Rose's Cantina

These celebrities were born on my birthday, July 2nd. What else do we have in common? Larry David is a whiner, a cheat, a fibber. Check, check, check. Jerry Hall has had a mountain of plastic surgery. I've had Botox. I think I bought a Pierre Cardin blouse once. I definitely bought Scott one of his ties. Yep. Been there. Done that. Got the App. Trust me Lins, eventually everyone smartens up. Happy birthday weekend to all the Cancers. Thinking about you, Di. I think Camilla is an ugly bitchin' hoe, too.

On Sunday, Canadians everywhere will be celebrating this nation's birthday. Or will it be on Monday? Nobody is really sure. I'll be celebrating on Monday, as it is the official holiday and my 56th birthday. I've invited the usual suspects to dine, dance and puke in my rose garden. Actually, nobody pukes anymore and I no longer have a rose garden. Mostly, people will eat what we put out. I always try to do something different and, this year, I'm going to make banana splits and watermelon margaritas. We'll throw in a few sliders, sausages and grilled dog meat. We have a couple of dead dogs in the freezer; we'll just cook 'em up and see if anybody notices. We'll tell everybody it's moosemeat. Seriously, before anyone rats me out to PETA, do you think I would ever do such a thing? NEVER! Unless I was in a plane crash and a pack of Huskies came along and I hadn't eaten for days. Even then. I'd probably eat the pilot first. I digres...

I am an idiot. I burned myself this morning because I hadn't secured the lid on my gigantic kettle and the damned thing steamed me like a salmon filet. My knuckles are the color of said salmon filet. Nuts, nuts, nuts. That's what I get for staying up late to watch a three-hour movie made in 1970. It was the disaster movie, Airport; it had no special effects and the writing was over-the-top, but it was still fabulous. Thanks to Helen Hayes who stole the whole bloody picture. Of course, Airport wouldn't happen in this day and age. When was the last time you saw unionized airport slugs digging a plane out of a snowbank? Never. They prefer to leave you sitting on the tarmac until the snow eventually melts. When was the last time a 30 year veteran security guy "just had a feeling" that a guy might have something in that briefcase? The goons they hire at security today are too busy confiscating your hand sanitizer to spot the real criminals and looney-tunes....

Imagine if a Canadian cabinet minister responded to questions by a journalist by calling her a bitch on Twitter. I would hope that cabinet minister would do more than just say, "sorry, my bad". I'm sure the cabinet minister would be forced to apologize to the journalist in the House of Commons. That's the very least the cabinet minister should do. The cabinet minister should be a) censured and b) fired. Now, I'm not saying that King Stephen would do the right thing by firing the asshole, but I'm sure there would be some kind of punishment. Not, apparently, for Senator Patrick Brazeau who is getting away scott-free for his unprofessional and sexist behavior on Twitter. From what I hear, Brazeau gets rewarded every time he does something inappropriate such as turning his former office into a speakeasy and acting like Don Draper. What happened when he was run out of his big chief job? He got a Senate post. What are his qualifications to be in the Canad...

Nora Ephron came of age in the 60s when women were burning their bras and forming angry moshpits to fight for equality and justice. It was a hard time to be a female journalist. Against their better judgment, Gloria Steinem and Barbara Walters were forced into bunnysuits to do "investigative" work at Playboy clubs. Most others had their work relegated to the women's section, writing about fashion and recipes. Nora took her work another way. She broke into the magazine business, a place that was friendly to women writers, where she churned out softball pieces about women struggling to have it all. And yet, she decided to take the traditional route, leaving her beloved New York for Washington to play "wife of" to Carl Bernstein, a man of high morals professionally but gutter values when it came to his family. Carl could have been the inspiration for Don Draper on Mad Men . But Nora was no Betty Draper. She left her philandering h...

I was thinking about my mother today, as I often do on the cusp of a birthday. It's a way I have of marking time, examining my own life against another's benchmarks. When my mother Vera was the age I will be on July 2nd -- 56-years-old -- she was working in a sweltering factory in St. Catharines making fine knit sweaters for the well-to-do. There was no air conditioning at Warren Knit, which had its factory above the shops on St. Paul Street, the main drag of my home town. Often, the temperature would reach into the 40s, an unimaginable working condition for a woman nearing her third act. Vera also worked shift work, which added stress to her already over-loaded system. But she never complained, just came home and downed about six beers and smoked a pack of cigarettes; maybe she'd watch a bit of television. By the time she reached 56, the heavy and difficult job was taking its toll. Vera had a hard time walking the few blocks to the bus and her back was in ruins, t...

I love to watch the shape of my face change. Since I've been working out and worshipping Harley Pasternak, I've managed to lose the "second face". That's the doughy rim that coats your real face and makes you look like a Beef Wellie. I've also lost my Joe Clark jowls, the ones that gather like little croissants around the sides of the chin. For years I thought I had a fat face. It was just my second face. Now I'm an oval. Which means that, hopefully, the damned hairdressers will stop trying to give me hairstyles that "frame my face". Maybe I'll even cut my hair short for the first time in a decade. No, that won't happen. Unfortunately, I haven't lost my boobs and that means the long hair is here to stay to bridge the distance between my mams and my pinhead. The other thing that's happened is that I've lost weight in some pretty exotic places. Generally speaking the gut has been transformed from two loaves of bread to...