At last summer’s inaugural gala celebrating the Canadian Opera Company’s move into the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, director Richard Bradshaw, perhaps with a little mischief in mind, decided that his table would include a seating arrangement for the ages. As is customary on such occasions, somebody snapped a commemorative pic. Standing tall among the group, looking the very soul of rakish confidence—Hornblower on deck, Conrad Black. Seated below to his left, side by cozy side? Oh dear: Margaret Atwood and Barbara Amiel. As if that weren’t enough, standing behind Amiel is John Fraser, master of Massey College and one-time employee and schoolboy chum of Lord Black.

For all the thousands of words that might be expended in explaining the ironies and oddities contained in the photo, none could be quite so tempting as an effort to interpret the look on Fraser’s face. In contrast to the range of slightly self-satisfied smirks that adorn his dinner mates (with a notable exception I’ll come to in a moment), Fraser’s visage bears a look of comic horror. Think Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein.

Any number of thoughts could have sculpted his expression, and every one of them bears on his contemplation of the Lady seated below him. He might have been reflecting on the supposed strains between college contemporaries Atwood and Amiel (given Atwood’s reputed modelling of the villainess in The Robber Bride after Amiel), or the mere fact of Fraser even being in the same room as Amiel, who, it is rumoured, was responsible for his ouster as editor of Saturday Night in favour of the more reliably right-wing Ken Whyte.

For all that, I suspect the deeper motivation was Fraser’s sense, in the moment, that he was standing in for Everyman and that a sort of mock horror was the only plausible response.

But what of the Lady herself? How does she respond to the slack-jawed gawking that her presence inspires? Let’s start with her expression in the photograph. Steely and stony come to mind, but above all else, unapologetic. It’s as if she senses not just Fraser’s disapproval (comic though it might have been), but the disapproval of the collective conscience. Amiel has always been controversial, the type of columnist who relies heavily on shock value to make her political points. But in the context of her husband’s current legal battle, her writing has taken a turn for the outlandish. Her “extravagance that knows no bounds” may not do much to help her husband’s case, but in the tabloid milieu, her style is an attractive MO—one from which Maclean’s, in its new incarnation, stands to bene­fit. In tabloid speak, Amiel is a curious cross between Paris Hilton, Ariana Huffington and Imelda Marcos. In short: an upmarket circus act.