Well, I’m back.
Been missing from this page for a few weeks, thanks to various vacations (mine and co-workers’), but I’ve been storing up a bunch of random observations about life in Kamloops.
First, yes, I know we’re the Tournament Capital of Canada.
Heck, one of our previous managing editors — the ever-joking Gord Kurenoff — wasn’t kidding at all when he told me to pen a column against the project to run with his opus praising all things sport.
Great, take the least-popular position possible. Thank you, Gord.
But there’s this great other side of the city, one I’ve known about but have been able to see in all of its intricacies in recent weeks, one that makes me think we should call ourselves the Creative Capital of Canada.
Consider this: A group of about 18 young men and women, none of them much older than mid-teens, gathers in the Pavilion Theatre on a Monday morning.
Some know each other from school or other activities but, for the most part, they’re not much more than strangers.
Two weeks later, they’re performing The Wizard of Oz in that same theatre, nary missing a cue or movement — almost like they’d been in rehearsals for months, not having about nine days to learn the script and the blocking en route to performing like a seasoned troupe.
Maybe I’m a bit biased here, since my youngest was one of the performers, but having grown up immersed in theatre and performing, I know how incredible this feat was for them and their instructors, the amazing Terri Runnels, Stephen Sawka, Jennifer Jones and Alison Clow, who was there to assist, but ended up taking on the guiding role of the narrator in the performances.
They’ll be doing it again — albeit somewhat adapted to find the reduced timeframe — on Saturday at the Children’s Art Festival at 3 p.m. in Riverside Park. Head on down and check it out. You’ll be amazed, too.
Having taken over the entertainment coverage here at KTW, I’ve been spending a lot of time with the people who fuel the creative core of the city.
It’s one thing to sit in the audience and soak up their genius; truly another to talk to them on a day-to-day basis.
There are some amazing people who work behind the scenes to ensure we have our art, our theatre, our music, to ensure our burgeoning creative souls have a place to make that first step out into public appreciation.
Some of them toil under some truly arduous circumstances. I think of all the staff at Western Canada Theatre has endured — and continues to grapple with — and marvel at how its dedication doesn’t wane in the face of true adversity.
Over at the Kamloops Art Gallery, they went through their own stress when executive director Jann Bailey went for a doctor’s appointment — and was not back to work for months, faced with the fight of — and for — her life as she battled leukemia.
The people who keep the gallery buzzing were painfully aware of it every day, but it didn’t affect the quality of work they provided for all of us.
And there are the ones you don’t hear about very often.
Last weekend, I went to the farewell concert by my dear friend, Danie Pouliotte.
I met Danie at the encouragement of Martin Comtois, the man who tried to keep the Ashcroft Opera House alive and well. Danie had been working for him on an internship and he knew she had talent people needed to hear about.
KTW photographer Dave Eagles and I met this shy young woman down at Riverside Park, talked to her, shot some photos, wrote a feature — and I figured that was it.
Then Danie popped up a few months later with the idea of holding a fundraiser for the Kamloops Food Bank. I helped her, Joey Jack and Kira Haug put it together and watched a still-timid Danie open the show for us.
You should see her now.
The musical community in Kamloops has been like an incubator for this woman, helping her develop her talent to the point that I have no doubt she’ll be successful following her dreams when she moves to Vancouver later this month.
There are so many more people out there who continue to do their part to keep the arts and entertainment community in this city alive.
It’s not an easy job, particularly in these times of government cutbacks, fewer donations and increased costs.
But it’s just as vital to Kamloops as all those sports events — so take the time to get out and support them.
dale@kamloopsthisweek.com
dalebass.blogspot.com
Posted by Dale at 11:27 a.m. Comments
Ten years ago, a small advertisement in the Globe and Mail caught my eye.
The timing was fortuitous. I’d left a 25-year career at a large daily newspaper in Ontario, only to discover that working for the federal government was not the relaxing, normal, peaceful gig I thought it would be.
My husband, having also left an equally long career covering Parliament, was finding his own post-journalism job in communications at the University of Western Ontario was also not the relaxing, normal, peaceful gig he anticipated.
And there it was, an ad seeking applications for a job teaching journalism at some place called University College of the Cariboo in some community called Kamloops.
“Here, apply for this,” I suggested over dinner. “At least you’ll get a trip to B.C. out of it.”
A couple of months later, we had a massive moving van crammed with all the things a family of seven accumulates through the years — including the 34 boxes of Alan’s books — and were heading west.
Now, for a girl who had never been further west — in Canada — than Thunder Bay and who had lived for her four-plus decades in the same city, this was one emotion-filled trip.
I was leaving behind my mother and my father died just a couple of weeks before we left — a move that, at the time, had me convinced was calculated to stop us from heading to what he derided as a “pulp-mill” town.
I also had to say goodbye to a huge group of incredible friends, including Catherine, my oldest and dearest friend.
And so we drove west.
Alan takes great delight in telling people of my first reaction to the Rockies.
I cried.
Thank god he was driving because I couldn’t do much more than gaze and weep. It’s one thing to know they exist, but quite another to see them.
We beat the moving van to Kamloops — I spent countless hours learning to say it with the emphasis on the first syllable — found the house we had rented unseen over the Internet, had our introduction to the glorious pizzas Panago makes, bunked the first night on the floor in sleeping bags and set out the next day to learn more about the place we were now calling home.
That was the day I declared that, in a previous life, I must have lived in Kamloops because everything about the city just felt right.
Felt familiar.
Felt like home.
Felt like a great place for the kids to grow up.
I mentioned this to a friend recently, who gave me her patented “you are so strange” look and announced she had no idea why I would feel that way. How could I possibly think Kamloops is an incredible place in which to live?
I’m chalking that ridiculous statement up to the fact she’s about the same age as my daughter and finds the idea of pondering retirement complete unfathomable.
But there are so many reasons to love Kamloops. Here are just a few:
Music in the Park. The Farmers’ Market. The Thompson River. The hills that can be seen from almost any place in the city. Riverside Park. The way people just stop if you look like you’re trying to cross the road. Western Canada Theatre. The way people are so willing to help others.
The list of incredible people I’ve met in the past decade would be too long for this space, but each of them makes Kamloops a wonderful place to live.
Now, before some of you e-mail writers start warming up the keyboard, there are downsides to Kamloops as well, but their impact is insignificant — and often inspirational, especially when it’s time to come up with another column idea.
I still go back to London every year to see the grandchildren and check in on the ones who’ve flown the Kamloops nest. I hang out with Catherine, who delights in driving me around the city that has grown exponentially since we left. But, after about a week of gridlock, flat horizons, way too much rain and people who seem to be on a constant caffeine kick, it’s time to come home.
And that’s here. Can’t imagine living anywhere else.
Posted by Dale at 12:56 p.m. Comments
Thirty Canadian geese swam up to the dock today.
A baby duck jumped onto Alan’s kayak.
And, when I went to buy newspapers — it’s an addiction, what can I say? — and bread, the lady behind the cash register remembered me.
This is rural B.C. It’s what we all brag about when we talk to our friends and relatives back East.
It’s what we talk about when we explain why this is God’s country.
More than Cambie Street or Robson Street or the proximity to Washington state, it is the grandeur outside the 604 exchange that truly describes what British Columbia is.
And it’s why talk of closing schools in rural areas of the Kamloops area is simply wrong.
Rural B.C. isn’t the same as Vancouver or Victoria. It’s not even the same as Kamloops. It’s those communities where everyone knows everyone else. Where they nod their heads as they drive past you. Where they tell you to have a great day and you get the feeling they really mean it.
It’s where their schools are more than just a collection of classrooms. They’re as much a part of the hub of the community as those halls and arenas that host the local artisans with their craft fairs and the tiny-tot hockey teams every winter.
Take away a rural community’s school and you’ve killed much of its heart.
You’ve taken away yet another reason why these pioneers — and that’s what they are, even today — choose to live the tough life that defines much of rural British Columbia. You might as well close their legion, shut down the mom-and-pop grocery store and roll up the streets.
Closing their schools is more than just a smack upside the face. It’s a death blow -- and these are people who do not deserve that kid of treatment.
Which is not to say School District 73 isn’t facing tough times and has some tough decisions to make. But let’s be honest. Close a neighbourhood school in Kamloops and all those affected families will simply have to learn to become part of some other school community.
We’ve done it with our children who, because we have chosen to send them not to our neighbourhood elementary, but to Beattie School of the Arts, have had to learn to become part of a community created from throughout Kamloops.
It’s hasn’t been that difficult. If the guys want to go visit with some school chums, they have to take a slightly longer bus ride. They don’t have to ask us to drive them to another city.
Close the school in Pinantan, Heffley, Westwold or Savona and you’re forcing the children to leave their home community and ride on a bus for a ridiculously long time to attend a school whose community can never really be their own.
What is most galling is that all it takes is a majority of the board to enact these cold, callous decisions. And that same majority doesn’t have to rely on the rural vote to be re-elected.
Can’t you picture it? It’s so simple.
The Kamloops trustees — a majority — shut down the rural schools. They don’t lose a lot of votes in the city because, heck, they didn’t do much in Kamloops. The few rural trustees rage and rail and condemn — a surefire way to guarantee re-election next time we go to the polls.
Nobody loses — except those who live in Pinantan, Westwold, Heffley, Savona and all those other communities that really define what British Columbia is.
dale@kamloopsthisweek.com
