*The Toronto Star* published this story after AvCon07 - in the newspaper
there were also three large photographs, that do not appear on the web
site artivle _http://www.thestar.com/article/241508_
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ROAD TO AVONLEA
TheStar.com - entertainment - Fans still follow Road to Avonlea
Fans still follow Road to Avonlea

TheStar.com - entertainment - Fans still follow Road to Avonlea
Jul 31, 2007 04:30 AM
Philip Marchand
entertainment columnist

Driving past the towers of Jane and Finch, one takes a right turn into
the 1800s. Tucked away behind those towers is Black Creek Pioneer
Village, a replica of rural old-time Ontario. What better place to hold
a convention of fans of /The Road to Avonlea/, a TV series celebrating
rural old-time Prince Edward Island?

It was called AvCon 2007, the third such convention, held every two
years. Ninety people had registered for it. On Saturday afternoon, about
60 participants -- more than two-thirds from the United States -- sat in
the Garfield Weston Theatre in the Visitor's Centre listening to Ian
Clark, an actor who played the character Simon Tremayne.

The series, created by Kevin Sullivan based on the books of L.M.
Montgomery (also his source for his /Anne of Green Gables /miniseries)
debuted in 1990 and lasted seven seasons.

Clark was talking about an episode titled "Hearts and Flowers," first
aired in the show's fourth season. He called it a "madcap" episode. It
featured a dead parrot, a hotel dance and the spinster schoolteacher
Hetty King (played by Jackie Burroughs). A young woman in the audience
raised her hand. "I have a question about that episode," she said. "When
Hetty picks up the parrot, why does her hand turn green?'

Clark was flummoxed. "Really?" he said. "Uh, you know, it might be ... "
Finally he confessed he hadn't noticed Hetty's green hand.

Afterwards I talked to the questioner, a 24-year-old from San
Bernardino, Calif., named Nafissa Thompson-Spires. She is doing her
doctoral dissertation at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., on
the subject of Canadian television exported to the U.S. She was also a
serious fan of /Avonlea/.

"I saw it on the Disney Channel when I was a kid and then I bought the
DVDs as an adult," she said. "I grew up loving Sarah Polley (a.k.a Sara
Stanley) and I really wanted to be her when I was young. I just love the
family values. It's a show where you don't expect anybody bad to be in it."

The theme of family values kept coming up. After John Welsman, who
composed the music for the series, talked about the "gentle, old-time"
quality of that music, a woman named Angel Willoughby, 31, there with
her family from Brooklyn, Ont., thanked him for his work. "It's an
escape. Today in the world there's so much garbage going on, and when
you play that music it brings back a time of innocence."

Most moving was the testimony of a special education teacher named Jean
Grant, 57, from Queensbury, N.Y. Many of her students were emotionally
troubled children, veterans of foster homes. They loved the series. She
told actor Michael Mahonen his character, an orphan named Gus Pike, was
a particular inspiration to one young man .

"Watching Gus, there was something good for him to connect to, a role
model," she said.

The next morning, an auction was held in an auditorium of the Royal
Ontario Museum. An overcoat worn by character Jasper Dale went for $300
toNewmarket's Barb Watts, 52. "I have no idea," she said, when asked
what she would do with it. "I bought it because I went to school with
Mag Ruffman (a.k.a. Olivia King)."

Later, the audience heard from Sullivan. He talked about various
episodes, including one titled "A Dark and Stormy Night," that opened
with Christopher Reeve riding a galloping horse, just a few months
before a riding accident left him paralyzed. But that wasn't the point
of showing the clip. The point was that the episode was a parody of
19th-century melodrama.

"We went out of our way to make /Avonlea/ tongue in cheek," Sullivan
told his audience. "It was an overriding concern of the writers and
myself that the show not become too sentimental or sappy."

The irony of /Avonlea/ was worn lightly, however/. /It did not shake the
sense, entertained by the participants of AvCon 2007, that the actors
themselves were as basically good-hearted and innocent as the characters
they played.

Kitty Hadley from Peterborough, N.H., discussed an episode titled "How
Kissing Was Discovered" that might have raised eyebrows because one
kisser, Mahonen, was 26 years old at the time and the other kisser, Gema
Zamprogna (Felicity King) was 13.

"He actually kissed her on the cheek," Hadley said. "He said he was very
much aware of the time period and the fact that in real life she was
only 13 and he was 26, so he was being extremely careful that no part of
him touched her."

"There was a real family that was on the set playing all those parts,"
Sullivan said. "It was a magic time when everyone really was related to
each other, and they felt as strongly about each other as they were on
screen."



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