Posts with the broadcasting tag

Barris Beat

The first time

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Actor Cathy Wallace granted a first professional interview. 1968.

We sat backstage at the Playhouse Theatre in Toronto. A few years earlier, we’d attended the same high school, but by the time we met professionally 57 years ago, actor Cathy Wallace had trained at the Banff School of Fine Arts and appeared off-Broadway in Bye Bye Birdie and in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. And she was my first-ever professional interviewee. I pressed the record button on my reel-to-reel tape recorder and asked an obvious question.

“How do you feel about playing Lucy in an off-Broadway show?”

“It just goes to show that producers can’t resist a pretty face,” she quipped. Any tension I felt evaporated, and we were off on a fun chat. (more…)

Barris Beat

The crisis is real on campus

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Dr. Craig Stephenson, president of Centennial College since August 2019.

The president contacted me this week. No, not that president. He’s an administrator of a large Toronto-area college. He addressed me by my first name, which caught my attention. Then, he offered some reflections on the pandemic, its impact on teaching, on learning and most assuredly on budgets. I sensed it was a pitch letter. But he wasn’t pitching me about hisbudget. He spoke about students’ budgets, or lack of them.

“It’s the beginning of a new order,” Craig Stephenson, president of Centennial College, said in a note, “full of uncertainty for our students…” (more…)

Barris Beat

Bowing to young leaders

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Monte Winter announcing he’ll be stepping down after 32 years’ service in Ontario Legislature. Toronto Star

A few weeks ago, I read a story about the end of an era. A man who’d come from a family-run gourmet meat business and then had been elected to the Ontario Legislature in 1985, was stepping down. Monte Kwinter had served his constituents in the riding of York Centre for 32 years, but now he was retiring. The Toronto Star’s Robert Benzie asked the former solicitor general about his decision to leave.

“I am proud of what we accomplished during that time in my riding,” Kwinter told Benzie. But then the 86-year-old Member of Provincial Parliament added something I didn’t expect when he said:

“It’s time to turn over the reins to a new generation.” (more…)