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 11 Glenmount Park Road

Toronto, Canada M4E 2M8

December 2019

Dear Family and Friends,

Snowflakes this morning accompany our annual wrap up of the year and our greetings to each of you. You are in our thoughts wherever you are and however you are celebrating family, downtime, Christmas, holidays, special treats, the new year…

We have to call 2019 Andy’s year. He spent the first half actively engaged in his mission at Theatre Passe Muraille, establishing a Trust Fund to promote his passion for supporting emerging Canadian playwrights, and wrapping up his 12 years as Artistic Director there. He executed the transition to his successor with grace and presented her with the keys to the theatre in a fitting Moment at the end of July. (photo)

At retirement, Andy is honoured to have contributed 43 years to theatre, much of that time in promoting new Canadian work. He’s not finished! Next on the list is consulting work aimed at improving the institutional health of theatres both locally and nationally, establishing www.andymckim.com and writing a book about audition technique. 

And…taking two National Geographic trips-of-a-lifetime. The second one is scheduled next year, to  the Orkneys and Northern Scotland. The first took place in September. He went to Portugal, northern Spain and southern France. In that time he went into (photo)

Meanwhile, I continue in the Urgent Action coordinator position at Amnesty International Canada, probably for another full year. Check www.amnesty.ca/urgentaction if you’re interested. At the moment, I’m also engaged in Write for Rights 2019 as the person responsible for the cases at www.writeathon.ca. Activists in over 150 countries are participating in this, the world’s largest human rights event which we mark on or around December 10, International Human Rights Day. In Canada, we have writers in 1500 homes, 75 schools, 30 workplaces and 302 community events all pressing 10 governments to improve the human rights situation of 10 individuals or communities. Last year, our global total was 5.9 million! Feel free to join in, wherever you are in the world, any time before mid-January.

Robin’s had another up-and-down year at work selling high efficiency lighting for large installations like factories, recycling plants and parking garages. One bonus is that, although most of his work is focused on southern Ontario, his business trips take him to points in the US, Canada and this year, Hong Kong too. We are fortunate that he lives on the waterfront here in Toronto and that we get to share his life more easily than if he were remote.

Our breaks from work were undoubted highlights. The three of us returned to Kipawa for a glorious off-grid week together with some great friends in August. This is a photo of our cabin on the Kipawa River as it joyfully skips over rocks to enter the Ottawa River. We learned this summer that this very shot is on one version of Canada’s new $10 bills! (photo)

Andy and I also took a week in November to discover a city neither of us had visited: Washington. We stayed with friends Andy had met on his National Geographic tour who ably facilitated our acquaintance with all the sites. One of our favourites is the memorial to Franklin D Roosevelt https://www.nps.gov/frde/index.htm which includes Eleanor Roosevelt too, a prime author (along with New Brunswicker John Peters Humphrey) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We also enjoyed the Martin Luther King memorial https://www.nps.gov/mlkm/index.htm and the story of Stevie Wonder’s visit. He wanted to feel the face of the statue and asked for a scissor lift. It took 6 hours to arrive. As he set foot back on the ground, he wrote a cheque for $100,000. “You may have this to enable anyone else who wishes to feel the face of Martin Luther King” he said, “provided it never takes as long for them as it did for me.” One can now order and get a lift within an hour J

From our house to yours, we wish you “Many merry Christmases, friendships, great accumulations of cheerful recollections and affection on earth.” – Charles Dickens