LAC - no heat, but enlightening

Posted at LAC last evening when I arrived for the Ottawa Book Awards was a notice:

"Due to an incident at the Cliff Street central heating and cooling plant, which provides heating and hot water to government facilities along Wellington Street, the facility at 395 Wellington is without heating and hot water for the time being. The delay for heat and hot water to return is not known at this time. More information will be provided to you when available."

The notice is also posted prominently on the LAC web site. Congratulations to the person(s) responsible for getting the notice up on the web promptly.

Whatever heat was lacking from the HVAC system was more than compensated by the body heat of the people crammed into Room A for the awards.

There were several historical books nominated in the English non-fiction category, but it was the award winner for fiction that came closest to recounting a family-history. Andrew Steinmetz's book Eva's Threepenny Theatre is described as: an usual blend of fiction and memoir that tells the story of the author's great aunt Eva who performed in the 1928 workshop production of the Bertolt Brecht's masterpiece The Threepenny Opera. Steinmetz takes the story back to Eva's childhood in Germany with her invalid mother and domineering siblings, the pronouncement of the family's Jewish origins, and her escaped to Canada.