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Showing posts with the label disability

The best way to give depression the finger

When I was going through a particularly manic phase about ten years ago, I was at the press club everyday chatting up the regulars, spending aimless afternoons playing shuffleboard. Then, like that, I was gone for weeks. During my hiatus periods, I would get frantic calls from my buds. They would leave urgent messages on my answering machine wondering where I was. Had I put my car in a ditch somewhere? Was I lying in a pool of my own vomit in the upstairs bathroom? It was never that glamorous. Usually, I was working. My pat answer to them when I finally went back to the club was this. "You don't have to worry about me when you don't see me. You only have to worry about me when you do see me." The sight of a Rose cut in the afternoon was a sign of trouble. I was trying to outrun my problems. Being a single mother is a tough road, fraught with potholes and detours. The schools are against you. The banks are against you. Your ex-husband is against you. And...

Joyce Fairbairn: The crimson pistol

Joyce Fairbairn was a legend in the Parliamentary Press Gallery even before she went to work for Pierre Trudeau. She was one of the few women who inhabited the storied hot room in the 60s, a feisty reporter from the Mad Men era who was admired more for her "great legs" than her native intelligence. Joyce always reminded me of Shirley Maclaine, with the short no nonsense blonde hair cut, the twinkling eyes, the sharp sense of humor. Joyce would have had no trouble hanging with Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack -- she would have eaten them for breakfast and they would have served her caviar and champagne. Frank was the musical hero of her husband, the late Mike Gillan, who had befriended me in the early 80s when I left my fledgling journalism career for the comfort of a Hill job. I met Mike through Jerry Yanover and the two of them had charmed me into thinking I would be welcomed into the fold. The Liberals were like that back in the 80s. Unlike the other partie...