Please welcome Craig MacInnis, former Toronto Star pop culture columnist and film critic, and now Oldish’s first guest columnist.
By: Craig MacInnis
I spied this sign by a storefront on Yonge and it gave me a start, like seeing the vapour trail left by a long-vanished ghost.
Meghan, at the time of her patronage, would have been just another hard-working actress here, grinding out episodes of Suits as the dynamic paralegal Rachel Zane while renting a fine but unremarkable house in tranquil Seaton Village.
When she snarfed back her açai bowls up in the nosebleed section of Yonge (Editor's note: anything above Bloor qualifies as nosebleed, and this joint is above *Eglinton*), she hadn't yet met her prince and was probably still married to the other schlub whose name I can't be bothered to Google before my first coffee of the morning.
Likewise, she had not yet fallen afoul of Piers Morgan and all those cane-banging Union Jack-asses who quote passages from The Daily Mail like Scripture and pine for the days of herbaceous borders, sticky wickets and the drawing-room schemes of Bertie Wooster.
Also, one has to assume that she and Jessica (last name redacted) were just getting launched as professional 'besties' then and what better way to bond than going out for açai bowls after a hard day's work? I'm told (and I have impeccable sources here), that it's almost as much fun as going for matching helix piercings after coming down off a hot-yoga high.
Then again, what do I know? Maybe she went for her açai bowls after a night of pounding bottles of Tignanello with Gina Torres at Everleigh.
Toronto is a big city, a fact I was reminded of just the other week when Ben Mulroney walked across a cross-walk at St. Clair and Mt. Pleasant with his dog and neither Liza nor I shouted out the window: "Hey Ben, keep your chin up," because with a Mulroney that's a given.
For my own part, I have never been tempted to try an açai bowl but I'm fond of açai jokes, which are gradually replacing kale jokes, which have had their day.
My current favourite: "I just ate an açai bowl and now my name is Ashley and I have a fashion blog."
Seeing Meghan's small thumbs-up, to a juice bar along this featureless stretch of Yonge, reminded me of an earlier American newsmaker, also a royal consort and also widely if unfairly perceived as a throne wrecker.
"You can never be too rich or too thin," decreed the late Wallis Simpson, who would no doubt gag at the calorie-rich slurry of bananas, peanut butter and guck that Meghan ravenously spooned up during her days in Toronto. Before her life and menu changed forever.