Celebrity encounter

I've been a Todd Haynes fan since Poison. I was living under a rock when Velvet Goldmine came out, and didn't see it until two years ago, when I bought the DVD.  I watched it... more times than I can recall, and soaked my head in the soundtrack.

As I was going through this obsession, every day on my way to work I'd pass a commercial real estate sign with an agent's name: Kurt Love.

Kurt Love.

Every time I read that sign, the name reverberated in my head, in Toni Collette's voice. This, generally, as I'd be listening to the soundtrack. I'd say it to myself, dramatically: "Kurt Love."

What a cheeseball.

So a couple of months later I was with a group of people evaluating office space.  We went to some boring glass cube perched on the empty plains of Siberia^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Mississauga to look at another spray of veal-fattening pens in neutral corporate-approved colours, sniff the washrooms, and pretend that any of this mattered, as the only important criteria were the price and that it have enough parking to encourage and abet the continued slow suicide of our civilization. We met with the suits (corporate real estate agents still dress up), and one stuck his hand out at me. "Kurt Love."

I froze. I swear, the sound cue actually went off in my head: the intro to "T.V. Eye".  I gaped. He didn't look like Ewan McGregor.

Somehow, after a subjective decade of embarrassed paralysis, I recovered enough to blurt out my own name and shake his hand. But I couldn't stop staring at him, like he was a major celebrity that I ran into at Costco.  The only thing I could think of to say to the man was "are you really Kurt Love?"  Thankfully, I was able to exercise restraint.