Since I became a journalist 10 years ago, I’ve had three dozen needles poked into my arm over two days, lived homeless for a year, stolen cars, hopped freight trains, panhandled and had the crap beaten out of me more than once. Through dumb luck and willfulness, I’ve wrung stories out of murderers, drug dealers,… Continue reading Going Undercover
Series: Spring 2007
Leading Men
The theatre performance du jour in Toronto is Soulpepper’s adaptation of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker. Having just finished their opening night performance, the three actors return to the stage to take their bows. A sparse standing ovation springs up for the 2005 Nobel Prize winner’s 1959 classic. The audience members process what they’ve seen. “That… Continue reading Leading Men
The Tortoise and The Tortoise
Shop clerk Dawn Golding snatches a copy of Edmonton Life from the display in front of her till at the Front Page, a newsstand on downtown Edmonton’s main drag. She leafs through its pages and gushes about the glossy new magazine in her hands. “I’m just glad they’re doing a magazine on Edmonton,” she says.… Continue reading The Tortoise and The Tortoise
The “Gee Whiz” Effect
The toys look like muses. They line the office partitions, overlooking producers at their desks in this third-floor corner of the Canadian Broadcasting Centre: a small dinosaur, a baseball in a case, an uncompleted Rubik’s Cube, a shot glass, a tiny model space shuttle, two snow globes, a Pez dispenser, a model of an atom… Continue reading The “Gee Whiz” Effect
“I”
“Failure!” says Ian Brown. “Big failure.” The feature writer and broadcaster is talking about his failure — to write a book he still owes Random House, the chronicle of a car high-jacking and kidnapping. We’re well into our conversation that began about an hour earlier, just after 8 a.m., when he burst through the wooden… Continue reading “I”