Don’t forget the tickets …and the antidepressants

Don’t forget the tickets …and the antidepressants

As a prologue to Caryl Churchill agrarian drama Fen, patrons filing into the Rachel Browne Studio encounter a female farm worker on stage attempting to protect her crop of potatoes from a flock of noisy rooks.

To a cacophony of caws, she dashes about the stage with a wooden noisemaker until she wearies and collapses in exhaustion on the ground in defeat. The scene foreshadows the 90-minute play's grinding down of the Fenland women of rural England due to back-breaking work and crushing isolation.

Churchill, who spent a couple of weeks living with the Fen people, unearths the despair that is harvested by these exploited labourers. They are the bottom-feeders of the capitalism food chain. Call them bottom girls, the country cousins of Churchill's high-achieving Top Girls.

These '80s women work the rich soil but they don't own it or their history for that matter as the story is told by a Japanese spokesman for a multinational corporation.

Cabernet Sauvignon star of wine festival

The Winnipeg Wine Festival will celebrate the king of red wine grapes next weekend — the theme of this year’s festival, which takes place Sept. 25 and 26 at the RBC Convention Centre, is Cabernet Sauvignon.

Cab Sauv, as it’s also known, is the world’s most widely planted wine grape of any colour, first coming to prominence in the 1800s in France’s Bordeaux region, where the grape is still popular. Rather than single-variety wines, Bordeaux reds tend to be blends, with those coming from the left bank of the Gironde estuary being Cabernet-dominant, while right-bank wines are Merlot-dominant, with Cabernet Sauvignon playing a supporting role. Cabernet and Merlot work well together and many other countries have followed suit in blending the two.

A team at University of California Davis put Cabernet Sauvignon through a DNA test in 1996 and discovered its parent grapes are Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc — it’s likely that at some point the two varieties, planted next to each other in some vineyard, crossed and mutated and became the grape we know today. (Someone growing grapes in the 19th century must have had an inkling of what was up, as the grape has been called Cabernet Sauvignon since long before the DNA test.)

Flavour-wise, most Cabernet Sauvignon wines are big and bold, with a core of deep dark berry flavours, some graphite and spice notes and relatively bright acidity. It’s a grape that is well-suited to barrel aging, with most examples seeing at least some time in wood.

Former Bombers linebacker Gauthier enjoying career as electrician

Most professional football players don’t ride off into the sunset on their own terms.

Shayne Gauthier was well aware of that, but it didn’t make it sting any less when the Winnipeg Blue Bombers informed the veteran linebacker that they weren’t bringing him back for 2026.

“I was really hoping to play one more (season) because it would have been my 10th season, so, I’d say it didn’t really end the way I wanted,” Gauthier recently told the Free Press.

“It left a little sour taste in my mouth, but that’s part of pro sports. If everybody got the ending that they wanted, then it wouldn’t really work.”

Klein has burned bridges with PM, Gillingham says

One mayoral candidate accused another of writing a column so critical it could compromise his ability to work with the federal government.

Near-future U.S. the setting for surreal dual-world storyline

It’s not every day you encounter a seriously intended literary novel that attempts to dramatize a mind-bending physics theory like quantum entanglement.

But then the B.C.-born-and-raised Emily St. John Mandel is not your everyday Canadian literary writer.

In her late 40s, she has lived in the U.S. for her entire writing career. She is best known for her 2014 dystopian novel Station Eleven, about a Shakespearean acting troupe navigating a pandemic-ravaged America.

Her new outing, her seventh, Exit Party, shares DNA with detective and sci-fi genres more than with conventional literary fiction.

Serious crash at West Kildonan intersection known for collisions

Residents in West Kildonan say an intersection that was the site of a serious car crash Sunday morning is notoriously dangerous.

Rob Lick heard a loud bang around 7 a.m. and rushed out of his home on Leila to see what the commotion was. He saw two crushed SUVs, a white and black one, in the intersection. Police vehicles arrived shortly after.

“It sounded like when (garbage trucks) drop a big dumpster,” he said. “I heard somebody crying or wailing, they were standing by the vehicle so I don’t know who exactly it was or if someone was injured.”

The sound of sirens followed shortly after when emergency crews came to the scene. The intersection was immediately blocked off.