Short Girl Trip: Toronto, June 8 2023

Greetings from Canada, the place we all want to be from.

It’s the annual girl trip! This year it’s short and to the north. Four full days in Toronto.

Before I begin, let me just say something about the fires (which had us a little worried for a while). We truly lucked out in that somehow whatever smoke was hitting Toronto blew south and east just before we arrived. So while we haven’t had great weather, the air is fine, although a little hazy… sort of like the fog that rolls into Berkeley in the summer. We have even had some sun.

Greetings from Toronto…. (or Toronno as the locals say). A very short 4-day trip with friends
—the annual trip with all short “girls”..

As a group, we’ve traveled together (sometimes just two of us, sometimes three, and sometimes there are four or even five) to Marfa TX, Netherlands, Montreal, Detroit, DC/NY, south of France, and more); this year we selected Toronto for a variety of reasons:

• We only had 4 days
• None of us had been to Toronto in years and we knew a lot had changed
• We often try to tie trip into some arts event or festival; during the time we are here, the Luminato Festival will be in full swing
• We like to visit ethnic neighborhoods and eat good food

So Toronto checked all the boxes.

We arrived late on June 7th (Wednesday)—each of us landing at about 9 pm—and connected easily after going through customs; taxied to the hotel by 9:45 and literally ran into the hotel restaurant which turned out to be fairly good…. Or maybe we were so hungry anything edible would have tasted good.

Today, Thursday, was really Day One.
After a quick breakfast at the tiny café attached to the hotel, which appears to be totally organic, leaning toward vegan, where we had an interesting “egg toast,” we strolled to the Bata Shoe Museum. It’s an amazing collection with more than 15,000 objects covering more than 4,500 years of history from Chinese bound-foot shoes and sandals from ancient Egypt to current-day Nikes and shoes needed for different climates and different jobs and shoes that reflect changes in society and social customs. There’s some good text that gets into how technology changed the nature of footwear and also how shifts in society and customs can be traced through shoes and shoe design and manufacture. The museum has shoes from every part of the world… from silk shoes from China to fur shoes for Samurai warriors. The museum exhibits about 1,000 pairs at a time.

We stumbled upon a group of college students with their instructor at the museum. They are doing a study (with a grant from the Canadian government) on how AI and other technologies will affect the design of museums. Like them, we downloaded the QR code at one part of the exhibit and attempted to follow the instructions which would enable us to put a shoe onto our feet and see our whole body in an image wearing these rather phantasmagorical shoes. Well, we were able to download the shoes but couldn’t get further than that. But these college students whizzed through the instructions and were able to model the shoes digitally…. So lesson learned for the students: these kind of exhibits that use AI will need to have guides at the museums help visitors learn the technology!

By the time we left Bata, it was drizzling but we walked to the Gardiner Museum which was a few blocks away. The Gardiner focuses on clay and there were several interesting exhibits including one highlighting Indo-Caribbean women, along with their stories. We tried to grab lunch at the restaurant but without reservations it was impossible.

Then we headed to an amazing early dinner (for me it was more like late lunch, given my usual eating times) at Canoe which is located on the 54th floor of the TD Bank Tower with spectacular views of the whole city—but we did need to contend with the minimal visibility. Anyway, the food was incredible and very upscale. We opted for the a la carte menu and shared two starters (scallop en croute—a huge scallop in the shell which was cooked with some pancetta, celeriac rémoulade, chanterelles, lobster oil, and sea lettuce—and had a sort of flaky and delicious “bread” which “resealed” the shell; and a venison tartare that came with roasted asparagus and pickled shallots, and probably some other stuff) and two main courses (halibut with asparagus and some kind of very whipped potatoes that had some apple puree, I think, and crispy onions). We were headed to the theater after this early dinner but managed to squeeze in a quick dessert: a sort of decomposed rhubarb cheesecake… and of course some nice wine.

Well-fortified, we headed to the St Lawrence Center to see “Treemonisha” which was staged in conjunction with the Luminato Festival. It’s an opera written from notes and music by Scott Joplin and is one of the few pieces completed soon after the abolition of slavery. But Joplin died before finishing it and thus it was completed by someone else. It fuses European classical music with ragtime, folk, and gospel which really makes for a wonderfully distinct score and also has a woman lead character who winds up being chosen to lead the community–definitely Joplin was a feminist and ahead of his time.

It’s an all-Black cast and orchestral ensemble (apparently a first for Canadian opera). The story takes place in 1884 on a former slave plantation in an isolated forest, somewhere between Texarkana, Texas (Joplin’s childhood town) and the Red River in Arkansas. “Treemonisha” is a young freedwoman. The opera was largely unknown before its first performance in 1972 (seven decades after Joplin wrote it). The story is very touching as it tells of Treemonisha, who is about to be married but discovers on her wedding day that she was not the birth daughter of her upscale freed parents and runs away (or is kidnapped, depending on your interpretation) to seek the band of “conjurers” of which her birth mother was a part (but had died soon after giving birth). To cut to the chase, she eventually brings the two groups of African cultures (the Maroons who live in the forest and the Freedmen) together—clearly a revolutionary idea that this would be done by a woman and is anointed the title “leader.”

It was beautifully staged and performed and I’d recommend it to you if you happen to be lucky enough to see it listed somewhere.
We then walked back to our hotel, which brought our steps for the day to nearly 18,000….and I’m sure I will feel it tomorrow.

Best—
Fern