The Toronto International Film Festival–Last moment
On Saturday, the last day of the Film Festival, I was walking the dog past the Park Hyatt Hotel when I spotted two young girls standing outside of the place. They couldn’t have been more than ten years old, and each one had a big camera hanging around her neck and a pad of paper and a pen in hand, ready for autographs. There was nobody else hanging around, just the two little girls, and they had positioned themselves, or been shooed away by the bellhop, so that they were out on the periphery, standing by a pillar near the street. This, of course, rendered them heartbreaking and beautiful, like a couple of hopeful kittens in the rain.
I went over and asked them how the autograph hunting had been going. They just shrugged, giving me a look that suggested I was a crazy stranger and that I should just leave them alone. For some reason, this startled, even offended me, and I pushed on. The dominant girl of the two, the shorter one, told me in a flat, economical voice that they had seen “Matt Damon, George Clooney, Nicolas Cage and Keanu Reeves.” She said this like it was no big deal.
I, however, was terribly impressed, and trying to be winning, like a cool uncle, asked them of the group, which star was the most handsome. The dominant girl screwed up her face and looked away, scowling, “ I don’t know!” I looked over at the other girl who was smiling nervously, “what about you, who did you think was the best looking?” Her eyes went blank, like she had just been asked a very difficult math question, and then blurted out, “ I don’t know, Nicolas Cage?”
It was at this point that I realized I was a creep, just some freaky stranger asking them questions about which star—who must have all seemed just as ancient as a great-grandparent to them—was cute.
Out of touch and gross.
This little epiphany, in the fading light of one of the last days of summer, was the sort of thing that might just depress a man.
