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“Mom, Dad, can I use the car?” Oh, the countless times I posed the question during my teenage years. The response, inevitably: “For what?” On this occasion, I thought the right thing to do was to tell them: “I’m going skydiving.” When my mother’s response was in Italian—“Che?”—I already knew the answer: there was no way I could take the car.

It was my first year at UBC. A new school, a new chapter, and so why not a new adventure? At club days on campus, I signed up for skydiving. The meeting point for that first jump was at a landing strip far east of Vancouver. If I planned on continuing to live under my parents’ roof, I wasn’t taking the car. Public transport proved challenging at such an early hour, but through the combination of foot, bus, boat, and even a random act of kindness when a stranger drove me to the airstrip in the middle of nowhere, I made it.

To this day, I am unable to adequately describe the sensation I experienced while free-falling. If you have the stomach for it, skydiving should definitely be on your list of things to do in your lifetime. I have experienced various degrees of that euphoria in my pursuit of adventure over the 30-plus years since, and although not all acts are as heart pumping as a Red Bull-sponsored event, something as low key as finishing a great piece of writing can enthrall all the same.

NUVO editor Claudia Cusano.

I had the pleasure of spending time with Francis Kurkdjian, the perfume creation director at Dior on a recent trip to Paris. The story “The Perfumer” begins on page 66. In the world of perfumes, Kurkdjian is as famous as the scent in the bottles he fills. He has created blockbusters for the world’s best brands, and in a career that has spanned 30 years creating fragrances that hit the right notes, he attributes his continued inspiration to a basic principle: “You have to seek. Inspiration is the result of the questions you ask to yourself or to someone else.”

We editors are continually seeking talent to showcase. For this spring edition, Issue 104, Adam DiMarco is our cover star, and like the title of the story, which begins on page 74, DiMarco is done playing the nice guy. Since The White Lotus, the floodgates of opportunity have opened, and the homegrown actor is “getting to experiment with a bunch of genres or forms,” including the dropping of an EP under the moniker Good One, an alt-pop project he started with his friend. The work of Valero Doval captivates in “A Case for Asymmetry,” which highlights the subset of watches that delight with their asymmetry and we are kicking it up a notch with a new wave of romantic fashion for spring in “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” commencing on page 90. There are plenty more reading adventures in this issue, and if you need a partner for tandem skydiving, count me in.

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