Sony Music Canada
Edmonton Stroll of Poets
Alhambra Books
Java Jive
There are many wonderful people who Kevin and I wish to thank for this evening.
Michele Hales, who manages many of my other initiatives including
cyberNephrology, designed the original webpage and logo for Leonard Cohen Nights
and has been an important advisor for the event throughout.
Dr. Sheila Moriber Katz, my partner in the cyberMedicine joint venture,
supported the event from the beginning as a part of our effort to reach out to a
lay audience in our writings, and specifically urged me to lengthen my stay on
Hydra so I could fully take part in the June fan event there, which proved to be
very important to the later development of Leonard Cohen Nights.
Sue Stark provided the printing of the posters which was a great help to us, and
my other sons Scott and Seth did yeoman's service putting them up around town
armed with staple gun and large rolls of tape. Scott is also doing various important odd jobs tonight during the event best suited to a 16 year
old.
My wonderful wife Elaine has had many good ideas about this event. If you
like the table setups and arrangements, the flow of serving of the food etc.
then you should know that Elaine had much to do with those arrangements.
Elaine has had to put up with a lot as a consequence of this event. She
thinks of me as the biggest most unpredictable kid in our household, and Leonard
Cohen Night was just the latest in a long series of surprising and
counterintuitive husband events. You may have heard of the term
"disruptive technology" which describes many of the major advances of
the past decade. I suppose I am a sort of constant disruptive force with
continual barrage of intriguing but untested new ideas from out of nowhere, and
organizing this event has certainly increased the rate of the disruptions!
I thank her from the bottom of my heart for her patience with it all!
We would also like to thank our corporate and organizational sponsors. We
thank Dr. Victor Tron, Chair of the Department of Laboratory Medicine and
Pathology, for his support throughout and for designating this as a University
event which has been an extraordinary help to us.
We thank Sony Music Canada for their support of the Leonard Cohen Nights
initiative generally and for providing the Leonard Cohen CDs and DVDs we are
selling here tonight. Leomid the Sony Aibo Robotic Dog who many of you
have met represents Sony's highest profile product worldwide and we are happy to
have Leo with us tonight! We also thank cyberNephrolgy volunteer Judy
Tarselli for looking after Leo at the event tonight.
We thank the Edmonton Stroll of Poets for the use of their wonderful sound
system and for their promotional assistance.
We thank Alhambra Books for handling ticket sales. I would like to thank
my secretary Janice McDonald and University secretary Lynda Harrison for their
help behind the scenes and taking tickets etc. tonight.
Java Jive provided the wonderful coffee. We would also like to thank from
the bottom of our hearts our caterer Upper Crust. You should be aware that
the Montreal food this evening was flown directly from Montreal today, this is
not something we had asked for but is a wonderful added benefit to tonight's
event! And isn't the food wonderful!
We thank our performers from, afar. It is truly wonderful to have Suzanne Holland and Andrew Darbyshire here, from
San Francisco and Australia respectively. You will all be receiving a CD
of Suzanne's wonderful singing when you turn in your evaluation questionnaire.
Andrew has also brought video of the high points of his Leonard Cohen event in
Australia last week so during a part of the event you will very much feel like
you have been transported to the other side of the world! We also thank
Natalie Fuhr who is doing her own event in Victoria Sept. 26th and wrote the
"Top Ten Reasons to come to Edmonton" for our WWW page.
We would also like to thank all of you for coming here, especially those who
have traveled great distances. We have enjoyed taking part in the social events
which preceded this evening with many of you. We especially thank those of
you who know very little about Leonard Cohen but who have come to be with
friends and have a good time here. We intend that over time there will be
many more people like you attending these events to celebrate fun seeking and
Canadian culture (just as occurs with fun seeking and Scottish culture in Robert
Burn's Night). And we hope you like what you learn about Leonard Cohen
tonight.
Finally we would like to thank Leonard Cohen himself, who provided artwork for
the WWW page and has been quietly supportive. He is the reason we are here
tonight and it is a delightful thought to think of his looking at the webcast,
which is being archived. Of course we will never know when he watches it
and how often, but still it is a very nice thought!
Kim Solez, M.D.