In 2014 Casper  which had branded its name for its “outrageously” comfy mattresses, was introduced in Canada  I’m not sure how people buy mattresses online, as to me, it’s one of those purchases where I must lay down (for a good 20 minutes) and make sure it’s the right “fit” for me.

I have in the past (and have heard from other people too) bought a mattress that was way too hard. I chose a “hospital grade” mattress supposed to be good for your back and last a really long time. I made sure it was a company that gave you a trial period so I could return it – and I did. Others just have had to spend more money to put all kinds of fluffy tops on them to try to correct the mistake.

So back to Casper. They have opened up Le Chalet Casper where they give you the opportunity to try out their products (pillows, bedding, bed frames) in person. They’ve showcased them cutely in little “chalet-like” houses.

Nicole Tapscott, Senior Director and General Manager of Casper Canada says, “Le Chalet Casper is designed as an oasis for people to relax as they would in a summer chalet to escape the city heat and bustle. We encourage visitors to touch, feel and experience our sleep products in an environment that will leave them with the feeling of a life well slept.” I agree that you have to experience a mattress before buying one.

You can buy at the shop or have your purchases delivered.

Location: 4367 St-Denis
corner: Marie-Anne
Hours: Wed-Fri 10-8, Sat 10-7, Sun 11-6
Dates: closes July 22

Many of us enjoy a light read to while away a lazy summer afternoon. At the Hudson Village Theatre, you don’t even have to read to have fun – you can just listen and watch as four women meet, mingle and moan – and become a family of friends.

The director, Ellen David, takes this (Jessie) Jones (Nicholas) Hope (Jamie) Wooten delightful script and gently guides the dynamic quattro of actors as they learn “what is holding you back from one’s past and self-imposed limitations towards a compelling future”.  This could be any one of us.

The performers David chose are as well cast and strong as the four sides of a square. Randa Covington (Jane Wheeler) has defined herself by her work, and doesn’t know how to re-define herself beyond that. She tries to hold on to her safe proper business countenance, but is weighed down by feeling second best in her family. Marlafaye (Lisa Bronwyn Moore) gets the classic “dumped for a younger woman” part, so feelings of anger and rejection are keeping her from moving forward. “I swear the older you get the harder it is to jump start a new life”, she says.

Dot (Kathleen Fee), the oldest of the bunch, has just lost her husband, the only man she has known, and with whom she had planned to retire. She has no idea how to figure out what comes next. Her subtle acting is deliciously wonderful as she delivers many funny zinger lines. Paula Costain as Jinx moves and talks with the right zippy attitude to convince them, as their new “life coach”, to go (as David says)” beyond their comfort zone to a brave new world where they eventually find themselves”. Jinx reminds us that her older sister (now incapacitated with dementia) taught her that “it’s the happy in life that counts”.

The set by Jean-Claude Olivier is a comfortable porch, so the women have an informal place to gently and liquidly reveal their sagas. As this is a “Sipping Society”, drinking props (by Lea Robertson) were a fun challenge due to the many iterations of serving different kinds of alcohol. Marlafaye once toasted, “Girls, here’s to living single and drinking doubles”.

There were more costume changes than you would expect (by Elisabeth De Medeiros), creating a fashion show which helped define the scenes and the forward movement of their lives.

Jamie Wooten, one of the playwrights, was a writer for The Golden Girls, so the quality of their patter and the giggly one-liners is in the same genre of that hysterical show.  When Marlafaye sees Randa’s house for the first time she opines, “Yeah, sure is a pretty place. Everything’s so neat and clean. I’m not like that. Instead of cleaning my house, I just turn off the lights”.  When Randa comments on drinking mead, “This really isn’t so horrible”, Marlafaye responds, “The very words I said on my wedding night”. Marlafaye also says,  “Sex is like a brownie – when it’s good it’s really good. And when it’s bad….it’s still pretty good!”.

Andrea Romaldi, the artistic director writes, “friendships are our lifelines and support structures. Good friends cheer us, challenge us, bewilder us and irritate us, but ultimately they support and help us grow into our best selves”. Head out to Hudson and lift a glass to friendship.

Location: 28 Rue Wharf, Hudson, QC J0P 1H0
Phone: 450- 458-5361
Dates: til July 22
https://villagetheatre.ca/

How many of you have a linen closet with piles of flat top sheets, fitted sheets and then pillowcases, all separated by type? When you need to make a bed, you have to go to each pile and select the matching set. Right? Sometimes stuff tumbles out and you must re-do the pile. Annoying.

Here’s a solution to saving time. When you take the sheets and pillowcases out of the dryer and fold them, you are going to make a package of each set. Take one pillowcase and open it up, put each sheet nicely folded inside it, and then add in any other pillow cases (folded of course). Tuck the end of the pillowcase underneath. Voila, you now have one bundle to grab for any bed. Each pile in the linen closet should be by bed size: twin, queen – or by room.

Another tip: I do love hanging my linens out on a clothesline for that delicious fresh aroma.

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