John Barber, the Globe and Mail, January 1, 2011
Pierre Trudeau’s childhood boxing gloves and Diana Krall’s very grown-up Prada dress are two of the exotic items that will be sold off next month in “Artifacts and Ephemera from Notables and Luminaries,” surely the most original charity fundraiser of the season. Taking place in conjunction with the Walrus Foundation’s third annual fundraising gala in Toronto’s Distillery District on January 19, the auction is expected to raise at least $30,000 to help publish the magazine of the same name.
“There are a lot of silent auctions and a lot of galas in this town and everywhere else, and there’s a certain sameness to them,” Walrus Foundation executive director Shelley Ambrose said in an interview. “So we made a pact at the Walrus we would never have that kind of silent auction. Every year we come up with a different idea.’
In its first year, the auction sold the rights to name characters in upcoming novels. Last year, it sold messages in bottles from such prominent figures as Archbishop Desmond Tutu and businessman Richard Branson. This year, Ambrose “called every friend and favour in that I have” to create a collection of strange but desirable Canadiana divided into 30 lots.
Trudeau’s boxing gloves, given by his father to a child who described himself as “pretty puny” at the time, top the list as formative implements in the history of Canada. In the same vein, U.S. novelist and National Wrestling Hall of Fame inductee John Irving has donated the boots in which he played his favourite sport.
Now known as a popular Web cartoonist as well as being an internationally famous novelist, Margaret Atwood reached deep into her past to donate two rare silkscreen posters she made in the 1960s before publishing her first book. Other literary artifacts to be auctioned include the British sports jacket in which Mordecai Richler “ambled the streets” and presumably wrote — “a crucial finishing piece in the literary giant’s wardrobe,” according to the auctioneers.
Not to be outshone, Alice Munro donated the wig and necklace she once used to impersonate her fantasy idol — Elizabeth Taylor — at a costume party. “As you look in the mirror with this item, imagining that you have Taylor’s violet eyes, you will know that Alice Munro did the exact same thing,” the auction catalogue says.
Among the pieces of original art on sale is Joanne Tod’s Divided Touch, a reintepretation of a seminal Tom Thomson painting that was used to great effect on the cover of The Walrus’s November issue, and Douglas Coupland’s Thomson Sunset #6 from his “highly collectible” Group of Seven series.
Less distinguished but perhaps no less enticing to collectors of oddball Canadiana will be such items as the chair in which the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge once read the nightly news, marine lamps collected by photographer Edward Burtynsky from the ship-breaking beaches of Bangladesh, a hat worn by Christopher Plummer in the play Barrymore and, the oddest desirable of all, two tickets to a Maple Leafs hockey game.
Already sold out, the gala is expected to raise $250,000 for the magazine and its educational programs, according to Ambrose. “The money is very important, but what we call friend-raising is also very important,” she said. “Facebook is not enough — you have to have a big party.”
The auction is open to gala attendees only, but proxy bids can be delivered through them, according to the organizers.
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