it's my stagette and I don't want to hear about it. The unsaid was the first thing I thought about when I woke up the next morning , that and Advil but I knew I wasn't ready, so I turned off the news, crawled back into bed  and went back to sleep. Yesterday however there was no escape from the horrible story of poor Tim Mclean on the bus and his sudden, tragic and grotesque murder. His death seemed to rid people of their numbness in a way that almost nothing does anymore. I think it made us all feel vulnerable, even when we believe we are safe minding our own business. A jumpy person at the best of time, yesterday I was a full on neurotic, scared to look people in the eye and more scared not to and last night after playing a gig with Spirit Of The West about two and a half hours north of Toronto I entered the city  like I was beginning a video game, with people popping onto the street on their bikes and flagging down crashing cabs after Caribana , dogs fighting and cats mating. I felt like I'd taken the brown acid and everyone was out to get me.  At about three in the morning I dropped off my guitar player after he'd regaled me about the two times he'd gotten shot at in Toronto and I actually ducked when a fire truck and a police car screeched passed me just a few blocks from my house. I was so spooked I pulled in right front of my house knowing ten minutes later I was going to get a ticket but I wanted to be in the safety of my home immediately. When I clicked online for the news this morning I was weepy to see stories about Tim Mclean's life and the person he was instead of how he died, what I didn't expect to see was that the fire truck and police car that had passed me were on their way to find a little seven year old girl who was killed by her guardian just down the street from me and back into bed I crawled for the third day in a row. I don't think I'll be turning on the news for quite some time.

It's just a few weeks until the Olympics. What should be the worlds expression of living in harmony with a common end goal, where sportsmanship is king and losers are defined only by not cheering for the winners has a huge rain cloud hovering overhead.  It  marks decades of training by athletes, miles of sacrifice and enough Gatorade to quench the thirst of the world. I heard on the radio that visibility in Beijing yesterday was only half a kilometre, maybe that's a good thing because if we could actually see further we would see the real wounds of Tibet, once a  world of spiritual freedom which is being crushed by an iron grip. Somehow though the earth powers that be have chosen to overlook this  as if we are so used to people being oppressed that we just shrug our shoulders and accept it even though we don't like it. Now it's widely reported that black people are not allowed in bars in Beijing, being denied or thrown out and  told not to come back-whoa stop the presses! Reading this led me on a google goose chase where I found a ton of articles backing up this claim and the same amount refuting this story saying the police weren't banning black people just keeping a closer eye on them. "A closer eye on them", you have got to be kidding me, it feels like we are back in the dark ages when Elizabeth Hasselback cried after scuffling with Whoppi Goldberg on The View because Elizabeth believes racism can be solved by refusing  to say one particular word. Oh sorry that was just a few weeks ago, my mistake, really it feels like the world is going to hell in a hand basket. The biggest problem we have in North America pertaining to racism is that a such a large amount of people don't believe it exists anymore and refuse to discuss it in the present tense . It's like breaking your arm, going to a doctor, getting it fixed up, but you didn't leave the cast on long enough, had to go back to work, you  keep using the same arm day in day out and all it feels is sore, some days more inflamed then others. Finally you go back to the doctor and he says that in order for it to heal properly they've got to break it again and start all over. In a way that's what Obama is doing, setting things in motion so we too can heal properly and not a moment too soon.

I have already admitted that I am "that person" , the person who as their wedding approaches can think of nothing else and is in a fact a little bit obsessed, so I am just going to go for it without an ounce of guilt. For the second time in my life I have a list of things to guide me and it seems that as I check one thing off another unravels, because no matter how the saying goes, sometimes when God closes a door, he shuts the window too. We have tried as hard as we can to make this a personal ceremony so when I learned

that a dear family friend who is also a catholic priest was coming up for my wedding I was beyond excited that someone who had known me since I was a baby would be the one the marry us. It was all coming together really, the food, the music and the veil, most of the details taken care of. Kim or as she likes to call herself these days " The MOH" checked out city hall and how to get a permit for a non resident to officiate the marriage, it was to be  a piece of cake, a phone call, a sheet of paper, a pen and voila. I was really excited about incorporating the faith that I was raised and schooled in ( all hail to Holy Heart) and my fiancé although an agnostic was excited for me (another reason why I love him). Last thing I heard was that the church was trying to figure out ways to get young  people  back in the church, I don't know, maybe I'm not considered young  anymore  because I wanted it to be a huge part of the biggest day of my life and it seems it wanted no part of me.  It turns out that because I wasn't getting married in an actual physical church a priest simply would not be allowed to marry me, when I casually mentioned it to the lady in the office of the archdiocese she actually gasped  to the point where I seriously considered calling an ambulance for her. Now I am left frantically searching the internet for someone who looks friendly and somewhat spiritual in their picture to come and marry us, I think it's really sad when Carrot Top could marry us and not someone whom I love and care about. All I'm saying is that the church is going to miss one hell of a party.

"Cheers" had it right, we all want a place where everybody knows your name, where people say hi as if they've known you half their life. Where you can walk in and sit at the bar, order lunch, dinner or just a coffee and not feel weird about being alone with nothing to read, no cell phone to talk in to and no paper to read. For many people in downtown St John's (including my father) this place was the Heritage Café on Duckworth Street. You could walk in and not even need to order, they'd say " How are you today Mr. Doyle, you want the usual?" . I remember how sad everyone was when it shut down, the wake seemed to last years with people walking around with a hungry, lost look in their eyes. I wish I could say "my place" was as friendly and unpretentious, but it isn't. I started going to this restaurant about twelve years ago when it was a skinny little slip of a thing with just a few tables. I would go there pretty much every day for cappuccino and some of the best and most consistent food you could think of, not to mention the nicest people in the world. After about five years of going there everybody else found out about it, soon you couldn't get a table, on weekends you'd have to line up for an hour, but by that point I was hooked and I rearranged my eating habits so eating dinner at either 4 in the afternoon or 11 at night was common practice- anything to avoid the line. Then they renovated and opened a few more locations and I thought finally I will be able to get a seat whenever I want again, but it just seemed with the facelift even more people wanted in. Still I walked there about five times a week, I went there every single time I hopped off a plane, even dreamed about the food when I was in Italy. Sure other people I brought there complained about it's " Seinfeld Soup Naziish" rules of no substitutions,  even if they were allergic, vegan even diabetic, or the rude response if the wine was off ( and it was off ), I was in complete denial about "my" restaurant. For twelve years I have been ordering the same seafood pasta and for twelve years I have lovingly covered it with parmesan cheese, but now all of a sudden they won't let you put cheese on it anymore- saying it ruins the dish, they won't leave the cheese on the table in case it might go near it and they watch over you shoulder to make sure.  I can live without just about anything in life except cheese, it's kind of like the moment your boyfriend cheats on you and then you go " that's it, I'm done", when they took away my cheese I knew it was a bad relationship and I had to walk away. Why is it that now just a few hours later the cheese is forgiven and all I can think about is the "make up" pizza?

If I had my way I'd fall into bed fully asleep because memories of childhood insomnia plague me to this day and since I am neither a field laborer or a mother of  one, two , three or eight children, my body like most other North Americans  tends to be underused. Sure I might go to the gym or do a yoga class,  run to grab a cab or take the stairs instead of the elevator and will even give myself a pat on the back for doing even one of these things in a day but compared to someone like a fisherman,  we are a comatose sort of bunch. So rarely am even close to  half asleep when I crawl into bed, mostly my mind is racing, my eyelids are glued open a la Nicole Kidman and I lay still just long enough to jump out of bed to adjust the curtains so no street light can leak in and cover up the blinking light on the clock radio only to return to the fold just to turn on the light and read. You'd think I'd  skip the other parts and go straight to reading but no I try and cheat the system every night and every night I fail. Last night saw me lying in bed staring at a pile of unopened books, a choice of twelve different universes I could delve into, I scanned the spines, dismissed some titles as too heavy  and settled on "A Sunday By The Pool in Kigali". A perfect read for a Sunday night I thought  as I sunk into the sheets. Immediately I was hooked by  story , I too was  by laying by the pool under an African sun , but this was no light reading, this was a personal account of the Rwandan Genocide. I could not leave the pages  until I realized I was  jumping out of my skin with every creak the wind dealt to my house, I lay there cursing our apathy, our role as a society who thinks much but does very little, who hides their head for fear of crossfire. Obviously this did little to help my attempt at sleep and when it did come it was filled with Machete yielding Hockey Players and gun toting beavers. So today when I stopped in the middle of the road and "harshly spoke" to a nine year old boy for pushing over a five year old on his bike and then walking off without an ounce of remorse, I didn't feel bad at all about now being the crazy lady in the neighborhood, I felt good about not being apathetic. Hopefully that feeling will endure when he comes to egg my house.

The art of  "Announcing" something  is a very tricky thing, even when there are other people nudging your elbow, you have to be completely confident in what you are proclaiming. Take Hilary for example, when the rest of the world was  shouting at their televisions saying " the race is over, drop out now" she did what any forward thinking, reserved person would do, she waited until she was one hundred and fifty percent sure there was no chance in Florida she could beat Barack. Well a month and a half ago Kim and I did our last concert as Shaye- a retirement of sorts, we toasted each other and all of the wonderful and crazy memories, we prepared  ourselves that we might not do another gig together for a long time, so last week when we were on stage together again I had to have a little laugh at our expense. Our embarrassingly Cher like short retirement came about because we were asked to host and event honouring Canadian Songwriters at Massey Hall for the Luminato Festival.  Honestly we were thrilled to be invited, let alone host it, so leading  up to the gig we spent countless hours that we'll never get back wondering what we should be called. If you think coming up with a name for your kid is difficult, you should try naming a band, all the good names are taken and if you try to reuse- you'll be slapped with a lawsuit harder then fifteen kindergarten name tags saying, Samantha H, Samantha C , Samantha R.. anyway you get the picture. Kim and Dav sounds a bit too much like Sim and I, Stockwood, Doyle sounds like a law firm specializing in divorce and KD although it's great with Ketchup is not where we want to go branding wise. Which leaves us with  Kim Stockwood and Damhnait Doyle, formerly called Bon Jovi, which I think will do quite nicely except some nights I wake up in a sweat going why isn't my name first? Between seeing Leonard, playing shows and squeezing in to see Hey Rosetta absolutely slay the crowd at the Horseshoe Saturday night, I feel like a groundhog who has hibernated all winter long and once it's seen sunshine it lays out in nonstop, risking burning and dehydration for fear of never seeing the sun again.  Here's to guzzling water, staying home and turning off the phone, this animal has got to go back underground.

"There Ain't No Cure For Love", "Everybody Knows", "I'm Your Man", one after another the magic kept coming. National treasures as prominent as Capital Hill, as original as the world's largest roadside beaver, easter egg, nickel etc etc, and as curious as the Dionnne quintuplets. To witness on stage grace personified, a voice at both times demonized and deified, Leonard Cohen has no contemporaries, Cohen is the whole package. Today in music that would mean being blond, skinny, under 20,with an ability to sing ridiculous songs while having a smile on your face as you prance around in a video, then gorging yourself backstage on burgers and illicit drugs. He is a throwback to a simpler, yet a deliciously more sinful time when the coolest cat in the room was  feasting on filet mignon, absinthe and exotic drugs. With the night ending in wicked creativity, not in getting drunkenly carried out by bodyguards to a waiting car through a back door. Cohen is a front door kinda guy, he never hid his hedonism, he created a world we could visit and look in on, even if we never dared to go there ourselves, he was the one all the girls wanted and all the guys wanted to be and now even more than ever that holds true. I've seen a lot of shows in my time and never have I seen such respect shown both to and from Leonard, every time  someone played a solo, he took off his hat and held it to his chest like he was saying a prayer, or perhaps a Buddhist chant thanking the heavens for Rebecca De Mornay or the two Edmonton ladies who became "The Sisters of Mercy" and we stood every time a song was finished and many times when it wasn't. I wasn't alone in my weeping, the lights went up and he walked onstage in silhouette and I cried, he played the first song and I cried, and he recited " A Thousand Kisses Deep" and I bawled and I mean I really bawled, like distractingly so, but I could not stop. I thought of the first time I heard his voice as a teenager and  believed it to be awful, little did I know that's its raw beauty would cut through to the heart of me so many years later like a serrated knife.

It just proves to me that everything gets better with age, even our ears.

Things change as you grow older, you do things you swore you'd never do when you were a child and to great surprise you find you actually enjoy some of them. Things like eating tomatoes that are not in the form of  ketchup and gardening, I mean who knew how exciting planting zucchinis would be! Let alone the satisfaction of clearing the ice off the sidewalk in front of your house before your Ned Flanders type neighbour does, the fact you did it when you got home from a party at four in the morning means nothing, you still win  fair and square. The way I gauge it - and everyone has their own measure -  as soon as I start delving into a bowl of olives and wiping them clean to the pit, only to resurface with a smug look on my face, will I truly realize it's time to hang up the old miniskirt ( please note that I have actually never worn a miniskirt) because I never met an olive that I liked.

I tried to explain to a friend approaching her thirtieth birthday that milestones are to be embraced and not feared, that these changes are positive, all it requires is a shift in attitude. Then I caught myself for the fourth time in a row getting up halfway into a movie and whipping out my computer to research the film. My parents can attest I have never done one day of research  in my life, any paper I ever passed in in school was completely created by me, which I admit made it very difficult to get a half decent grade in subjects like history. Everything I've ever purchased I have immediately regretted because, without fail, it appears in the window of a store around the corner at a better price and in actual working order, while stamped on my receipt in bright red is " absolutely no return". So to suddenly find myself  the Jane Fonda of research while completely abandoning my favorite pastime of movie watching I realized the next phase of my life has begun. I am dying to know what stage Rick Hillier is heading into, for I have never seen a man of such action in all of my life. His tireless dedication to every single soldier in the Canadian Army was awe inspiring and the respect he received as Canada's Top Soldier was even greater.

Needless to say I like so many others will be watching and maybe just maybe even doing a little bit of research.

http://www.dav-net.com

I am a bit of an odd duck, a little weirdness here and there is my calling card. I am the person who will put the “do not disturb” sign on their door for days when staying at a hotel, instead of taking advantage of it. I get uncomfortable with anyone cleaning up after me even though as my friends and family can attest I really, really need someone to clean up after me. I have this thing about needing to do everything for myself and that is why I have single handedly painted about ten apartments ten hundred colors but when I moved into my house last year I realized it was too big of a job and I was actually going to hire someone to do it for me. I had a consultation and found someone I could trust in my house, I felt excited, liberated and actually a little proud that I was getting over a bit of a phobia -- and then he quoted me the price. To say I just about fell over would be an understatement, I felt like Archie Bunker sitting back in my chair going “ You’ve got to be kidding me” as if the price of ham went from a dollar a pound to twenty overnight. It was a reasonable enough quote but as someone who subscribes to the modern girl’s guide to hunting and gathering including shopping at Winners (Adrienne Clarkson does it, I‘ve seen it with my own eyes), I quickly resolved that I would once again do it myself. So I have spent the last week cursing and aching as I try to paint my stucco ceilings white. Stucco as anyone who’s tackled it knows is its own beast and what a beast it is. Plaster falling like raindrops onto my hair, the floor and until I put on some goggles, my eyes, with each gallon of paint only covering one square meter like it was the desert. Last night at two in the morning I screamed out that horror movie scream as my shoulder locked in place above my head and the roller slipped from my grip and at that moment I would have paid a burglar five times the quote to finish the job . This morning however I am fresh with extreme amounts of caffeine, coupled with Vitamin d and b12 and I am gonna show this rest of the ceiling who’s boss and I am going to enjoy every minute of it if it kills me.