Celebrating our Neighbours Extraordinary Stories
For our next Extraordinary Women event, Sunday, April 27, 12:30 pm at the Revue Cinema, we are going local! We will look to our own neighbourhood and to the women who have taken part in our video-making and writing projects.
They are all extraordinary with engaging stories to tell. We will be showing a selection of their videos, and you will meet some of them for our panel.
Joining us are Doris Dunne, 99, who went from processing invoices in the Junction to working in the art department for advertising giant J. Walter Thompson; Verna van Sickle, 93, who ran a record store at the corner of Cumberland and Yonge St. from the mid 1950s to 1968 when Yorkville flowered and the art scene in Toronto flourished; Elizabeth Ross, 82, the first woman to sell print ad space in New York City; Ingrid Shouldice, 79, whose early life was spent in Weston, where her family immigrated from Austria after the war and whose lives were coloured by wartime experiences; and Maureen Chicorli, 72, Doris Dunne’s daughter who had a challenging job at Maclean-Hunter and an interesting story to tell about popcorn and her first encounter with her future mother-in-law!
This event will also be an occasion to remember women who shared memories with us and who have since, to our great sadness, passed away: the incomparable Lois Broad whose story about growing up in the Junction helped shape our subsequent projects; sisters Karin and Helga who used to run the Old Country Shop on Roncesvalles; Lisette Mallet, who tells of the grinding poverty her parents and grandparents experienced on the Acadian Peninsula in New Brunswick and her move to Toronto; Ann Crichton-Harris, who was a backstage pioneer in London’s West End Theatre District; Joy Cohnstaedt, a woman of powerful intellect and commitment to social justice, whose grandfather, an immigrant from Newfoundland, helped build Sick Kids hospital; Sheila McIlraith, who shared remarkable stories of her family and the war years; Pat Ostermeier, who made a video about an extraordinary ancestor, a self-proclaimed king and saint; and Elke Schliemann, a nurse who immigrated to Toronto and settled in Roncesvalles in the 1960s.
We miss them. And we are deeply grateful to them for having spent time with us.
Their passing reminds us how important it is to reach out and capture these amazing stories, write them down or record their memories! We hope this Extraordinary Women event at the Revue will inspire you to join us in our efforts to value our personal experiences, preserve our collective history and enrich our neighbourhoods through remembering what has happened here over the years.
Tickets are simply pay what you can on Eventbrite or at the door. We hope to see you at the theatre on Sunday, April 27! To buy your ticket through Eventbrite, click here.
Our video projects are supported in part by the Government of Canada’s New Horizons for Seniors Program (NHSP).