You’d be well offside dating kid’s sports coach

DEAR MISS LONELYHEARTS: My recently widowed mother, who’s a former advertising exec from Toronto, invited herself to visit me for a whole month recently — a 28-day sentence. I left Toronto to get away from her, because she befriended all my friends in high school and college.

Anyway, I gamely staged a little party for her at a restaurant, so she’d meet a few people. My friends loved her! She got them playing a mixer game, and everybody had fun.

But then, she went too far. She actually took down some of my girlfriends’ phone numbers on a little list and jotted a couple words on what they liked to do — like the super saleswoman she is. The next day she made lunch and touristy dates, for when I was at work.

A few days later one of them called me and finally spoke the words I didn’t want to hear: “Your mother is more fun than you are!” I blew up! I said back to her, “Well then, how come she had to leave Toronto and come way out here to Winnipeg to steal my friends?”

DEAR MISS LONELYHEARTS: This was a stupid time to fall in lust, but it just happened with my daughter’s sports coach. I am a single dad and I had to look twice when I met this beautiful woman this month. I recognized her from back when I was in university. She’s appears ring-less — not married, I guess — which only made my hopes rise more. I used to stare at her in university, I’m embarrassed to admit. She wound up with some other guy in those days, but I take it she may be free now.

Now what? It probably isn’t cool to date your kid’s coach. I could tell she remembered me the other day and still liked me — laughing at all my little jokes. What’s my next move?

— Can’t Stop Daydreaming, St. James

Dear Daydreaming: You don’t need to know your next move until your daughter’s off this coach’s team. It wouldn’t be professional for a coach to indulge in a romance with a player’s parent. You can flirt a little, but don’t mess up everybody’s situation pushing for anything like a date during the playing season.

Support for combined approach

Re: Balanced drug blitz pays off (Oct. 14)

Your news and reporting on the positive results of co-ordinated outreach coupled with enforcement combining social, medical and police services is important progress towards a safer and healthier Winnipeg.

As is often stated and conclusively researched, the poverty, mental health, addictions and desperation of too many of our brothers and sisters on the streets is a very complex dilemma. Let’s really get behind and support these new initiatives with vigour and sustained support through this combined co-operation with front-line engagement coalition partners.

NEW YORK (AP) — A journalist and former aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has a book coming out this fall, one of the first announced releases about Zelenskyy and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

One Signal Publishers announced Wednesday that it had acquired Iuliia Mendel's “The Fight of Our Lives.” Mendel served as Zelenskyy's press secretary and spokesperson from 2019-2021 and has been sending dispatches about the war to the Washington Post. According to One Signal, a Simon & Schuster imprint, Mendel will write about everything from Zelenskyy's meetings with Soviet leader Vladimir Putin to the phone calls with then-President Donald Trump that led to his impeachment for trying to pressure Zelenskyy into investigating Joe Biden.

Mendel also will write on the “massive economic problems facing Ukraine, entrenched corrupt oligarchs in league with Russia, and — in shades of the United States’ recent federal election — the Kremlin’s repeated attacks to discredit Zelenskyy through disinformation and an army of bots and trolls,” One Signal's announcement reads in part.

Mendel, 35, has written for the Post and The New York Times among others.