I don’t need to use a steel wool pad very often for difficult clean-ups of pots and pans. It occurred to me that every time I used one, it would sit for awhile til the next use – and rust away.  So I’d throw it away. It seemed like you only got one use out of them.

Then the Eureka moment hit. I don’t really use the whole pad each time. So why not cut them in half? Half had enough thickness to scrub. This way I only throw away half when they rust. When I buy a new box, I take a scissors, cut all of them in half right away. So now when you need one (and are too lazy to cut it at that moment), they’re all ready to use.

Every year on a Sunday in May, Montreal treats us to a binge day at museums. All of them open to the public without any fees and you can hop from one to the other all day long. They make it easier providing buses on museum routes so you can easily do a circuit.

This is a list of  the options:

The Biosphere
Canadian Centre for Architecture
Montreal Science Centre
Centre d’Exposition Lethbridge
La-prison-des-Patriotes Exhibition Centre
Centre d’Histoire de Montreal
Château Ramezay Historic Site and Museum of Montreal
DHC/ Art Foundation Pour l’art Contemporain
Écomusée du Fier Monde
Stewart Museum
The Guild
Musée de Lachine
Maison Nivard-de Saint-Dizier
Maison Saint-Gabriel
Montreal Museum for Contemporary Art
Musée Plein Air de Lachine
Musée de Lachine Pavillion de l’entrepot
Montreal Holocaust Museum
St. Joseph Oratory Museum
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Shriners Hospitals for Children
Musée des Hospitalières de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Montreal
Musée des Maîtres et Artisans du Québec
Musée des Ondes Emile Berliner
Dorval Museum of Local History and Heritage
Musée Marguerite-Bourgeoys
McCord History Museum
Redpath Museum
Musée Regimentaire les Fusiliers Mont-Royal
Musée Stewart
Planetarium Rio Tinto Alcan

Date: May 27, 2018
http://museesmontreal.org/en/museums-day/programmation

Our Prime Minister took the feminist lead when he packed his cabinet with 51% women. Now the Centaur Theatre with this production, Successions, has stacked the female deck with: a female playwright – Michaela Di Cesare, a female director – Tamara Brown, a female set and costume designer – Dianai Uribe, a female lighting designer – Audrey-Anne Bouchard, and even a female “fight co-ordinator”  Anita Nittoly. This team of girls is a real anomaly,  since  this play is very much about brotherhood.

Playwright Michaela Di Cesare admits that she attributes her active imagination to her Only Child Syndrome. Usually authors are told to “write what you know”, but Di Cesare chose to write this play about siblings – and male siblings at that. Enzo and Anthony are St-Leonard Italians who have just lost their mother and inherited a dilapidated junk-filled house (well-imagined by Tamara Brown, the set designer).

Instead of the usual “who did Mommy like best”, this play is more about who despised whom the most.

Di Cesare notes that “When both parents die, the family is cut off from the head”. Like a chicken without a head, these two brothers, David Chiazzese as Enzo and Carlo Mestroni as Anthony, keep circling and attacking each other both mentally and physically. It is painful to watch the enormous hostility and resentment between them. The difference between the would-be plumber and the lawyer-politico wannabe is too huge a gap to bridge. While Anthony just wants to get out of the junky house (in more ways than one) and snarkily dismisses his brother with “my time is to me my most valuable possession”, Enzo retaliates with the biting, “Am I about to be lawyered?”.

Though deaths can bring love and forgiveness between siblings, we see little of it here. Even Enzo’s heavily pregnant fiancee Nat (Gita Miller) and Anthony’s upscale wife, Cristina (Tara Nicodemo) verbally shadow box around the guys as they butt heads.

The  fun part for Montrealers are the lines that place the play here in Montreal, like the people who “get hives if you go east of Frontenac” or saying food is healthy like bagels.

All of the actors proved Di Cesare’s  point, which was that siblings have the capacity to hurt one another because they know so well how to push each other’s buttons. And she then goes on to say, “What I find so interesting about siblings is that they are the only people who bear witness to your whole life.”

Location 453 St-Francois-Xavier
corner: Notre-Dame
Tel: 514-288-3161
Dates: til May 6
Prices: $37.50 – $51.75 (deals for students and seniors)
www.centaurtheatre.com
Metro: Place d’Armes

Nice weather has us yearning to take a long ride somewhere. If you decide you’d like to do a little cross border shopping in Plattsburg or wherever, besides the extra cost due to the money exchange rate, you must remember what your duty free allowances are.

– One day: How much can you bring back after one day? The answer is Nothing.

– If you go for the weekend, let’s say 24-48 hours, you can bring back up to $200, However If the goods you bring in are worth more than CAN$200 in total, you cannot claim this exemption. You have to pay full duties on all goods you bring in

– After 48 hours, goods worth up to CAN$800 can be brought across without paying any duty and taxes.

You must remember to add these costs to the purchase, to see if a deal is really a deal.  And don’t forget to factor in the currency difference.

Montrealers have hockey in their DNA, so it is easy to suggest that you head to the Centaur Theatre to see “Playing with Fire”, a must-see play about hockey – it’s even performed on a hockey rink!  Okay, it’s a synthetic one, but the star of this one-man show, Shaun Smyth, skates and acts the entire show in full hockey gear as NHL’er Theo Fleury. Now that’s something Habs fans can enjoy – even though he played for the Calgary Flames when they beat us for the Stanley cup in 1989.

Smyth (through the storytelling gift of author and playwright Kirstie McClellan Day) grips you from the last bars of “O, Canada” and takes you through every sweaty moment of his roller coaster life. She glides you in to the sad family life of a diminutive kid from Russell, Manitoba who, after skating, “took his time getting dressed cause I didn’t want to go home”-  to one of only 90 NHL players who have scored 50 goals in a season and then went on to win a Stanley cup and even a gold medal in the Olympics. For Fleury,  “sports was his salvation and his escape”.

The story is based on the autobiography of Theo Fleury, a book which spent a year on the Canadian bestseller list. His tortured past included the awfulness of a a coach (Graham James) sexually abusing him as a young teen. This led him to years of self-destruction, blowing 50 million dollars on addictions to booze, drugs, strippers and gambling.

To be fully prepared for this part, Shaun Smyth hired a hockey coach to make him a good enough player to meet the expectations of the NHLers he knew would come to see the show. He spent two years practicing, renting ice time and playing pick-up games. If that wasn’t hard enough, imagine skating and acting in a one-man show at the same time (and memorizing 7 different versions of it). He, like Fleury, was fearless playing both jobs.

Director Ron Jenkins, along with set and lighting designer  David Fraser, impossibly make the hockey rink slide into everything from an ambulance/hospital room to a hockey sweater cupboard or a firy inferno. The projections and videos by Corwin Ferguson really illustrate the narrative, whether showing hockey cards of players Fleury is referencing or news stories, prairie scenes or even Calgary “flames”.

A hometown sidebar is the “So You Think You Can Sing O, Canada” contest which was held before the play opened. Contestants submitted a demo, and each night of the show, “O, Canada” starts the performance, sung by a different Montrealer. Come and watch your neighbours trill.

Meeting Theo Fleury on opening night was a privilege. He has become an advocate for abuse victims, giving over 50 lectures a year – even in prisons which include child molesters (now that’s forgiveness!). Fleury said, “We all get addicted to something. We can get rid of stigma. We can all heal“.

Though the play showcased a superstar behaving badly, Theo Fleury the man is a double hero: physically he’s a hero, succeeding in the impossibly tough game of NHL hockey, but he’s also a mental hero who was courageous and strong enough to beat his demons too.

Location 453 St-Francois-Xavier
corner: Notre-Dame
Tel: 514-288-3161
Dates: til Oct 29
Prices: $38.50 – $51.75 (deals for students and seniors)
www.centaurtheatre.com
Metro: Place d’Armes

I have not seen a nasty show since the days of Bobby Slayton, so I wondered how I would find it. I was actually very pleasantly surprised to find that the show was not so nasty,

Ari Shaffer

but WAS so funny. Don’t get me wrong – there was plenty of swearing and 4-letter words, especially f___ heard incessantly, but we found ourselves laughing out loud more than we had at the galas recently.

Ari Shaffir as host was definitely qualified and funny, with some great lines about Orthodox Jews and their clothing, and about New York City.

Robert Kelly was the first performer, and his description of potty-training a toddler brought me all the way back in time, when my toddler(s) resisted sitting down and doing their thing, preferring to sit in a dirty diaper instead. He discussed how he was taken aback when he realized that he probably has only 30 summers left in his life.

Robert Kelly

Yamaneika Saunders, herself a large person, joked about being fat and black, and had the audience in tears, especially when discussing black-boy weed.

Jimmy Carr was next, and he came out with a list of one-liners in a notebook, roasting Montreal, Donald Trump (when Donald Trump took office, little did he know), a takeoff on the word “cunt”, and pedophiles.

Godfrey followed with his comparisons of Trump and Trudeau, a diatribe about vegetarians, and his amazement about vaginas (“people actually come out of there, whole groups of people”).

The show was closed by Big Jay Oakerson covering the topic of buttf__king in prison.

Yamaneika Saunders

Jimmy Carr

Godfrey

Big Jay Oakerson

Happily, there was no serious heckling as happened the day before. If anything, the audience was standing up to urge the comedians on and to show their glee over the performances.

The show continues until Saturday night the 29th at the Metropolis, 59 Ste-Catherine St. E. Prices range from $45 to $60.

http://www.hahaha.com/en/show/nasty-show-0

Celebrate Canada’s 150th birthday by visiting the our home and native land. Parks Canada is offering all Canadians a FREE 2017 Discovery Pass so there will be no cost to visit any of their sites. You have the option of visiting 148 locations everywhere in the country. You probably think  they’re all about national parks but Parks Canada is way more than that – their mandate includes marine conservation areas and national historic sites.

You could visit the wreck of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror in Nunavut, view Canada’s highest peak, Mount Logan in Kluane National park, ice fields in Jasper, our country’s birthplace within the fortifications of Quebec, Alexander Graham Bell’s inventions,  walk amongst the flower pot rocks on the ocean floor in the Bay of Fundy, Haida Heritage sites, or even Anne of Green Gables‘ writer, Lucy Maude Montgomery’s house.

Here’s a challenge: See how many of their iconic red Adironack chairs you can find and Instagram. If you want to drool – and – plan ahead, get copies of the National Geographic books Guide to the National Parks of Canada and Guide to the National Historic Sites of Canada.

Yes, you can camp, but you can also reserve a yurt, a goutte d’Ô which resembles a water droplet, a micro cube, large modern houses called oTENTiks or be one of the first to sleep in a hanging Cocoon in Cape Breton.

www.parkscanada.gc.ca
Tel: 888-773-8888

Perhaps your Mom would love a night out to enjoy theatre. Next year’s lineup at the Centaur Theatre runs the gamut from family saga, to murder and mayhem, to puppet farce. The family could chip in together and save up to 25% off the single ticket price by buying a 4-play, 5-play or 6-play package. Here are the benefits:

– free ticket exchange up to 2 hours prior to your performance
– guaranteed seats so you’ll never miss the hot ticket shows
– discounts at other arts events and restaurants
– discounted tickets for other Centaur Theatre Company events and visiting productions
– students pay less than $10 per show with a 6-show subscription getting a share-with-a-friend (Mom?) BOGO (buy one get one) and 2 Bring-a-Friend Passes (Mom?)
– tickets are tax deductible if you are self-employed or for companies using them as an entertainment expense

Don’t miss the Gazette’s Sunday Free chat-ups which are informative and entertaining lectures related to the current production. They’re held before the 1st Sunday matinee performance at 12:30 pm and even include refreshments provided by the Bonaparte restaurant.

Also there’s the exciting peek behind-the-scenes Talk-Backs where you can ask questions about the play or the actors, and find out what happens behind the scenes. They are presented after the 2nd Thursday evening and the 2nd or 3rd Sunday matinee performances.

2017-2018 Season:

Playing with Fire: an inspirational story of  hockey legend, Theoren Fleure
The 39 Steps: a comic spin on the classic Hitchcock film
The Baklava Recipe: women reaching out to one another for comfort, understanding, and friendship
The Daisy Theatre: 40 outrageous puppets in nightly vaudeville
Successions: second generation Italian family saga
Hosanna: a passionate, fierce, and vulnerable Cleopatra impersonator faces her fears

Location: 453 St-Francois Xavier
corner: Notre-Dame
Tel: 514-288-3161
www.centaurtheatre.com
Metro: Place d’Armes

One tends to forget that it is the behind-the-scenes people who make stars stars. Sam Phillips, owner of Sun Studio and Sun Records, was a shrewd man and one of the early brand marketers. Million Dollar Quartet, a Tony Award winning musical, tells the story of his tens of thousands of miles journeyed going from radio station to radio station trying to get air time for the musicians he believed in. It’s been said that he had the magic ear and could sense a star after hearing him play for just ten seconds. Elvis Presley in the show utters, “He seen something in me I’d never seen myself” and if not for Phillips, “I’d be driving a truck”.

On this magical day, December 4, 1956,  Jerry Lee Lewis wound up playing piano during a Carl Perkins (king of rockabilly music) recording session at Phillips’s Sun Studio. When Elvis Presley walked in unexpectedly, Phillips called in Johnny Cash, leading to an impromptu session featuring the four musicians.

Perhaps Phillips was thinking strategically, so he coined them the Million Dollar Quartet, and he eventually turned that session into a record. Perhaps he was also seeing the writing on the wall as each neophyte he nurtured (Cash, Perkins and Elvis) was leaving him in order to be represented by a major record company.

Sky Seals shows versatility playing Johnny Cash on edge as he is worried about telling Phillips about leaving yet still is able to portray his calm deep hypnotic voice when he croons. James Loye playing Sam Phillips, blocks out the story, telling us how hard it was trying to get the DJ’s to play the “devil’s music”, as it was being banned by laws and shunned by the church. It is hard playing the straight man to a bunch of high energy music masters, but Loye plays it brilliantly.

Christo Graham as Jerry Lee Lewis steals this show with his showmanship – and – over the top (literally) piano playing.  I don’t know how George Krissa’s leg (as Elvis Presley) doesn’t just fling off with all that shaking going on. He plays the ingenue Elvis understatedly well. Having been to Sun Studio in Memphis I can confirm that set designer, Brian Dudkiewicz, hit it bang on.

Though people thought Phillips was plain dumb selling off Elvis’s contract to save his recording studio, let it be known that he smartly flipped the cash into shares of a new company called “Holiday Inn”, and he too became one of the million dollar players (and we all know what happened to Elvis).

Director Lisa Rubin kept the show nice and tight, balancing out the jamming we wanted to hear along with the history that must be told. And she orchestrated the best planned curtain call ever. It’s rare for a member of the “orchestra pit” (Evan Stewart) to get his moment to shine too. You will be rocking and rolling out the door to this one.

Location: Segal Centre, 5170 ch. de la Cote-Ste-Catherine, Montreal H3W 1M7
Dates: til May 14
Phone: 514-739-7944
Tickets: $40-$50 ( group, senior, student and under 30 discounts available)
www.segalcentre.org
Metro: Cote-Ste-Catherine, Snowdon Bus: 129, 51, 17

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The Tailored Man, is considerate of the Canadian consumer. Due to the value of Canadian dollar, they are offering new and lower pricing and complimentary shipping and handling. Since 1969, The Tailored Man has been coming to North America fitting men (and women too) with made-to-measure suits at Hong Kong’s prices. these are the March and April specials:

For the Budget Minded: 2 suits & 3 shirts US $1,100
For the Executive: 2 suits & 3 shirts US $1,475
For the Discerning: 1 suit & 1 shirt US $950

The suits come with extras you don’t usually see in North American stores: sweat shields, cell phone pockets and the pants have a heel guard and knee lining. When you order a shirt, you choose collar, style, cuff and monogram.

“When you wear individually tailored clothes you need individual attention”   Thus they work by appointment only.

Sunder Daswani’s team is back in Montreal so make a personal appointment: 866-751-7868 or 647-989-0555 or www.tailoredman.com/appointment. To be added to their mailing list: goodfit@tailoredman.com.

Locations and Dates: Thurs Mar 30 & Fri Mar 31:  Le Centre Sheraton, 1202 boul Rene-Levesque O / Google Maps: http://bit.ly/1RCB ; Sat Apr 1 & Sun Apr 2: Ruby Foos, 7655 Decarie:
Tel: 866-751-7868 or 647-989-0555
www.tailoredman.com
goodfit@tailoredman.com