I Was THIS Close...:

Okay, first of all, I want to say that although I do enjoy the occasional celebrity moment, I don't use that as my sole reason for going to the film festival. Honestly, some of the movies they screen are really really cool, and will probably never see the inside of a Famous Players. Like today, Howie and I saw "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised", a documentary about the military coup that happened in Venezuela last year, coincidentally on my birthday. To quote Howie, "I've never been inside a coup before...that was cool."

So, the second movie we went to see today, "Casa de los Babys", was very closely timed to the first, and so we had to hustle out of the theatre and head down the street to the other. Since we arrived later than most, we had some side seats that were not too bad. About five minutes before the film was to start, a lady came up and asked if the two seats behind us were taken, and then asked if the seat beside me was taken, and I said no. She continued up the aisle asking if other seats were free, and Howie turned to me and asked, "Isn't that Fran Drescher?" Damn right it was. If nothing else, the voice was pretty much a dead giveaway. So Fran Drescher saved the two seats behind us, and two seats that were a couple rows ahead of us, and called to her friends. One of those friends came up and happened to be Kim Cattrall. So I was sitting there, in a theatre in Toronto, with Fran Drescher behind me and Kim Cattrall in front of me. Incidentally, neither of them were in the movie we were about to see (that, I guess, is actually kind of obvious, because if they were, they wouldn't have been trying to find their own seats).

Yeah yeah, I was star-struck. I didn't say a word to either of them, but then again, I don't think anyone else did either. We Torontonians are just too cool for that. Like, two nights ago I went to see "My Life Without Me", which was a nice film dealing with dark stuff, mainly cancer and death. A young married mother finds out she's going to die in two months, and sets out to do everything to prepare, like recording birthday messages for her two young daughters until they turn 18, and finding them a new mother, and visiting her dad in jail, and having sex with another man just to see what it feels like. You know, warm fuzzy stuff. Anyway, it stars Sarah Polley and Scott Speedman, among others (like Deborah Harry!! Okay, I said that to each of my friends and none of them had heard of Blondie...honestly!!). During the question/answer period, someone asked how Sarah and Scott developed the intimacy that they displayed so well on screen. Scott was visibly embarrassed, and Sarah simply mentioned that she and Scott had gone to high school together and had been friends for a long time. My friend reminded me later that they had gone to Earl Haig, and suddenly it was like they became more familiar. Not because I had gone to that school (I didn't) or really knew anyone who went there, but just because here were two people from my hometown, who had gone to high school just like I did, and were now doing what they loved to do, and I got to see them do it. I don't know if that makes any sense at all. I guess it just further reinforces the idea that they're normal, just more well known than the rest of us.

In other news, I GOT LEAFS TICKETS! So very exciting. I'm going to see some pre-season kick-ass action against the Senators, as well as a regular season game in February against the Hurricanes. And yes, it does seem like I'm buying tickets for everything under the sun these days, but if I didn't get on board for the hockey tickets now, I wouldn't be able to see anything live for the whole season. My mother was on my case about it, especially about the hockey tickets. No doubt she still has that $300 playoff ticket fiasco firmly in her memory. But this time they are much more reasonably priced (I mean, I've got the cheapest tickets in the house). "You're buying tickets to everything all the time...why are you spending all that money??" So I have varied interests...what's wrong with that?

"The last goal he ever scored won the Leafs the cup"