Two hours ago, I was in a small jam-packed London theater, joining in on a much-deserved standing ovation to the cast of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Some of the finest Shakespearean actors, most notably Ralph Fiennes, indulged us tonight with an unforgettably moving performance. Pleasure, sadness, delight and joy, smiles and tears, deep reflection and thrilling [...]
entertainment
Do you learn more about yourself from watching films or is it just me? How can the same film produce such vastly different reactions from each of us? I wonder why TIFF09 did not nearly have this effect on me. I discovered a great deal about myself during this second round of Toronto’s Film Festival, [...]
I absolutely and positively would not be caught dead in a night club, a bar, or in the wild and loud parties in my own hometown, much less in the super-hyped version of these for which Las Vegas is so well-known. Yet I often seem to be clarifying silent assumptions for those who find Las [...]
Reading Anna Karenina has been so overwhelming and gratifying that I chose to walk away from it for a short while. I decided to take time to digest the scope, the breadth, the depth in this masterpiece of a novel. It is of course an overly ambitious task to ever digest it all. This is [...]
Traveling is a necessity to living fully, to expanding your horizons and partaking in life, if ever so briefly, beyond your immediate surroundings and perhaps beyond your own country and continent. Traveling away from home and to new places can change your thoughts, sharpen your senses, introduce you to wonderful people and places, and create [...]
Our experiences are not only made up of what we have lived through. Sometimes, experience stems from that which we did not do. I never had the chance to watch Luciano Pavarotti perform live. I regret that bitterly. The immaculate voice of this opera tenor was a gift to this world and who knows when, [...]
The bleak of winter can be a heavy burden on the soul. The sunless skies, the freezing rain, the brutal wind, the scenery of naked trees stripped of all life until the warmer seasons. However do we make it to spring year after year without losing heart? For me, it is taking refuge in the [...]
Sometimes we put off some of the most obvious things on our bucket list for an unusually long time. We cannot explain it beyond the excuse that we just haven’t come around to doing them. Over 8 years ago, in a small Mexican restaurant that has since shut down, Argentine tango found me. I say [...]
I fell in love with classical music when I watched the unforgettable Igudesman and Joo in a small theater in North Carolina on a Thursday night in summer 2009. Alexander Pope once wrote that the theater aspires to wake the soul by gentle strokes of art – to raise the genius and to mend the [...]
For the Love of Film. The beautiful motto seen everywhere across Toronto during the fabulous, exciting, and thoroughly fun film festival, also known as TIFF. This was our very first film festival and I am eternally grateful to my friend for sharing her yearly tradition with us. The festival’s energy had completely engulfed Toronto by our [...]
My greatest mistake wasn’t to start tango late in life, that is a mere regret, or to not tango seriously enough, I couldn’t as it was making me so happy with so little, or to not tango frequently enough, as life happens and it needs your attention. My greatest mistake was to temporarily give up [...]
One evening in early spring, I came home to a kitchen smelling of divine home-made cooking of the resident chef, my husband, Andy. On this particular night, he was going to show me the first Episode of the infamous TV show, LOST , during dinner. He is already a huge fan, along with most of [...]
