By Marvin Ross
This is our last blog for 2020 in what has been a horrible year . We will return in January when the roll out of vaccinations increases to slow the deaths from Covid-19. We can only hope that we can regain all that has been lost as we mourn the countless number of people who did not make it.
Science has shown that when it needs to, it can come up with a vaccine in less than a year in a process that normally takes 5-10 years if ever. There are still many infectious diseases that do not have a vaccine. Meanwhile, science is still a long way from unravelling the mysteries of serious mental illness let alone developing truly effective treatments.
We can all use a little laughter in our lives so I would like to present a one man show called Charly’s Piano for your entertainment. Charly Chiarelli is a retired social worker, and entertainer who plays a mean Blues harmonica. His show from 2019 which I saw live has just been made available on Youtube. As the description states, this is a “heartwarming true tale of how, in 1972, he was a young hippie looking for work in Toronto. He gets a job as a psychiatric assistant at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry and organizes a fundraiser to buy a piano for the patients’ lounge. Some of his quirky patients help him….”
and “He returns years later with his daughter Selina, to find that things have changed in psychiatry.”
I knew the Clarke well as about that time, I had a friend who escaped from there regularly and showed up at my apartment not to far away. Charly is a graduate of McMaster University (and two others) and was inducted into the McMaster Hall of Fame along with its other grads – Martin Short, Dave Thomas and Eugene Levy.
Enjoy and have a safe and happy holiday. See you in January.