OK, it wasn’t Bobby Thompson lining that three run homer into the seats to knock off the Dodgers in Game 3 of the 1951 playoff. It wasn’t Ken Dryden graduating from Cornell, playing six regular season games then defeating the mighty Boston Bruins in the 1971 quarter finals, it wasn’t North Carolina State defeating Phi Slamma Jamma in the 1983 NCAA Finals, but Catherine Banks won the Governor General’s Award for Drama Tuesday, for her play Bone Cage.
It was better! Those were just a bunch of dumb sports events. This was a play. Plays aren’t televised, beer companies don’t sponsor them, and gasoline companies don’t issue stamps featuring the stars of plays, which is why we know who Bobby Orr is, but Willy Loman sounds like the name of the guy your old man used to play bridge with on Friday nights.
Bravo to Catherine, for saying to helll with the nattering nabobs of negativity, and pushing forward with Bone Cage!
Slowhopes salutes you!
http://thechronicleherald.ca/ArtsLife/1090879.html
From the article Slowhopes gave us about Catherine Banks’ award, for this late-bloomer, there were three particularly hopeful points:
“Nova Scotia playwright Catherine Banks invited her Grade 8 teacher Dr. Claudia Mitchell to the Governor General’s Literary Awards announcement in Montreal Tuesday.” Yay for wonderful teachers who change our lives, and kudos to Catherine for remembering her Grade 8 mentor.
“Unable to find a producer, Banks produced the seven-character play herself in 2007 with Natasha MacLellan and Andrea Dymond of the Halifax independent theatre company Forerunner Playwright’s Coop and with Ship’s Company Theatre, Parrsboro.” Yay for persistence, and for believing in the significance and meaningfulness of your own work.
Banks, who lives in Sambro, didn’t start writing plays until she was a mother and a special education teacher in Halifax in the early 1980s and took a night course in playwriting. “The first night I started writing in dialogue I felt I’d come home. I couldn’t believe I could tell a story by just having people talk to one another.” Ah, so Catherine Banks is a bit of a late-bloomer as well