When Heidi Janz was born, her parents were advised by doctors to put her into an institution and forget they ever had her. Thankfully, her mother didn’t listen. Today, at the age of 46, Dr. Janz is an award-winning playwright, author, researcher, PhD scholar and adjunct professor at the University of Alberta. She also has cerebral palsy. “I’m stubborn,” Janz laughs. “So if people tell me, ‘I don’t think you can do it’, I’m...
From the moment she struck a pose on the ice, just before the music began, the glint in her eyes told everyone that this was going to be a performance worth watching. Kaetlyn Osmond didn’t disappoint. With a joyous smile, an ability to make the difficult look easy and confidence well beyond her age, the 17-year old skater dazzled the crowd and, halfway through her routine, the cheering grew so loud...
In grade school, she was known as “the stuttering vampire girl.” With eye teeth that protruded from her mouth, Amanda Welliver rarely smiled. She was always picked last by her peers for sports or class activities and she walked around with her head stooped down. Her hair was once lit on fire. Another time, kids locked her up in a locker. Life was painful at home as well. Welliver’s parents were divorced and she was raised by a mother who was emotionally unavailable. She was never hugged, was given lots of chores and was told constantly that she was...
It's the biggest night of the year for Hollywood, and another big opportunity for a Sylvan Lake entrepreneur. Jodee Prouse is one of a select group invited to the Academy Awards Feb. 24th to meet celebrities and make her products available to them. She’s done the same thing at the Emmy Awards, Miss Teen USA and the Canadian Country Music Awards. She’s also participated in the Kardashian Birthday Gift Bags. “It shows you how far outside the box I am from everyone else,” says Prouse, who plans to take...
Ten years ago, Cheryl Schneider looked in the mirror and knew she had to make a change. What bothered her most wasn’t the fact she was 100 pounds overweight. It was how she was retreating into a cocoon. “I didn’t go swimming with my children because I was embarrassed,” says the mother of three. “And started saying ‘no’ to functions because I didn’t feel great about myself.” Schneider’s main psychological roadblock was her long-held belief that mothers who took care of themselves didn’t...
Danielle Campbell was in Grade 10 when she met Jim, her future brother-in-law. He was an RCMP dog handler. “More importantly was when I met his dog,” says Campbell with a grin. “I said to him, ‘Seriously. Let me get this straight. You get to play hide and seek, your partner’s a dog, you get to keep the dog and you get paid for that?’ I love dogs and I loved playing hide and seek as a child. I thought, ‘That’s the job for me!’” Campbell’s mother had other ideas. She thought police work was too...
Vivian Mushahwar was halfway through her studies as a scholarship student in electrical engineering at Utah’s Brigham Young University when she noticed something different in her homeland. As a Palestinian, she grew up under Israeli occupation, but returning to her hometown Jerusalem for the summer of 1988, the atmosphere was charged. “Every day I could smell tear gas and all kinds of things,” says Mushahwar. “And my blood pressure went up and stayed up the whole summer.” In the heat of the first major Palestinian uprising that...
Christy Morin was a newlywed when she and her husband, Darcy, bought their first home off Edmonton’s 118th Avenue. She was a recent University of Alberta drama graduate and he was still completing his degree, so a small house in a less-desirable neighbourhood was all they could afford. They planned to renovate and eventually upgrade to a better neighbourhood. But after their daughter, Allison, was born, and then their son, Zach, deals to sell kept falling though, and Morin was becoming increasingly discontent living with the stigma of the Avenue. “The...
The weather turned cold and heavy clouds threatened rain. But that didn’t deter blues music lovers, many of whom had been waiting in line since early in the morning, for prime seating. By the time the opening act belted out its first song that evening on Aug. 24, Hawrelak Park’s outdoor Heritage Amphitheatre was filled with a hearty, warmly-dressed crowd, photographers at the foot of the stage snapping shots of the musicians and people moving to the beat on the dance floor. Edmonton’s Blues Festival...
A baby robin pokes his head out of a small shoebox, looking anxiously around at foreign surroundings. He’s the first “patient” of the day at the newly-opened Wildlife Hospital in north Edmonton, brought in by a woman who took him away from neighbourhood children who were playing with him. Kim Blomme calms him with gentle strokes while she checks for injuries, then gets help feeding him formula through a narrow tube attached to a syringe. At about two weeks old, he likely fell out of the nest and, while he’s not hurt, he’s still too young to fend for himself...
