Taking flight
There was a nice article titled "AA helps many souls take flight" (you can use 'nobody@coldmail.com' with password 'mugsgame' to log in) in the Toronto Star last Tuesday about this coming weekend's AA International Convention there:
Aerodynamically speaking, bumblebees are said to be incapable of flight. By any reasonable standard, the world conference being held in Toronto on Canada Day weekend should be equally impossible.

Alcoholics. About 50,000 of them. Folks who couldn't be trusted to bring home the pay packet running a multi-million-dollar undertaking. Folks who could scarcely get themselves to work organizing one of the biggest conferences in this town's history. Folks who once thought only of themselves volunteering to get things ready for visitors from all over the world. And doing it all without dues or fees or fundraising campaigns or leaders or much of an organization at all.

Who could be blamed for saying that, in a logical world, it should never get off the ground?

Yet there will be alcoholics enough in Toronto to fill the Rogers Centre until it runneth over (three times, in fact). And, touch wood, there won't be a lampshade, impaired charge or bouncer-issued black eye to be seen. For they will be (or most of them anyway) as sober as the judges who used to lock them up. As sober, in fact, as the judges who will certainly be in their number. Along with butchers, bakers, candlestick makers — and people in any other line of work you care to name.

The conference, to mark the 70th anniversary of Alcoholics Anonymous, will more or less be a rolling series of AA meetings. In that sense, it might be one of the larger storytelling festivals Toronto's ever had. For what an AA meeting is, at its core, is the telling of tales....