Tad awkward? Yes. Happens to Ada at TIFF? All the friggin' time!
In my first or second year of volunteering, I worked with a guy named Ryan H at the recruitment sessions at Roy Thomson Hall. We both studied/worked in film, and one time we were chatting after a session and he wound up walking me home (I lived about a 20 min walk west of RTH then) to continue the conversation.
With all the people I'd met at the festival, coupled by not seeing him again for a year (and all the people I prob met in that time), when Ryan and I spoke again the following year I'd forgotten much of our conversations from the previous year. At one point he mentioned the location of my home and my response was one of confusion... "How do you know where I live?" (I was probably getting ready to shout "stalker!" haha ) He reminded me that he walked me home last year, and then it came back to me. Of course by then I'd already presented myself as the paranoid chick who clearly had no recollection of his courtesy and friendship. Eek.
That said, I remembered Ryan quite well from then on. We were in discussions for him to produce a project I was working on at one point, and though he didn't continue to volunteer for much longer, we did keep in touch for some years. I recall him and his roommates threw some stellar Halloween parties. :)
I don't learn from my mistakes though. A year or two later the TIFF Staff & Volunteer Party was at the Liberty Grand, there were shuttle pick ups for us from downtown, but they took forever. After the wait began to get lengthy, there were some rumblings about sharing a cab. I was up for it, as well as one other guy, but the others declined. We didn't wind up getting a cab, I didn't really want to ride alone with some strange guy anyway.
Fast forward to the next year's recruitment sessions. I began chatting with this one shit-disturbing, purposely evasive guy... I don't make him out to sound like a nice guy but he's actually very funny the way he always calls attention to strange details, or purposely redirects questions at you when he doesn't want to answer them himself. His name is Phil and over the years he's become one of my favourite people to shoot the shit with (not that we talk on the phone anymore now that he's finally learned to text).
Anyway, in one of our many conversations over the summer of 2004, the topic of the TIFF 2003 shuttle fiasco did come up... and yep, you guessed it... Phil was the guy that wanted to share the cab.
While keeping company with Phil that year, his friends came to identify me as "that Asian girl that hangs out with Phil". These friends I would get to know much better in the coming years, one of them being Darrin (whom I mentioned in yesterday's Midnight Madness tales). There are photos of Darrin and I together at a party the year before we actually became friends, how odd is that?
[There might be a photo somewhere of Ryan H and I, and the photos of Darrin and I before we knew each other definitely exist, but both require further digging to uncover. I'll put them up when I find them.]
This is Phil and I in 2012.
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