Michael Moore and Old Friends

At the end of a week when the Canadian Medical Association elected a president who wants to expand the role of private health care delivery, it's rather fitting that I went to see "Sicko" tonight. Michael Moore, as usual, takes the viewer on a journey that is both entertaining and enraging. Ok, so he sees universal health care, from Canada to Cuba, through rose coloured glasses, but it's the contrast with the American system he's after. What a storyteller--and humourist.

I dropped in to see Aggie this morning to return some books and we decided to go see Moore's doc together. Afterwards, we had some mint tea at Javaroma which holds open mic night on Saturdays. The son of senator NWT Nick Sibbeston was performing, while an older gentleman played his flute. It's been a week of getting together with a number of people I knew from the late 70's. After having dinner with Marie on Thursday night, I had lunch with Anne Crossman Friday. She too worked at News of the North, but left to take up various CBC posts, most recently in Inuvik where she was station manager. Now, she's living in the Valley in Nova Scotia where she edits an online newsletter called Permafrost. It's a digest of articles about the proposed Mackenzie Valley pipeline and other resource related issues. Anne came back to Yellowknife for a wedding this weekend, and this is the first we've seen each other since 1979. We met at the museum restaurant, then that night Judy and I had dinner at the Office, a dark old style restaurant with a great bison steak. It's too bad the group of us couldn't have connected at the same time--just like in the old days when we might meet at the press club, or for Women's Night Out. And then there was the time we printed up t-shirts declaring "This is Not a Wet T-shirt" to protest the wet t-shirt contests at the Explorer Hotel... I still have that shirt.

(And thanks to two of my dedicated readers, I have amended the previous sentence to read "Wet" instead of "Dry". Thank you truenorth and Eustacia Vye.)