One day, when Nivedita and Niharika were still new to eating lunch at school, the girls asked their mom to come up with another word for “roti.” The question caught Niyati Desai-Kadakia a bit off-guard. Growing up in Baroda, India, everyone knew what roti was. Not only that, but Niyati’s own school lunches had always […]
Sporting chef whites on a sunny day by the Beaches Rec Centre, Gordon Brown stands zero chance of going unnoticed. “Hi Chef Gordon!” comes the sing-song voice of a kid walking up Lee Avenue, half a block away. “Looking good!” calls a woman not a minute later, laughing with a friend as they push by […]
She can remember a time when Italian was as common as English on East Danforth. In fact, Vincenzina – more commonly known as Vincy – Angelone repeated Grade 1 at St. Brigid Catholic School in order to learn English, after immigrating to Canada with her family from the Abruzzo region of Italy in 1952. Later […]
Whenever you phone Al and Barbara Ambroise, be prepared to get the machine. Both retired years ago, but only from work. Barbara is often out for Tai Chi, Al for carpet bowling, and the two long-time volunteers are frequently found on the business side of a crafts or a bake-sale table. If it’s summer, drop […]
In a tiny room of his old high school, Dr. Rod Tennyson, aerospace engineer, is running an experiment with vinegar and baking soda. Dr. Tennyson has designed protective coatings for spacecraft, and a kind of fiber-optic nerve system for airplane wings. Somewhere at home, he has an award for his part in saving the astronauts […]
Shortly after giving birth to her first child in 1975, Linda Livingstone signed on with the relatively newborn Beach Metro Community News to make deliveries of a different kind. For the past 40 years Livingstone has been dropping off issues of the paper to the porches and mailboxes of residents on her Beach street, making […]
For a while before it shut down, the Roxy Theatre at Danforth and Greenwood screened one movie every Friday and Saturday night — the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Fans of the cult comedy-horror musical know to bring squirt guns for the rainstorm scene and confetti for the wedding, never mind the glitter and your favourite […]
Carmin Priolo is a star prize for a horoscope writer. He was born the day Nazi Germany signed its surrender: May 7, 1945. When his father drove to the hospital, people jumped on his car and yelled, “Peace! The war is over!” “Everyone said, ‘You’re destined to be great,’” Priolo says, shaking ice in his […]
When Mary Franklin rang in her 100th birthday, friends and family met where she made her home for half a century: Moberly Avenue. Mary bought a house there in 1954, for $8,900. A painting of it hangs in her room at the Beach Arms and shows a bright spring day. Beside it is a photo […]
One day last fall, Mariah Campbell was on a bus back to her homestay in Accra, Ghana, when a preacher got on and started singing. Riding a ‘trotro,’ the 15-seat vans or minivans that are the most popular type of mass transit in the Ghanaian capital, Campbell says you can get pretty close to your […]
