A few years ago, your band played a show in Halifax, and a few of us flew up from Newfoundland for a few days to see it. While it wasn’t the original Lost Weekend, life doesn’t get a whole lot better than this. You know those times when you and your friends are all in the same place physically and emotionally and drunkenly, and everything is more fun than everything else, and nobody else could possibly be having a better time than you guys?
The first night starts with a casino visit, a delayed flight and a cancelled hotel room. With nowhere to go, we wander down a street and hear a party happening in an upstairs room. Under the guise of needing a corkscrew, which I guess we actually do need, we knock on the door and this guy Graham opens it. We get to talking and he invites us in for a few drinks. He takes us to the Khyber, somewhere I’d wanted to go ever since Joel Plaskett touted its iconicism years earlier. We drink warm beer from a broken fridge and dance our butts off to a band that’s playing. Then we eat some pizza on the way back to Graham’s, where we cram into his living room to sleep.
The next day the rest of our friends arrive and we bang around the city until your show. Rayfield keeps making it clear that he has the most experience at Arcade Power shows so we should do whatever he says. Hanging out behind a fence before the show, we try to guess what you’ll open with and settle on a reading of the entire Shawshank Redemption screenplay, which unfortunately doesn’t happen. There’s a video on the internet somewhere of one of the songs, with an annoyed comment, “The show was good except for this topless girl whose manfriend was peeing in a cup, like an animal.” That was us. We were having a much better time than her.
The next day we end up in a used bookstore downtown when Bridger runs up to me and urgently mentions something about Jonny Osmond. I ask her to elaborate, and so she declares, “I am positive that Pierce Brosnan is in this bookstore.” She then runs away as Mrs. Doubtfire’s Stu Dunmeyer himself taps me on the shoulder. “Does anybody work here?” I’m flustered enough to say I do, and he asks for a recommendation. I have Christos Tsiolkas’s “The Slap” in my hand, so I hand it to him and lie about it being my favourite book.
After leaving the store, we pass two of the coolest-looking people around. As they approach, we realize it’s you and Régine. You both give us a look like you know what kind of a weekend we’re having. Then we head to a hill to eat burritos and drink wine until our flight home.