In a world primed for cynicism it would be easy to dismiss a story like *Tuesdays with Morrie* as a schmaltzy softball for bleeding hearts in the same vein as the sometimes over-the-top “Chicken Soup for the Soul” series of books. However such a dismissal would be missing the true merits of the work and an opportunity to be truly moved.

I wanted to rave about *John and Beatrice*. I wanted to stand on the rooftop patio of the slick Coal Harbour highrise that houses the PAL Vancouver Theatre and shout the production’s praise to the urban folks going about their daily lives below. Just as the title character Beatrice sought a man to love, I wanted to love this piece, completely and in its entirety. But seldom do things work out as we desire.

Living in Calgary at the turn of the millennium brought me few artistic pleasures: the "Calgary Folk Festival":http://www.calgaryfolkfest.com/users/folder.asp, "One Yellow Rabbit":http://www.oyr.org/, and the "Old Trout Puppet Workshop":http://www.theoldtrouts.org/. As a globe-trotting arts lover, I felt wretchedly misplaced amongst the stripmall shopping, suburban-dwelling oil profiteers in the Texas of Canada. I clung dearly to the few cultural niches I discovered, and the Old Trouts were one of those nuggets that kept me going until I finished my degree and fled to Vancouver.

Theatre tackling the issues of the day is often referred to as ‘timely’, whereas theatre touching on themes as old and persistent as humanity itself is dubbed ‘timeless’. In those instances when the two overlap there is no single term to encapsulate the idea, but suffice to say it is a rich experience and Toronto’s "Soulpepper Theatre":http://www.soulpepper.ca/ has brought just such an experience to the stage with their production of David Mamet’s pointed signature work, *Glengarry Glen Ross*.