From “The One With the East German Laundry Detergent”:
Chandler: So… Saturday night, the big night. Date night. Saturday night, Sa-tur-day night!
Joey: No plans, huh?
Chandler: Not a one.
My mom and brother came up on Friday night, since my mom’s birthday had been earlier in the week. We took her to Wayne Gretzky’s for dinner. We had intended to leave the house for 5:30, but were a little late getting out the door. Lucky for me, since the phone rang at about 5:35 and it was saxman. So I high-tailed it to Tamara’s room, where there’s a private phone, and we chatted for a few minutes, until he asked what I was doing Saturday night. I had tickets to see Coldplay, and I was really hoping he would call before Saturday so I could invite him to come with me. So I did, and he agreed to come along. We decided to meet at 7:00 in front of Union Station.
I drove Mom there around 5:30 on Saturday to catch her train back to Cobourg (where saxman is from…), and I had planned to just hang out downtown until meeting up with him, and it’s a good thing I had loads of time because I left the tickets at home. So I dropped off Mom and zoomed back home, picked up the tickets, and killed about a half an hour before leaving again.
I parked near the Air Canada Centre, and walked up to the front of Union. saxman was there already, early, (drinking a hazelnut coffee, which, as you all know, is my favourite), and we went over to Casey’s on Front Street and grabbed a beer before the concert. He has great ship stories to tell, and is so animated when he tells them.
A band called “Ash” opened for Coldplay, but I didn’t really care to get to see their set so much. So we left Casey’s at about 8 and made our way to the ACC. Caught the last 10 minutes of Ash’s set, and then there was about 45 minutes of setup to sit through before Coldplay came on, so we just chatted some more. The concert was amazing, I’m so loving this band these days (listening to them right now). The only thing that sucks about going to concerts is when you really want to hear the band play a particular song and they don’t perform it. (That happened when I went to see DMB earlier this year, too.) Oh, well, it was still an awesome show. It was over around 10:30, and saxman asked what I wanted to do next. It was nice, because it wasn’t even like, “Do you want to do something now?” but rather, “What are we going to do now?”
So we hopped in the car and tried to get over to the Starbuck’s at Queen and John but finding a parking spot down there is impossible on the best of days so we ended up going a little further west, to another Starbuck’s. That one closed five minutes before our arrival so we walked to a Second Cup, grabbed a coffee, and went for a walk, over to Spadina, up to College, and then sat on a bench outside of a church on College Street talking for a good while. Walked back to the car, and then I drove him home. I invited him for dinner this week and we settled on Thursday night. It was such a great night, it is so cool that this is going so well after a summer of “what ifs”. Date night rocks.
