One of these things is not like the other.
Except it kind of is. I showed up to the presentation of the Standing Armed Spring/Summer 2012 presentation wearing the same crochet fabric as the models.
So who wore it best? I think we all know the answer to that question.
[Vintage jacket, converted vintage pants, RoseGold sandals.]
P.S. Who tweeted best? You, when you followed The Anthology.
I’ve always envied East Coasters and their cottage country.
There’s something so romantic about spending the weekend off the grid — or at least untethered from your laptop — playing croquet and having bonfires with your friends.
But instead of cottaging, I cabin. (It is the west coast way, after all.) And there’s nowhere more spectacular to do so than the Gulf Islands.
I spent the weekend on Galiano Island and I am sold — hook, line and rooster-shaped sinker — on its cozy, woodsy charm. (I first fell for it during a retreat with Amrita Yoga.)
Especially when that cozy, woodsy cabin comes with a gazillion dollar view.
And frogs that seem like they’ve been transported from some tropical destination.
The water, on the other hand, does not seem tropical in the least. It is all sorts of freezing, but we swam in it any way. Because that’s also the west coast way.
[RayBan Sunglasses, vintage shirt, Gap shorts, Cougar Boots.]
P.S. Whether you cottage or cabin, you should definitely keep up with The Anthology on Facebook.
In The Anthology’s A-list column (“A” stands for Anthology, in case you haven’t had your coffee yet) we tabulate a few of the very best things in life.
Let’s count down the ten most fun, relaxing things to do on a lazy long weekend. It’s (eep!) the last one of summer, so let’s make the most of it…
10. Spend the whole day by the water. Oceanside, lakeside, bird bath-side — it doesn’t matter.
9. Go for a bike ride and see if you can balance your friend on your handlebars like you could when you were 12.
8. Host an al fresco dinner party.
7. Unplug your TV.
6. Gather all your friends for happy hour.
5. Pick up a book. And actually read it.
4. Play a board game. Or a garden game (bocce, anyone?). As long as it requires neither wires nor an outlet, I’m game.
3. Set sail on a boat. A BC Ferry counts.
2. Challenge your friends to a corn-on-the-cob-eating contest. (I’d beat all of you combined.)
1. Throw a dance party under the stars.
[Photo by Andrew Dalik, courtesy of Toronto-based director Philip Lyall.]
What’s your very favourite thing to do on a long weekend — sleep until noon? Stay out until sunrise? Do tell!
In her fourth dispatch from London, Katie Burnett, a friend, actress and writer, shares her favourite way to spend a Friday night in London Town: at the theatre…
Living in London might be incredibly expensive, but saving money for the theatre is a must. Luckily, in London the theatre isn’t just world-class, it can be affordable. Sure, there are the West End theatres that can set you back as much as 200 Canadian dollars, but theatres like the National Theatre, Old Vic Theatre, Donmar Warehouse and Royal Court are rarely above 50 dollars Canadian a ticket – if that even. On a Friday night, whether you’ve been sightseeing all day or working, the best treat you can give yourself is a night out at the theatre.
The Old Vic, located on the Cut by Waterloo is a great theatre with dynamic plays. Kevin Spacey is currently finishing his run as Richard the 3rd, and Robert Sheehan of Misfits fame will take over next in the Irish play, The Playboy of the Western World. If you’re able to get to the Old Vic for a night of theatre, try and leave yourself time for a walk along the South Bank before your show, as it is the perfect place for a stroll, sight-seeing, and people watching.
There are a lot of food choices, like the always popular Wagamama or Ping Pong, but I suggest going to Cubana. It has pre-theatre dinner menus AND happy hour – a rarity in London. Their Pina Coladas are to die for….
After your play at the Old Vic, head down to the Pit bar for drinks, a chance to mingle with the cast, and usually some roaring music courtesy of a local band like Salt Water Thief (check out their performance of Adele’s “Someone Like You”). It’s a great atmosphere to relax and also extremely entertaining.
Over at the National, the views are stunning, and even if you don’t have a ticket you can go inside, wander around the bookshop (stocked with what feels like every play ever written), check out the art exhibits, treat yourself to a coffee or some wine, and sit up on the deck, overlooking the Thames and St. Paul’s. And if you do want a ticket to a show, they do Travelex offers, meaning you can get tickets for the equivalent of 20 Canadian dollars on the day!
The great secret about theatre in London is that you can wake up (albeit early), go over to the theatre where you’d like to see a show, line up, and more often than not (if you’re early!) you’ll score a ticket.
I woke up at 7am one morning recently, dragged my weary roommate Isobel and met up with our friend Sam outside the Donmar Warehouse, where we waited until 10:30am – and each walked away with a ticket that cost about 15 Canadian dollars for that evening. The Donmar is a stunning, intimate space, and we had perfect seats for Schiller’s Luise Miller, which was a phenomenal production directed by Michael Grandage, featuring up and comer Felicity Jones as the title role.
Next up at the Donmar? Jude Law in Anna Christie. It’s sold out, but fear not – if you wake up early enough, there’s a good chance you can line up for tickets!
And if you can get to the Royal Court, dubbed “London’s coolest theatre”, you can also enjoy the surrounding Sloane Square area and the Kings Road. It’s a hub for new playwrights, notably Lucy Prebble’s Enron, Polly Stenham’s That Face and Jezz Butterworth’s Jerusalem which went on to play in the West End and Broadway, winning various prestigious awards along the way!
[First photo found here, second photo found here, third photo found here.]
P.S. Want to keep adding to your “When I’m in London” list? Katie Burnett has more dispatches from London coming up on The Anthology! Catch up on her first dispatch from London here, her second one here and her third one here.
So I hosted a segment for Global Television and since the clip is not yet available online I thought I’d give you a little freeze-frame recap.
First, I went shopping at Metropolis at Metrotown with two high school students where they picked out back-to-school outfits and I discovered that I would be far from cool in grade 11. (Long skirts in homeroom? Am I insane?)
Then we appeared live in studio where we went through some of fall’s biggest trends — colour blocking (see Sierra’s pants), warm, fiery colours (check out her scarf) and desert boots for men (Mark’s rocking them).
And then I made a face like a little chipmunk. Because animal-inspired things are big right now too.
Thank you Global BC! Thank you Mark and Sierra! Thank you Olivia and Steve! Thank you Metropolis at Metrotown, Banana Republic, Forever 21 and Town Shoes! Let’s do this again sometime, mmkay?
[Green dress by Anthropologie.]
A gazillion entries, tons of shameless begging and several original poems later, we have picked the winner of the Frye Veronica boots from Freedman Shoes. And the lucky lady is…
Melissa B., who entered via Facebook. Congratulations! Send photos of how you style them, mmkay?
I love music festivals. Love, love, love them. But I wasn’t able to attend Live at Squamish myself so I sent my brother Bryce Dundon who is a magical musician to cover it for The Anthology. Below are the highlights.
The sun was shining, the camp was bustling and the stage was set.
Live at Squamish has a very unique feel to it. It is about an hour outside of Vancouver and in such a short distance you travel to another world of mountains and evergreen forests.
The stages themselves are nestled in between massive glacier-tipped mountains, which would give any music venue a run for its beauty.
When we had some down time we were able to hit up the Mattel booth to swing in a quick game of Apples to Apples, which got far more competitive than needed.
One of the weekend’s highlights was Shad, a rapper from Ontario. He connected incredibly with his audience and put on a fantastic live show. Definitely a must-see for any hip-hop lover.
The major (pun intended) highlight of the weekend had to have been Major Lazer.
I have been a long time fan, but first time performance viewer. Major Lazer’s Diplo and Switch earned my stamp of approval. Besides, the show had some of the most interesting… “acrobatic stunts” I have ever seen on or off a ladder.
Yes! And that is why they earned a spot on The Anthology’s Coachella 2010 highlight reel. Thanks again, Bryce! Glad you had a blast.
I’m spending a lot of quality time in your living room this week. First, alongside a gaggle of male models. And now with a couple of stylin’ students.
We shot a segment for Global Television earlier this week and in it, judging by this shot, I get very, very angry about back-to-school clothes. (I didn’t yell at that poor student, I swear.)
We shot at Forever 21, Banana Republic and Town Shoes at Metropolis at Metrotown and it was all captured by Doug the cameraman and produced by fellow Point Grey Secondary School alumnus Olivia Mowatt (holler!).
So grab a triple shot of espresso and watch Global BC Friday morning. I’ll be there live in studio.
This summer, I went heli-hiking with the pioneers of the heli-adventure: Canadian Mountain Holidays (CMH). I loved every single minute of it. Although some of those minutes, like the ones recounted below, were flat-out terrifying.
I feel like I’m going to be sick. I sit down to try to stop my legs from shaking. Below me is mountainside and below that is a tree-covered valley and below that is more mountain and more valley and I can’t see any level ground other than this coffee table-sized helipad I’ve just been dropped off on.
I’m about to climb a Via Feratta. Latin for ‘iron way’, a Via Feratta is a series of metal rungs and cables fastened to the rock face so even those who have never been rock-climbing can scale a cliff like this one, which stretches 1,200 feet above me. Invented during the First World War to move troops over the Alps, people now choose to climb these things for fun and the practice has become so popular in Europe, CMH has built two in BC.
“Focus on the rock in front of you and don’t look down,” says my mountain guide Peter Macpherson as I’m cinching up my harness. “Remember to take small steps.”
So even the pros are telling me to take baby steps.
We begin by sludging our way up a snow-covered slope, kicking our toes into the mountainside to carve out our own steps. The snow is slush, the drop is long and I’m not locked in at this point. I don’t have any poles to brake a slide. I don’t have anything except gloves that are too big for me, a harness that’s too tight around my bladder and a pounding in my ears so loud I feel like I’m going to have that panic attack I’m so afraid of.
We get up to a bench, a ledge on the mountainside that can’t be more than 18 inches wide. But it’s flat so it feels so, so good. And there’s a rope so I can finally latch the two clips that run from my harness like an umbilical cord to the mountain. If I slip now, I’ll only fall a few feet before dangling off the side of the cliff. I find this comforting.
The woman right in front of me, Joanne from New York, assures me she’s as terrified as I am. And she even climbed a Via Feratta a couple days ago.
“If I had known what it was before I went, I would never have done it,” she says. Yet here she is.
I would never have done it either if it weren’t for 69-year-old Mike Brink from Massachusetts whose gentle encouragement (read: peer pressure) prompted me to face my biggest fear: heights.
At first there are proper nooks in the rocks for me to place my feet. It’s steep, but I’m framed by rugged boulders on both sides. This isn’t so bad, I think. And then I look up. Carved into the very, very vertical face of the cliff are iron rungs that look like giant staples. Even though this particular route is called the Sky Ladder these rungs aren’t evenly spaced or lined up one above the next. They’re sporadic, so wide apart you have to straddle the mountain from one to the next and in between are footholds that don’t seem like they could support me or my clunky hiking boots – few are more than an inch deep.
I feel the panic rising. It starts in my stomach and moves to my shoulders and I know I could let myself succumb to this. As I have neither vodka nor Ativan with me, I try calming my nerves the old-fashioned way: with a good, stern talking to. “I’m doing this,” I say to myself. Which is to say both “I’m already doing this” and “I’m going to keep doing this.”
My harness clips are attached to the rope that’s running vertically beside me. But they don’t stay there. Each length of rope is about eight feet or so, which means when I get to an end that’s bolted into the rock, I’ve got to unclip – one at a time – and move them up to the next portion.
Because only one hiker (climber?) can be on a length of cable at any given time, it can be slow going, which is fine when I’m resting on a flat bench – and there are a few on this route – but when I’m clinging to the rock like a starfish in the sky my mind starts wandering. And I start noticing how vertical this cliff is and I start thinking about how everyone tells me not to look down. But that just makes my imagination run wilder so I face the monster under the bed and I look straight below me. What do I see? My big hiking boots on a small iron rung, the cliff, the snow, the postage stamp-sized helipad way in the distance.
My god, we’re high, I think.
The next phase of the route has me shimmying horizontally on a narrow little ledge, which I don’t mind. But then the ledge ends and I have to wrap my body around a 90-degree bend. The world falls out below me and yet for some reason there are no rungs here, just the natural, narrow footholds in the rock. Somehow my clunky boots and now-bare hands (cold cable and muddy rock felt better than letting my fingers swim in oversized gloves) find their way.
I look up and the mountain is folding back towards me. If it’s my vertigo or the vertical, I can’t tell, but my knees are shaking again and I’m starting to feel woozy.
“What do I do now, Peter?” I ask. “Keep going up,” he says.
So I do.
The rock gets steeper and the angles get more angry-looking but thankfully there are more iron rungs. I leap across a divide and land on one, shimmy across and peer up over the jutting crag that I’m supposed to mount. Here, just below this ledge in the sky, I am supposed to unclip and reattach my clips to the cable. So I do.
As I ascend I keep banging my knees. Peter tells me to keep my body away from the rock but my instincts tell me to cling to that which supports me. I can feel my knees throbbing, I can see the bright red scrapes on my knuckles, but I’m doing this.
I’ve been doing this for nearly two hours.
I swing my body up and see Peter taking a photo of the two New Yorkers ahead of me. I would love nothing more than to have him capture this moment with my camera too. I climb a few rungs and try to turn my body so he can grab my Canon from my backpack. Then the wind starts rushing over the ridge and I change my mind – even after coming this far and knowing the summit is so close I can feel the panic rising inside.
I must keep climbing.
All of a sudden the ground starts to level off. My legs are still shaking but I move more quickly and unclip and reattach my harness more easily. Then I climb the final boulder and reach the summit where I’m struck by the picture-perfect mountain ranges stretching out in every direction.
I sit. On somewhat level ground, no less. I feel the sun on my face and I feel the adrenaline slowly drain. As I’m sitting there on top of the world I feel a sense of accomplishment like never before.
I’m still afraid of heights.
[Second photo by Mike Brink, helicopter photo by Philip Garbe.]
Thank you, Canadian Mountain Holidays, for such an amazing adventure!
P.S. Catch my thoughts on travelling solo on CMH’s Adventure Blog.
There are accessories you buy as souvenirs, there are accessories you buy because they look cool and there are accessories you buy because doing so would feed a child in East Africa.
(No, that’s not my manly, tattooed hand, that’s City and Colour’s Dallas Green.)
Buy one limited-edition Rafiki chain ($10.00 CDN), beaded by Me to We artisans in Kenya, and you’ll feed one child in East Africa. For a whole month.
If you’re in Toronto you can get yours at the Me to We store, and if you’re not, you can get yours online. I bought five.