![]() I visited the place a few years back - before Leonardo DiCaprio bought it - during one of my jaunts to the California desert and it is spectacular: affording floor-to-ceiling windows that wink at the San Jacinto Mountains. In Palm Springs, meanwhile, there is the former Dinah Shore estate, a midcentury oasis designed by the legendary Donald Wexler. Prefer Jimi Hendrix? His old place in Maui - fairly quaint, with cathedral ceilings - is retreat ready. Likewise: the rustic pile in Bath - England! - where none other than Jane Austen found her muse. She was a true pound-the-pavement activist. I mean … did those other two show up in RCMP documents decades later, as Rita did? Her involvement with the feminist movement in Toronto in the ’70s brought Rita to attention of the force’s intelligence branch, as it was amazingly revealed years on. MacNeil may not have had the wider pop culture stamp of Joni Mitchell, or the chest-pounding vavoom of Céline, but in her salt-of-the-earth way she remains just as poignant. (Just this year, meanwhile, she was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame.) “Most Promising Female Vocalist,” indeed, well into the meadows of middle age. She battled all kinds of challenges.Īnd yet she was also the person who nabbed her first Juno at 42. ![]() Every bit the icon - and a gay icon, in particular, I will add - she not only sang like a lark and was synonymous with Christmas because of her televised holiday specials on the CBC, she had a personal story that made her endlessly rootable. In the garden, too - if you really wanna get your Canadiana on - there is a chair where MacNeil, who died in 2013, apparently wrote some of her most beloved songs, like “Working Man,” a haunting ode to coal miners.Īll of which got me thinking how much of a fixture the songstress was at one point in this country and how - because of generational amnesia - it might be hard for some young people to appreciate her singularness. Set on six acres, and perfectly positioned for ambitious schemes of hiking and fishing, it comes with saltwater pool outside, baby grand piano inside. I was tickled to see the other day that the Nova Scotia answer to Graceland is now a thing: an Airbnb listing dubbed (what else?) Rita’s Retreat, making posthumous use of the waterfront spread that the Canadian icon of song and, yup, First Lady of Cape Breton, called home. Do your post-double vax plans include a trip to Cape Breton? ![]()
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