Cultured Cuties

With the weather holding out, aunt Wendy and cousins Stepheny and Thomas thought they'd take advantage of the hospitable conditions (and rare lack of a public transit strike or highway protest) to come our teeming hive of activity to meet up with the boys for a change, but this time around, we did it a little differently. Rendezvousing at The Eaton Centre (which, as some of you might or might not know, no longer contains a store called "Eaton's" anymore), we casually strolled the multiple Escher-esque levels of this sprawling behemoth--any evidence of the current recession keeping a lock on discretionary spending couldn't be found on this afternoon (we also parked at the familiar Green P lot across from St. Mike's, where we'd spent a lot of time visiting the boyos while they were still in incubators before Xmas).

While Stepheny and Thomas perused the finer shops, we enjoyed the expected smiles and awestruck comments from passersby and kept the boys fed and stimulated. The big drama of the day was the case of Carter's missing shoe--which turned out to have fallen under the bench after I dug through two public trash cans...











Across Yonge Street, the annual Luminato arts festival was in full swing, with this afternoon hosting a truly unique outdoor spectacle. When we took a break from conspicuous consumption to check it out, several lineups of literally hundreds of guitarists--professional and aspiring--had already formed to sign up for large communal jam on what was voted the Great Canadian Tune (interesting, not a single Gordon Lightfoot or Tragically Hip song made the list): Neil Young's 1970 classic "Helpless" (although unidentified, I always thought the "town in Northern Ontario" he sang about could've been my birthplace of Pembroke).


A judge from The Guiness Book Of World's Records was on location to confirm whether the previous record of 1,803 (in Leinfelden-Echterdingen, Germany, performing Deep Purple's "Smoke On The Water", apparently) would be broken.

(for what it's worth, I was handed not one, but two, freebie samples of some sort of male cosmetic rejuvenation/"tired skin"cream...was somebody trying to tell me something?)

Unfortunately, registration and a countdown to the song would take several more hours--Nathaniel and Carter were already clearly exhausted and our guests had to head back to make the Go Train. Lidia took the boys home while I stuck around to witness (and record) the event, which sounded great, but unfortunately, the efforts fell short of the necessary head count needed to break the record, by a mere 180 axemen.

Who knows? In a few years, after some serious time with "Guitar Hero" on their dad's PS3, the boys might be one day be part of music history. I can't play an instrument to save my life, but my singing voice isn't much worse than Young's...