Like I said, Sunday no movies for me, since our only one, Families, selected for us by TIFF and therefore immovable, conflicted with Robyn Hitchcock at the Drake Hotel.
Robyn brought British – or Seattle – weather to Toronto for us – although it seems as if he has moved his US homebase to Nashville from Seattle, which makes me a little sad, because I love Seattle more than Nashville. Anyways, this meant that Sunday was grey and rainy. Mark went down to the Starbucks in our building for coffee and I recorded lectures for the next week for my classes. We ate in, and then just worked some more.
I didn’t go outside until 5:30, when it was time to walk Mark down to the film. I bought a flat white and a cookie on the walk back, and changed into my going out clothes – my 6oth birthday dress – and rode the streetcar to the Drake. Mark was going to join me after the movie.
Emma Swift did a short set, and Robyn joined her for (Neil Young’s) Motion Pictures. He was sounding a little hoarse, so I was worried that his voice had not joined us for the evening, but he seemed to get warmed up on time for his set with the Sadies. During which they performed Sweetheart of the Rodeo in its entirety. Robyn didn’t tell us that until after they’d done You ain’t goin’ nowhere, during which I was thinking, “jeez dudes you sound like the Byrds.” Followed by Astronomy Dominie for the first encore, and then another Floyd song I did not recognize, with RH playing a pink telecaster, and then I wanna destroy you, and Queen of Eyes, and “we don’t know anything else”. We left the bar, crossed the street, got on the streetcar, and there we were.
Monday morning we saw Born to be Blue, up at the Bloor Hot Docs theater, Ethan Hawke as Chet Baker. And then at noon, we added a movie, so it was back to Ryerson for Freeheld, another one where one of the women in a relationship is dying of cancer, but so much better done than Miss You Already. I got Mark a scone at Bulldog, and I got a spinach wrap and water at Starbucks. They’re supposed to be egg white, feta, and spinach on a whole wheat tortilla, but mine seemed to have some kind of cheddar spread instead of feta. And the spinach wasn’t very good.
Ethan Hawke as Chet Baker
It was a pretty day, so we walked to the Brick Street Bakery (getting righted after a little mapping confusion that had us pointed to the branch of the bakery in the Financial District instead of the Distillery District) and ate sandwiches for lunch. I had coronation chicken – curried chicken salad on wheat bread – and Mark had a BLT on a bun, that had a truly impressive stack of really good bacon on it. We came back, and I had an online class meeting for one of my classes, then we strolled to the supermarket to get milk & bananas for the next morning, just to give me a chance to get out.
