MRHS59 50TH REUNION – HOSPITALITY SUITE

photo: John Rayside
Downtown Holiday Inn, Montreal
In the Downtown Holiday Inn on Sherbrooke Street in Montreal, one of the top floors is partly taken up by an extraordinary suite: conference-cum-dining room, living room, ms bedroom (politically correct master bedroom), kitchenette, ballroom, swiming pool, and helicopter landing pad, to name just some of the facilities which it provides—and in a few cases does not provide.

Depending on who is staying in it at any particular time, it becomes the Presidential Suite, the Royal Suite, the Bridal Suite, or the empty suite.

The Mount Royal High School Class of '59 rented it for the duration of our 50th Reunion, 19th–21st June 2009. By day we called it the Hospitality Suite, and used it as our home base. It was here that classmates were registered, received their badges and yearbooks, shook hands with people they hadn't seen for half a century, gathered for coffee and other refreshments, and promised never to loose touch again.

During the night it became the Second Honeymoon Suite, where Ann (Chislett) and Bruce MacNaughton celebrated more than 40 years of married life—and the luxury of not having any children, grandchildren, dogs, cats, or goldfish to look after.

Welcoming us all with her warm smile and effervescent enthusiasm was our Hospitality Organizer Extraordinaire, Joan (Brick) Rogers, who soon made everyone feel at home— and glad that they had decided to come. Somehow she even managed to organize some fresh Fairmont bagels for breakfast on Saturday!

The Reunion Torch

Along with our badges (with names printed in LARGE letters, so that sexaginarian eyes could read them without glasses), on arrival we were each handed a copy of the fabulous Reunion Torch, which Claudia Bierman and her husband Will Graham had put together for us. Not only was it great to have during the reunion—so that we could read up on (and learn to recognize) the people we met during the reunion—but since it is based on a loose-leaf binder system, we can continue to add bios to it as they make their appearance on the MRHS59 web site.

Food For Thought

Another thing we received along with our badges was a complementary copy of The Great Warming, a documentary produced by Stonehaven Productions, a company that Mike Taylor founded in 1978 to make films about issues that matter.

This film would be on everybody's lips today if it hadn't been for one inconvenient truth: Al Gore lost the US Presidential election in 2000. As a consequence, he decided to switch the focus of his campaign machine from politics to environmental issues. In 2006, the same year that Mike released The Great Warming, the culmination of many years of preparation, Al Gore released his own film—suitably called An Inconvenient Truth.

Since there is no way that an independent Canadian film maker can compete with the PR apparatus of a former US vice-president—who came within a few hanging chads of becoming President himself—it is the latter film that most people associate with Global Warming. But not Mike's MRHS59 classmates!

You can read more about The Great Warming on Stonehaven's home page and on Wikepedia

The Rest Is Up To You

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