Events Calendar

Simon B. Cotter and Scott Harris revisit the 50's, 60's and 70's while bringing back the two man comedy team to theatres across North America. Hip, slick, and hilarious with a little bit of music thrown in. Simon and Scott celebrate the fads, events and accomplishments of the "Me" generation.

So drop in, let your hair down, and check out the scene. Your parents would hate it!

This performance proudly sponsored by The Big Brain and The Parry Sound Mall.

This performance is proudly sponsored by Royal LePage: Nicole Boyd and Claudette Boyd, Team Advantage Realty; Horseshoe Pines Marina; and Now That’s Catering.

As former team captain and one of the most beloved players in Toronto Maple Leafs history, Wendel Clark draws from his experiences to share stories of overcoming obstacles to achieve success. Motivating the audience by expressing how with teamwork, determination, and great leadership you can achieve anything!

Sponsored by Barb Kerr, CFP®, Financial Consultant, CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER Professional, Investors Group Financial Services Inc.

http://investorsgroup.com/consult/barb.kerr/english/default.htm

JUDY FONG BATES

THE YEAR OF FINDING MEMORY is an elegant and surprising book about a Chinese family's difficult arrival in Canada, and a daughter's search to understand remarkable and terrible truths about her parents' past lives.

 Growing up in her father's hand laundry in small town Ontario, Judy Fong Bates listened to stories of her parents' past lives in China, a place far removed from their every-day life of poverty and misery. But in spite of the allure of these stories, Fong Bates longed to be a Canadian girl. Fifty years later she finally followed her curiosity back to her ancestral home in China for a reunion that spiralled into a series of unanticipated discoveries. Opening with a shock The Year of Finding Memory explores a particular, yet universal, world of family secrets, love, loss, courage and shame. This is a memoir of a daughter's emotional journey, and her painful acceptance of conflicting truths. In telling the story of her parents, Fong Bates is telling the story of how she came to know them, of finding memory.


JUDY FONG BATES is the author of the critically acclaimed short-story collection China Dog and other Tales from a Chinese Laundry, and the novel Midnight at the Dragon Café, which was the 2007 Everybody Reads selection of Portland, Oregon, and an American Library Association Notable Book for 2006.

CATHERINE GILDINER - AFTER THE FALLS

CATHERINE GILDINER recounts her remarkable coming-of-age in the 1960s with the same wit, candour and exhilarating storytelling that has made Too Close to the Falls a modern classic.

 When Cathy McClure is thirteen years old, her parents make the bold decision to move to suburban Buffalo in hopes that it will help Cathy focus on her studies and stay out of trouble. But “normal” has never been Cathy’s forte, and leaving Niagara Falls and Catholic school behind does nothing to quell her spirited nature. As the 1960s dramatically unfold, Cathy takes on many personas — cheerleader, vandal, HoJo hostess, civil rights demonstrator — with the same gusto she exhibited as a child working split shifts in her father’s pharmacy. But when tragedy strikes, it is her role as daughter that proves to be most challenging.

CATHERINE GILDINER published her first book in 1999, a humorous memoir of her childhood called Too Close to the Falls. The story is told through the eyes of the young Cathy who, at the age of four, is put to work assisting the delivery man who works for her father’s pharmacy – and other “crazy” stories from her “normal” childhood. The memoir was published in Canada, the United States, England and Australia to wide acclaim, received award nominations and spent more than 70 weeks on Canadian bestseller lists.

FEBRUARY is the month in 1982 when the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a Valentine's Day storm. All eighty-four men aboard died. February is the story of Helen O'Mara, one of those left behind when her husband, Cal, drowns. It begins in the present-day, but spirals back again and again to the "February" that persists in Helen's mind and heart. In her external life, Helen O'Mara cleans and does yoga and looks after her grandchildren and shakes hands with solitude. In her internal life, she continually revisits Cal.

Here is a novel about complex love and cauterizing grief, about past and present and how memory knits them together, about a fiercely close community and its universal struggles, and finally about our need to imagine a future, no matter how fragile.

Lisa Moore has written two collections of stories, Degrees of Nakedness and Open, as well as a novel, Alligator. Open and Alligator were both nominated for the Giller Prize. Alligator won the Commonwealth Prize, and Open won the Canadian Authors' Association Jubilee Prize for Short Fiction.