Article: The Four Faces of Pam | Vancouver magazine
Roles: Writer, researcher,
This 1996 article on dating through personal ads has stuck around longer than anything else I’ve written, thanks mainly to Alex Waterhouse-Hayward’s brilliant photos of my personal-ad personae: Physical Me, Active Me, Spiritual Me, and Basic Me.
For Spiritual Me, he asked me to channel the hippies of my youth. I found that pretty easy. For Basic Me, he said, “I want you to look so smart that men’s testicles shrink up into their throats.” I found that pretty easy too.
Listicle: Here and Away: Obesity | The Grapevine (Nova Scotia)
Roles: Writer, researcher, editor, proofreader
My column Here and Away appeared in every issue of The Grapevine for a couple of years. It gave statistics for Canadian provinces and other regions of the world on such topics as income, life expectancy, fracking, happiness, and smoking regulations.
“Nova Scotia: 37.5% overweight; 23.7% obese; 2.3% morbidly obese. Overweight/obese rate: 63.5%.
Newfoundland: 41.8% overweight; 27.7% obese; 2.6% morbidly obese. Overweight/obese rate: 72.1%.
Ontario: 33.7% overweight; 18.4% obese; 1.7% morbidly obese. Overweight/obese rate: 53.8%.
BC: 31.3% overweight; 14.5% obese; 1.2% morbidly obese. Overweight/obese rate: 47%.
West Virginia: 37.2% overweight; 20.8% obese; 4.2% morbidly obese. Overweight/obese rate: 69.3%.
California: 36.5% overweight; 14.6% obese; 3% morbidly obese. Overweight/obese rate: 54.1%.
Scotland: 37.2% overweight; 27.1% obese. Overweight/obese rate: 64.3%.”
“1980: Already entering a decade-long decline, blondness suffers another setback when Parisian fashion dictators declare the season’s most desirable hair to be ‘generally the kind of red that goes with near-transparent skin and sea-green eyes.’
1984: Though blond perms are practically de rigueur among the leg-warmered aerobics set, red remains the classy choice, with ‘gel hair blush’ and cellophanes allowing even dark brunettes to acquire that coveted burgundy hue.”
Chart: The Curve of Time: Blondness | The Vancouver Sun
Roles: Writer, researcher
My weekly “Curve of Time” column for the Mix section of the Vancouver Sun noted key points on the timeline for every topic from anti-monarchy sentiment to cougar attacks, from Academy Awards snubs to child abductions, from racism to…blondness.
The random topics stemmed from equally random brainstorming sessions with my Mix editor, Jim Sutherland. “All is not right in the animal world,” he mused during one. “Why don’t you do something on that?” It became a Curve of Time on animal epidemics, a topic I ended up asking my students to write on throughout my university teaching career. Why he thought there would be any substantial body of work on the topic of blond hair is anybody’s guess–but he turned out to be right. Bonus: My use of the word “lissotrichous” landed me on Wordsmith’s Word of the Day website.
Travel article: Maui | Vancouver magazine
Roles: Writer, researcher, traveller
The first file went astray, so I wrote this mostly from memory, half a year later. Fortunately, Maui is memorable.
“All the rooms at the Mahana at Kaanapali have an ocean view and come equipped with everything from steak knives to vacuum cleaners. Buy a loaf of sourdough, a tub of Haleakala Farms sweet whipped butter, and a pineapple—cored and peeled—from the Cannery Mall Safeway. Then breakfast on your balcony while watching surfers catch the morning waves. You’ll save a fortune on pineapple alone: a whole tub is $3, while a small wedge at a restaurant can cost upwards of $8.”
“If Biloxi Blues has a point, it is left unsharpened. After about an hour and a half of funny lines, the movie wraps up with a lame narration that includes the statement that life is weird sometimes. ‘When it comes down to it,’ Eugene summarizes, ‘the only action we saw was up in the hooker’s room.’ Yeah, and we only got to see it from the waist up.”
Movie reviews | The Georgia Straight
Role: Writer
Reviewing movies for the Georgia Straight (Vancouver) was my first steady writing gig and is still my favourite. As the resident middle-brow critic, I got sent to 3-4 mainstream movies a week, and I found it exhilarating to watch them knowing that my opinions and analyses would be read by tens of thousands of people.
Along the way, I reviewed quite a few high-profile movies, such as Pretty Woman and Total Recall, and many more that nobody had heard of even at the time, such as the Whoopi Goldberg starrer Eddie and Kiefer Sutherland’s directorial debut, Truth or Consequences, New Mexico—a movie so bad that I spent my two hours with mouth agape, wondering how I would ever capture its sheer awfulness.
Pamela Swanigan portfolio 