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Successful thrifting expedition Saturday morning netted me a knee-length broomstick skirt with sequinned waistband, and a pair of J. Crew wedges which like the ballet flats I found last year, are cute, comfortable and don't fall off my feet when I walk. I can see why J. Crew have such a preppie cult following, and it's not as though I've any street cred to lose by wearing them. We then went to the 25th Annual Reading of Single Pages, aka Jason's birthday party. The dice rolled up a page number of 26, and I read about four of the half-dozen books I brought -- Lives of the Monster Dogs and The Joy of Cooking had the best pages 26.
Today we had lunch with my parents and then went to TCAF. I picked up a graphic novel called Louise Brooks, Detective. It's set during the part of her life immediately after the end of Brooks' Hollywood career, when she'd returned to her home town in Kansas; so far so true; I'm guessing the solving-a-murder part is fiction, though I'm not sure. They've certainly got her voice down, at least as I remember it from the memoir I read years ago. After that we hung out for a while in Balzac's, the coffee shop on the ground floor of Metro Ref, where Andrew chatted happily to an older woman named Peggy who reminded him of his late friend Bev.
I think Balzac's must be part of a chain(1), though I can't recall seeing another one. Faux-vintage restaurant decor is nothing new -- it's at least twenty-five years since my father, returned from a trip, mentioned a place that had been "a sort of English Pub mapped onto the interior of an office building." Balzac's struck me as especially theatrical, though -- it has a pressed-tin ceiling, beadboard along the front of the counter, and a wood-framed glass display case for the baked goods, and yet there is no attempt to hide the edges: you can see you're on a set that's been constructed inside a 1970s Brutalist concrete building.
About twenty minutes before we left, someone began yelling and I glanced up to see a shirtless man in a Santa hat. Oh wow, I said, Zanta's back. Apparently the local man, famous in the first decade of this century, is off his meds and back to his manic career.
(1) I just checked their website -- apparently there are six locations around Toronto, and several elsewhere in Ontario.
Today we had lunch with my parents and then went to TCAF. I picked up a graphic novel called Louise Brooks, Detective. It's set during the part of her life immediately after the end of Brooks' Hollywood career, when she'd returned to her home town in Kansas; so far so true; I'm guessing the solving-a-murder part is fiction, though I'm not sure. They've certainly got her voice down, at least as I remember it from the memoir I read years ago. After that we hung out for a while in Balzac's, the coffee shop on the ground floor of Metro Ref, where Andrew chatted happily to an older woman named Peggy who reminded him of his late friend Bev.
I think Balzac's must be part of a chain(1), though I can't recall seeing another one. Faux-vintage restaurant decor is nothing new -- it's at least twenty-five years since my father, returned from a trip, mentioned a place that had been "a sort of English Pub mapped onto the interior of an office building." Balzac's struck me as especially theatrical, though -- it has a pressed-tin ceiling, beadboard along the front of the counter, and a wood-framed glass display case for the baked goods, and yet there is no attempt to hide the edges: you can see you're on a set that's been constructed inside a 1970s Brutalist concrete building.
About twenty minutes before we left, someone began yelling and I glanced up to see a shirtless man in a Santa hat. Oh wow, I said, Zanta's back. Apparently the local man, famous in the first decade of this century, is off his meds and back to his manic career.
(1) I just checked their website -- apparently there are six locations around Toronto, and several elsewhere in Ontario.
