A thousand times, yes.

The arrangement is by Andy Beck of the piece as performed by Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, for S.A.TB voices a capella with optional piano, ukelele, or guitar. You can get it from EMI Feist Catalog Inc. (www.alfred.com).

Saw this in the theatre on its initial run; the place was pretty full, if I remember. It’s got great songs, the lead actors are a joy and perfect for their roles, it’s a visually stunning film to watch, and it’s vastly underrated.

Our local choir performed this version of ‘Over the Rainbow’ three years ago, and it’s really lovely. I’m not a trained singer and can just about sight-read music, and I can tell you that that decpetively simple-sounding ‘doo-do-do’ background chorus work can be a bit tricky. Mess up one sequence or chord change and…

Love, love, LOVE ‘Dream Away’, to the point that when our local theatre group did Midsummer Night’s Dream and was looking for dream-related songs to play during the intermission this was one of the songs I chose (to the bafflement of more than one person).

The film had a budget of $40 million, which was huge in those days, and only grossed $7 million, prompting Grade to say afterward ‘Raise the Titanic? It would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic.’

Last night’s episode with Ted had me crying. All the Roses have changed and grown so much as people since series one, but I’d say Alexis has changed and grown the most. Her conversation with Twyla was beautiful; Murphy is a gifted comic actress, but she also sold the heartache. And her bittersweet acknowledgement that…

Neither patrons nor barkeep were ordinary Oxfordians.

Don’t know if this counts, but I worked as background talent on an episode of series 2 of The Twilight Zone which is filming in our small British Columbia Interior town. It was huge fun, and the background people were treated fantastically.

Yes, Holmes is described in the first novel, A Study in Scarlet, as ‘an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman’. In the second novel, The Sign of the Four, Holmes talks his way around a gatekeeper who says he doesn’t know him by saying ‘Oh yes you do, McMurdo. I don’t think you can have forgotten me. Don’t…

Get Smart! was such a fantatsically funny show. I missed it by that much when it began in 1965, but picked it up pretty shortly thereafter in its final seasons, and then for several years after in repeats; no matter where I lived, Get Smart! formed part of a two-hour block of comedies that aired after school.

I went back to them about 17 years ago (20 years after first reading them) when my son was five, and read a lot of them out to him (he loved being read to and I loved doing it; he got to the point where he asked me to ‘do the accents’, which was sometimes a challenge). They held up incredibly well: the HQ in the…

She is also brilliant when it comes to ‘active listening’, which is when an actor is in a scene and has no lines but has to be engaged with what’s going on. I do a lot of local theatre (as actor and director), and know how hard it can be to pull off: either you look completely unengaged (because you’ve heard these…

After discovering/binge-watching Schitt’s Creek last fall, I can’t wait for tonight’s new episode on CBC. I have every faith the show will stick the landing; it’s been a marvel of character-building from the beginning.

I’ve seen Cats live on stage twice, and it really is an amazing experience (in a good way): the set is wonderful, the make-up and costumes are clever, a lot of the songs are catchy (the ones by/about Skimbleshanks, Bustopher Jones, and Gus the Theatre Cat are my favourites, and I love how the cast improvises a train…

My English husband, who lived in North Wales for several years, said it’s pronounced ‘lew-ed’, but a video I found had a Welsh woman pronouncing it more like ‘loy-ed’. It could be a regional accent thing.

By the time Jaws came out in 1975 (when I was 11) I had been reading Poe and classic ghost/horror stories for several years, and my mom had let me watch several classic horror films, including The Haunting, so I guess she figured I was past being traumatized by a movie about a shark.

My brother and I and our two best friends wanted to see it in 1975, when we ranged in age from 9 through 12 (I was 11). We finally wrung permission out of our parents, only to have one of our friends, who was 10, say it was going to be too scary for her, at which point our parents said none of us could go as it…

I saw it in a movie theatre a few weeks back, and I think the jaws of everyone in the audience hit the floor when ‘that moment’ came. I knew going in that at some point it transitioned from black and white to colour, but wasn’t prepared for when it happened, and the immediacy that the film suddenly gained. Yes, the…

My English husband, who lived in north Wales fro many years, suggests ‘fuckio’, adding that a lot of Welsh swear words are English words that have been slightly changed.