DON STEWART, a long-time performing Vancouver-based jazz musician with an unusually high octave range of 4.5, was recently made the focus of an award-nominated 2019 documentary film titled The Day Don Died. As a resident of Performing Arts Lodges Vancouver (PAL), he became both the subject and the object of a building-wide concerned message that he had unexpectedly succumbed to at least 15 possible causes of death.
The film addresses the many communications – and miscommunications – that can quickly spread in a tight-knit community. Don, however, had not died! Alive and well, and with his naturally positive outlook, he viewed the event with a sense of humour.
“It gave me another drive,” he says. “If that hadn’t happened, I’d have stayed in my comfort zone, but instead, I am now singing stronger and I appreciate the fact that I’m alive! It definitely opened me up to living life more. I’m here and I’m getting things done.”
That includes writing new songs for a fall CD release, Midnight Hour, with Vancouver’s jazz great, Miles Black.
For a link to the documentary, The Day Don Died, visit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qQkb05wVdw
LIN BENNETT, an original founder of Vancouver’s award-winning Axis Theatre and then Communications Manager at Vancouver’s Arts Club Theatre, relocated to Kingston, Ontario, when playwright husband, John Lazarus, joined Queen’s University drama department in 2001. She continued to actively work in her new theatre and arts communities, including being marketing manager for The Thousand Islands Playhouse, teaching mime and creative drama to students with developmental disabilities, and presiding over the Kingston Arts Council.
On retiring, Lin acknowledged, “I wanted to find the artist inside me; it was time to find the creative force that I was always admiring in others.”
“Art balances out the brain after all those years of strategizing, budgeting and timelines,” she says. “It necessitates more moment-to-moment living.”
Lin, through her personal painting and writing projects, consciously pulls back and slows down to “notice” and to “absorb” the flow that is now her life. “I didn’t want to be a mover or shaker anymore,” says the grandmother of several. “I want to be moved and shaken.”
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