Sorry, folks. It’s doubtful the Courier’s editor will allow this space to be exclusively about animals even though the past year of City Living columns was filled with headlines about the four-legged, fluffy, winged, clawed, or otherwise nonhuman creatures.
We stretched with cats for the Cats on Your Mats yoga session held at Catfé in February. The feline-friendly coffee shop in the International Village invited yogis to mix with cats supplied by the SPCA in a cat adoption showroom of sorts.
“People definitely come for the cats over the yoga,” said instructor Emmanuelle Rousseau, also a cat lover. “All of our teachers were kinda thrown off by that because, well, you just can’t ask people to close their eyes in class — that’s just not fair.”
People went crazy for a different kind of animal in July — imaginary Pokémon. Vancouver, like many other cities around the would, was hit hard by the Pokémon GO game craze and the Vancouver Aquarium capitalized by offering a discount at the door to “catchers” who swarmed Stanley Park.
As Derek Jang, the aquarium’s acting assistant manager of interpretive delivery, explained: “The sad truth is that, nowadays here in Vancouver and maybe in almost every part of the world, talk of biodiversity, ocean conservation, going out and exploring species on this planet, is not something that comes up all the time.”
Hopefully the interest in saving the oceans lasts longer than interest in the game that only has a few diehards logging these days.
Beating out imaginary animals and even — gasp — cats in terms of page visits was a crow from East Vancouver. His name is Canuck and he found fame in May when he attempted to steal a knife from a crime scene in a McDonald’s parking lot. Shawn Bergman, Canuck’s best human friend, heard about the incident that went down in one of the crow’s favourite hang-outs while on a bus coming home front work.
“I was thinking, ‘Don’t be there, don’t be there.’ And, sure enough, he’s sitting on top of a white SUV in the middle of the crime scene,” Bergman recalled. “I’m like, ‘Of course you’re there. Of course you are.’ I walked all the way around because I really did not want to be associated with what’s going on and I don’t know how involved he had been.”
All creatures great and small were invited to St. John’s Shaughnessy Anglican Church for the annual Blessing of the Animals in October. St. John’s reverend Liz Hamel assisted archdeacon John Stephens with the service that included many dogs and cats. “I’ve been at pet blessings where there have been worms,” said Hamel. “Little kids dug up some worms to be blessed, so they got blessed!”
Dancing also took up some column inches. Hundreds of lindy hoppers attended Lindy Bout X at Performance Works early April. The dance, born in African American communities in Harlem, New York, grew alongside and within the jazz scene of the 1920s and ’30s. It is a growing scene in Vancouver, reminiscent of swing revival that hit this city in the early 2000s.
The Lord Byng Reunion Band, made up of five Class of ’65 graduates and one ’75 graduate, played the golden oldies to a packed house of former classmates and friends at Branch 142 of the West Point Grey Royal Canadian Legion mid-April. Marianne Schmidt was one of the dancers who tore up the floor all night long. “I just love to dance,” said the 69-year-old who wore a pedometer on her hip to log her many steps. “I can’t stop. I do it at home, when I’m in a line-up… If I can’t really get into the music, then I don’t dance as wildly. I hear the music that I love so much then I can just let go. I don’t care what people think, or what they say!”
Square dancing is Paul Silveria’s jam. Silveria, who calls shows and teaches dance steps regularly at the WISE Hall, is one of the reasons the scene is alive in Vancouver. He credits his interest in old-timey music to his earlier involvement in punk, and the parallels between both.
The Tiddley Cove Morris Dancers celebrated its 30th birthday in July with song, dance and drink. The group visited the city’s landmarks and treated the public to English folk dance performances. One of the dancers dressed as a fool who carried a pig’s bladder. “He’s supposed to be one of the better dancers, if not the best dancer,” explained Tiddley Cove’s founder Sandi Cleary, “and what he does with the bladder is he’ll go out and whack one of the dancers on their rear end if they made a mistake.”
The spirit of giving also made the news when a group of Syrian refugees held a public dinner at the Mount Pleasant Neighbourhood House early December. “We appreciate what Canadians and Canada has done for us,” said Leena Al Ahmad through translator and settlement worker Sherifa Azzab. “We want to give back, to say thank you to Canada.”
@rebeccablissett
