Back in Toronto after snow duty in NJ

One of the most gratifying things about writing a Blog, that is intended to come out on a pretty regular basis, is to have someone tell you that they have enjoy reading it and have missed seeing it when you don’t write one.

A number of people told me that during the last couple of weeks and I was really pleased to hear from “my audience.”

When I headed out into the “Prairie” with granddaughter 11-year-old Taylor Bera in October, I began a weekly log of the travels with the cast and crew of “Little House on the Prairie The Musical.”

A couple of weeks ago I left the trail in Toronto to be home in New Jersey to spend time with Helen, my wife of nearly 48 years, who I haven’t seen since the first of the year (except via Webcam). Taylor’s mother, Kelly, and father, Joe, plus older sister, Maggie, took up the trail in split shifts for two weeks.

I’m now back in Toronto for the last week of a five-week run before heading back to the states for our next stop in Tampa, FL.

Helen will be rejoining the tour then when we hit, what we hope will be, much warmer weather. We’ll have two stops in Florida, Tampa and Naples; a week in Raleigh and then a week in Appleton, WI, just before our Easter break.

Now back to the last two weeks—I really enjoyed being home with Helen and my older daughter Terri’s family, but keep wondering if the weather gods were also waiting for me to come home to bring the heaviest snowfall of the season.

I came home Friday morning (Feb. 5), a day earlier than planned, to avoid the snow delays that did hit the NYC area later that night even though towns north of our home in Parlin really didn’t get much, if any, snow. We had enough to use the gasoline powered snow plow to clear the driveways the next morning.

It was just a forerunner of a storm that would hit us the following Tuesday night, all day Wednesday and into Thursday. Four plowings later, the storm stopped and Kelly and Maggie were able to fly out for Toronto on Friday morning.

I guess it was fate that brought me back to NJ when it did, since “fate” knows I’m an experienced “digger outer.” Our area was hit pretty hard but points further south including Washington, DC, were buried a lot deeper.

We had another snowfall early last week, but that one only required a manual snow shoveling.

Now for a recap of what transpired on the “Little House Prairie” while I was back in the wilds of New Jersey.

Taylor and her schoolmates were busy with regular classes the last two weeks but found time a couple of class trips. Taylor says that her favorite was a trip to the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum). She says she liked all of the exhibits that are housed in Canada’s largest museum of world culture and natural history.
Joe and I both missed the class trip because we were in the air at the time. Joe did get to go with Taylor and others from the play when they spent time at a Habitat for Humanity project in Toronto. The Habitat visit was filmed by local TV crews and some of the cast members told Taylor they saw film of her working on the JumboTron in Dundas-Yonge Street Square. Little House cast and crew (including Taylor and Joe) got to take in a “Jersey Boys” performance on a day-off.

Last week mom Kelly went with the class and other cast members on a tour of the sacred treasures from the Tomb of King Tut on display at the Art Gallery of Ontario. You may recall that Tut ruled for nine years before he died in this late teens, so he really was a boy king. His tomb was discovered in 1922.

Taylor also had a good week as an actor: she got to do what an understudy does best by filling in as the younger Ingalls daughter, Carrie, and then yesterday picked up the Tony Award for youth actor from the Main Street Players back home for her role as Scout in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Here’s a pictorial recap of the last two weeks (thanks to pictures made by Taylor, tutor-wrangler Carolyn Dunning and others in the cast):

http://www.kodakgallery.com/gallery/creativeapps/slideShow/Main.jsp?token=271576513803%3A1568836058

Little House Travels Across the Border

We’ve been in a Canada just over a week—8 days to be exact—and we’ve seen so much but only skimmed the surface of things to do. Too bad that the cast and crew of Little House on the Prairie The Musical has to work and/or go to school too.

The kids, of course, have school 20 hours a week—their Toronto school is set up in a “pretty neat suite” at the Delta Chelsea where we’re staying, so they don’t have far to travel for that gig. After one of the parents solved the riddle of who gets to use the lone internet cable in the room, things went smoothly the rest of the first week. The answer, of course, was the splitter that the hotel installed in the room to give them multiple connections to the internet. Wish I had their 40” flat screen TV in our room!

We’re in the heart of Toronto’s entertainment district. Little House is playing its 5-week run at the Canon Theater, a 2,200 seat venue just down the street from the Chelsea.

LHOP did eight shows last week and the crowds were very good at this 90-year-old venue, which was part of the Pantages vaudeville circuit that had it’s beginnings in western Canada (actually started in the Yukon by a Greek sailor who left ship and went there during the Gold Rush Days in 1898). By 1920, his company acquired the Toronto theater on the east side of the continent.

Guess there’s something about Greeks coming to North America as sailors. My wife’s father came to the U.S. after being a sailor. Helen says the story is he jumped ship in the NYC harbor and ended up in Dixon, IL.

Outside of school, the kids and their grownup companions have found lots of fun things to do (and some of them were educational too). The country’s money is educational in itself. They have the right idea and have eliminated some heavily used paper currency. They have $1 coins, called loonies and $2 coins, officially called toonies, but I have not heard anyone use that term yet. They say the coins last so much longer than paper currency and are easy to use after you get use to the concept.

We took advantage of an only slightly cold and not so windy first full day in Toronto last week for the kids to go ice skating on probably the city’s largest outdoor rink near the harbor. Skating at the Harbourfront centre (that’s the right spelling for both) is free for those with their own skates. The kids had to pay $7 Canadian for the skate rental and another $5 for the helmets (the latter we insisted they wear despite their protests,)

There are similar free skating rinks all over the city. There’s one just adjacent to our hotel, but the view from the waterfront was spectacular with all the private and commercial ships that are docked in the harbor and the planes landing in the background at the city’s municipal airport on an island. The people who live or work on the island plus the airline passengers need a ferry to get to downtown Toronto. Besides we got to see the Air Canada arena, where the Toronto Maple Leafs play hockey and the Raptors play basketball, while we were walking there after jumping off the subway,

It’s pretty easy to get around---they have two subways, one goes north and south and the second goes east and west. It should be simple but even though I’m pretty proficient on the complex New York City subway system, I almost got us lost doing the simple northbound-southbound loop in Toronto. You just have to remember that the southbound train designations on the platform become northbound designations after you pass Union Station.

It was just a short walk after skating and lunch to get to the CN Tower that was the world’s tallest building for the last 35 years until the Burg Khalifa Tower was recently opened in Dubai. The builders in Dubai won’t say exactly how tall the structure is but they say theirs exceeds 800 meters (2,625 feet) while the CNT Tower stands at 553 meters (1,815 feet).

I’ve been around the Empire State Building in New York City for the last 30+ years so a tall building is not new to me. But, Canada’s National Tower (its official name now) stands plenty tall and was exciting to tour, Don’t know if the kids (Taylor and Carly Sonenclar) or their chaperones (me or father Bob) had more fun.

We saw it all from every level. At 1,122 feet, we all got to walk on the glass floor and peer down at the specks on the ground below. If you lay on the glass floor and someone takes your picture, you appear to be flying. That’s just for the kids though, haha. Rogers Stadium, the home of the Toronto Blue Jays, is just adjacent to the Tower. I think it would be fun to be in the tower on a summer day and view part of a game when they open the sky dome.

Even though it is enclosed, it was still too cold of a day for baseball in Toronto, however, our next Little House tour stop will be in the warm temperatures of Tampa, FL, and spring training will be in full swing. The NY Yankees home base in the spring is in Tampa and even though I’m not a fan, I’ll likely get to see at least one game in March when we’re in Florida for two weeks.

Back to Toronto, and much chillier weather. We got a panoramic view of the city from the 1,136 lookout level and also from the Sky Pod level another 110 feet higher (but high winds kept us inside behind windows.) The view later at night was breathtaking—they let us go back up for a second trip, some thing that not possible when the Tower is full of visitors in the warmer weather time.

We could even pick out our hotel which is about a 15 to 20 minute walk from the tower and the downtown area surrounding is lit up at night like Times Square in Manhattan. The latter is not something that all Toronto citizens like, I’m told. The square has its own version of our TKTS—they call it T.O. Tix, but the principle is the same—cheaper tickets no matter what your area of entertainment leans toward---drama, musical, opera, ballet, symphony or whatever-Toronto has it all.

Some members of the cast combined a lavish opening night party at the Canon on Wednesday and a performance by Guns N’ Roses, an American rock band in its 25th year of performing.

Mary Louise Parker, the Emmy-winning star of the TV show Weeds, stopped by with her family and met with the cast. I complimented her on the show and told her I missed the last season because of travelling, but coincidentally had just started watching the DVD version that came out last week.

The Little House cast left the flu in Madison, WI., hopefully or maybe the “bug” got confused by the shift from Fahrenheit to Celsius temperature readings. It’s been below zero all week but when you convert it to Fahrenheit it’s really more like home. But the wind here whipping off Lake Superior is more like you experience in Chicago. I’ve not lived in that city for nearly 40 years, but I can still remember the cold winds from Lake Michigan. Brrr!

Yesterday (Monday) was an off day for the cast and crew. Some of us went to the Bata Shoe Museum, which may not sound every exciting, but even Taylor thought it was. Footwear on display ranges from Chinese bound foot shoes and ancient Egyptian sandals to chestnut-crushing clogs and glamorous platforms. Over 4,500 years of history and a collection of 20th-century celebrity shoes are reflected in the semi-permanent exhibition.

The 2009 Winter Olympic Games are just around the corner and one exhibit featured athletic shoes donated by past Canadian Olympic champions from years ago. It was interesting to see how footwear design has progressed over the years. The kids found the Olympic Wii game, they could try out, to be interesting too.

My picture album that accompanies this edition of my Blog gives you a better view of some of the exhibits, but we had a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to see the extremely rare 15th and 16th century artifacts, “On a Pedestal: From Renaissance Chopines to Baroque Heels.” If some women today complaint that shoe heels might be too high for walking, they should take a look at the outrageous platform chopine and its replacement, the high heel. Even men of the day wore some of these too. One nobleman was said to own, 1,300 pairs of shoes but only 7 pairs of underwear—guess his priorities were twisted somewhat.

Check out my picture album at:

http://www.kodakgallery.com/gallery/creativeapps/slideShow/Main.jsp?token=259804832803%3A116889370

This Friday, the kids will tour the Royal Ontario Museum (the ROM), we got a glimpse of it yesterday walking back (or hiking back) to our hotel. It was really cold and windy but no one froze.

And, of course, there’ll be eight performances of Little House on the Prairie The Musical, this week iu Toronto. That part of the tour is consistent.