PTE gets $100-K donation from theatre co-founder

On eve of Folklorama, Ghana pavilion scrambles to replace stolen outfits

Volunteers from Folklorama’s Ghana pavilion scrambled to replace cultural costumes for about 40 young dancers after the outfits were stolen in Winnipeg days before the annual festival begins.

Two plastic storage bins containing the costumes, to be worn by children and teenagers, were taken from the trunk of a parked car on Banning Street, near Notre Dame Avenue in the West End, likely late Wednesday or early Thursday.

“I felt sad that this has happened. I felt completely devastated for the mother who had them in her car,” said pavilion co-ordinator Abigail Larson. “The initial feeling of sadness changed to, ‘OK, how do we make this a positive?’”

The costumes belong to the Ghana Union of Manitoba Dancers, whose members have rehearsed for months for Folklorama, which begins Sunday.

Wild weather uproots trees across city, leaves thousands in Manitoba without power

This summer’s latest barrage of severe thunderstorms caused widespread property damage and power outages for more than 30,000 Manitoba Hydro customers, mostly in Winnipeg, as winds of up to 133 km/h wreaked havoc.

Charleswood resident Ian Glover’s house had minor damage compared with a neighbour’s home, where a large, uprooted poplar tree crashed through the roof while the storm pummelled Winnipeg late Wednesday night and early Thursday.

“I opened the window after I woke up (around 6 a.m.) and the tree — oh my God,” Glover said. “I got my wife up and she couldn’t believe it. I was totally blown away. (Our neighbour) said the branch went right through the house into their living room.”

Glover was thankful his neighbours were not injured. Some of the tree’s outer branches clipped the corner of his home.

Prepare to be … blutterbunged?

Are you not blutterbunged?

If Russell Crowe’s second-century gladiator character had uttered a 19th century equivalent of “Are you not entertained?” that fit the mood of today’s 21st century, that would be it.

Definitions first. Blutterbunged is an obscure regional dialect word from England that means everything from astonished to confounded to bemused or shocked into speechlessness. Its composition suggests something both more and less, namely blustering bloviation (that’s the more part) and empty words (that’s the empty part). These days we would more naturally punctuate our reaction to an event or statement with a profanity. But you get the drift.

Unearthed by lexicologist Susie Dent, it speaks volumes about our times that it fits now. That we need to reach back hundreds of years to find the right word to adequately capture a contemporary civic reaction to what the hell is going on in politics and the world today.

On the night table: Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead

Author, Cool Machine

I’ve been reading Caroline Fraser. She has a book called Murderland about serial killers that came out last year. Her previous book, Prairie Fires, was a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder. She’s a new author for me, and I’m going through that biography now. I never read Wilder’s books, but I liked the TV show when I was a kid; it’s one of those books that’s about a person’s life, but also pulls back to get the larger cultural panorama of America, talking about frontier life and and prairie life — it’s really interesting.

Colson Whitehead will launch Cool Machine, the third book in his Harlem trilogy, on Tuesday at 7 p.m. in the Muriel Richardson Auditorium at WAG-Qaumajuq (300 Memorial Blvd.) in an event presented by McNally Robinson Booksellers.

PTE gets $100-K donation from theatre co-founder

Colin Jackson gave the Prairie Theatre Exchange audience reason to cheer before the show began Wednesday when he announced a $100,000 donation to the downtown arts organization, located since 1989 in Portage Place mall.